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For The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s January cover story, \u201cThe Most Powerful Man in Science,\u201d staff writer Michael Scherer<\/strong> profiles Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, as he crusades against what he perceives as the corruption of the scientific establishment. Scherer asks what it means when the country can\u2019t agree on common facts\u2014even those once considered validated by the scientific method\u2013\u2013and examines why RFK Jr. is so convinced that he\u2019s right in his beliefs. \u201cThe whole medical establishment has huge stakes and equities that I\u2019m now threatening,\u201d Kennedy told The Atlantic<\/em>. \u201cAnd I\u2019m shocked President Trump lets me do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Scherer had extensive access to Kennedy and his top deputies at HHS for the profile, including Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makary, and Mehmet Oz\u2013\u2013all of whom were bonded by the experience of COVID \u201cin a fellowship of the ostracized.\u201d Since Trump put him in charge of HHS, Kennedy has, in conjunction with the White House, pushed out about one in four HHS employees, including much of the senior career staff and thousands of workers at the CDC, which Kennedy described to Scherer as a \u201csnake pit.\u201d (Kennedy compares his relationship with Trump to \u201cwhen you\u2019re dating somebody that you keep liking more and more.\u201d) And though Kennedy has slashed the budget of his own department, he now tells Scherer that he plans to spend billions of dollars investigating vaccines\u2019 potential ties to chronic diseases.<\/strong> Discussing COVID-vaccine boosters, Kennedy tells Scherer: \u201cYou never do an intervention\u2014particularly with a healthy human being\u2014unless you know that it\u2019s safe and effective. And we don\u2019t know if it\u2019s safe and effective.\u201d<\/p>\n Throughout their interviews, Scherer writes, he often found himself jousting with Kennedy about the details of one scientific debate or another. Scherer writes that Kennedy says he\u2019s open to listening to other viewpoints, but, \u201cwhen presented with data that contradict his arguments, Kennedy regularly claims bad faith on the part of his adversaries\u2014\u00adthat they\u2019re motivated by profit or professional advancement. His experience as a litigator may have made this reflexive. As John Morgan, his litigation partner, told me, it\u2019s hard to sue polluters and cigarette companies and not come away convinced that the defendants are \u2018in the business of premeditated murder.\u2019 Kennedy has applied the same lens to the medical establishment, casting it as powered by the big pharmaceutical companies and their government protectors\u2014despite the fact that most pediatricians and virologists and epidemiologists have devoted their lives to helping children and reducing suffering.\u201d<\/p>\n Additional highlights from Scherer\u2019s article:<\/p>\n On physical threats:<\/strong> On the flight where Kennedy learned that Charlie Kirk had been shot, he told Scherer that \u201chis security team recently circulated a memo warning him of threats to his own life. \u2018It said the resentments against me had elevated \u201cabove the threshold of lethality,\u201d\u200a\u2019 he said. Kennedy greeted the threat assessment with remarkable equanimity for someone with his family\u2019s history.\u201d<\/p>\n Kennedy said he told Trump not to post a warning on social media about pregnant women taking Tylenol:<\/strong> \u201c\u2018You can\u2019t do that,\u2019 Kennedy said he told the president. \u2018There\u2019s nuance to it, and you can\u2019t scare people away from Tylenol, and you\u2019re going to get a huge amount of pushback from powerful pharmaceutical companies.\u2019 Trump\u2019s reply: \u2018I don\u2019t give a shit about that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n On Kennedy\u2019s life as an addict in recovery, and his current nicotine and tanning habits:<\/strong> \u201cAlthough Kennedy says he has not taken heroin since he got clean, he still considers his brain to be a sort of \u2018formulation pharmacy,\u2019 able to transform anything\u2014rock climbing, falconry, sex\u2014into a drug.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI asked him how much being an addict in recovery still affects him. \u2018I think it\u2019s shaped everything,\u2019 he said. Even as HHS secretary, he sponsors others in recovery. \u2018I take calls all the time.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I asked him to square his nicotine habit and the time he spends tanning with the federal health advisories against both, he shifted in his chair. \u2018I\u2019m not telling people that they should do anything that I do,\u2019 he said. \u2018I just say \u201cGet in shape.\u201d\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n On Kennedy\u2019s claims that experts are unwilling to debate him: <\/strong>\u201cEven now that he sits atop America\u2019s health bureaucracy, Kennedy told me, public-health authorities\u2014\u00adwhose convictions, he said, are more akin to religion than science\u2014\u00adwill not engage with him. \u2026 \u2018You\u2019re the HHS secretary,\u2019 I said. \u2018Presumably you can call anybody at CDC to have this debate.\u2019 \u2018There\u2019s 21,000 people in that agency, and I\u2019m not going to have a personal debate with each one of them,\u2019 he responded. \u2018By the way, they\u2019re leaving because they can\u2019t defend their position.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Kennedy on \u201ctrusting the experts\u201d as a \u201cfeature of totalitarianism and religion\u201d: <\/strong>\u201c\u2018Trusting the experts\u2019 is not a feature of science,\u2019 he likes to say. \u2018It\u2019s not a feature of democracy. It\u2019s a feature of totalitarianism and religion.\u2019 But having everyone \u2018do their own research,\u2019 as Kennedy recommends, was untenable even before the advent of technologies like nanoscience and genomic editing. When I suggested to Kennedy that he was now presuming to play the role of health expert himself, he rejected that. \u2018I don\u2019t tell people to trust me. I tell people, \u201cDon\u2019t trust me.\u201d\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Senator Bill Cassidy, a gastro\u00adenterologist who cast the deciding vote to confirm Kennedy as HHS secretary, said that<\/strong> \u201che and the HHS secretary regularly share scientific articles and papers with each other. \u2018I find that he often will send me the same article more than once,\u2019 Cassidy told me. Yet whenever Cassidy points out \u2018statistical flaws\u2019 in the article, he said, Kennedy says he considers those \u2018immaterial.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Kennedy on the media, and on this profile: <\/strong>\u201cHe suggested that he regretted agreeing to talk with me, and compared our relationship to the fable of the scorpion who asks the frog for help crossing a river, only to sting and kill the frog after it does.<\/p>\n \u2018Every article about me is the same, which is never science-based; it\u2019s never an argument; it\u2019s always an ad hominem attack,\u2019 he continued. \u2018\u201cHe\u2019s a conspiracy theorist, he\u2019s anti-science, he\u2019s a crazy person, he\u2019s got a brain worm,\u201d or the bear story, or the whale story, or the dog story, any of these, and that\u2019s what they focus on.\u2019 Articles about some of these colorful episodes from his past, he believed, were efforts to distract from the substance of his arguments. \u2018I challenge you to tell me one conspiracy that I\u2019ve talked about that has not come true,\u2019 he said.\u201d<\/p>\n Michael Scherer\u2019s \u201cThe Most Powerful Man in Science\u201d was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.<\/strong><\/p>\n Press contacts:<\/strong> For The Atlantic\u2019s January cover story, \u201cThe Most Powerful Man in Science,\u201d staff writer Michael Scherer profiles Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, as he crusades against what he perceives as the corruption of the scientific establishment. Scherer asks what it means when the country can\u2019t agree on common facts\u2014even<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34904,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[19771,4898,16178,3401,789,19772],"class_list":{"0":"post-34903","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-atlantics","9":"tag-cover","10":"tag-january","11":"tag-michael","12":"tag-rfk","13":"tag-scherer"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic<\/em>
[email\u00a0protected]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"