Contributor: RFK Jr.'s focus on viral nonsense is putting children's lives at risk

This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the person charged with safeguarding the health of 330 million Americans, posted a 90 second video of him and Kid Rock doing shirtless calisthenics in blue jeans, riding a stationary bike in the sauna, doing a cold plunge in slow motion, and toasting glasses of whole milk in the pool. The Internet responded with memes and mockery. I sat in my office at UCLA, where I have practiced pulmonary and critical care medicine for more than 40 years, and I didn't laugh.

I felt anger, real anger.

Because this is what was not in that video: the More than 2,200 Americans will contract measles in 2025.in a country that effectively eliminated the disease in 2000. The three who died. The more than 900 confirmed cases already reported in the US in 2026. South Carolina children… totaling almost 1,000 cases from a single outbreak — whose parents were persuaded by rhetoric, this secretary spent decades explaining how the MMR vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. It is not. Decades of rigorous science have shown that this is not the case.

When the absurd reaches a certain point, mockery is a natural defense. But I worry that we have become so numb to spectacle, so conditioned to treating governance as entertainment, that we have lost our capacity for the emotion this moment demands: genuine outrage. Real. The kind that mobilizes doctors, parents and policymakers to say, “This is not acceptable.”

Let me be precise about what Kennedy did in his first year as HHS secretary, because the shirtless antics are designed to distract him.

He fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (the panel of experts that has guided national vaccine policy for decades) and replaced them with vaccine skeptics. It forced the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Susan Monarez, to resign. He cut funding to the National Institutes of Health, destroying cancer research and addiction treatment programs. He stopped federal support for mRNA research, one of the most significant advances in the history of immunology, which is being developed for vaccines against multiple sclerosis, influenza and certain cancers. when he FDA initially rejected Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine This month, for what experts called ideological reasons, only public reaction forced it to back down, during one of the worst flu seasons in modern history.

Then, last month, Kennedy eliminated the childhood vaccination schedule, reducing it universally. recommended vaccines from 11 to 17 years. Hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rotavirus, and influenza were relegated to “shared clinical decision-making,” a bureaucratic euphemism for neglect. Routine recommendations trigger automatic prompts in electronic medical records and allow nurses to vaccinate following standing orders. Shared decision-making requires a doctor in every vaccination decision, creating obstacles that will reduce acceptance among the more than 100 million Americans who do not have regular access to primary care.

During Kennedy's confirmation hearings in 2025, he told senators under oath: “I support vaccines. I support the children's calendar.” Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican doctor from Louisiana, voted to confirm Kennedy. explicitly in those promises. All commitments have been broken. The only Republican to vote against him, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a polio survivor, warned his colleagues. They didn't listen. Since then, trust in the CDC has increased. fell from 66% to 54%. Confidence in school MMR vaccine requirements among Republicans has fallen 27 points in just six years.

These are not poll numbers. They are harbingers of future outbreaks, future hospitalizations, future deaths.

I've seen this before. I was an intern at UCLA in the early 1980s, when the first cases of what we would call AIDS appeared on our wards: young men dying from infections we had never seen in previously healthy patients. I saw how an institution and a government did not respond with the urgency that an incipient epidemic demanded, and I saw how people died because of that failure. The lesson was not subtle: When public health leadership fails, when ideology supplants science, when the people in charge decide that politics matters more than medicine, people die. Not in the abstract. In beds. In hospitals. In Los Angeles.

I'm seeing it happen again. The United States is on the verge of losing its measles elimination status, an achievement that took decades to achieve. Kennedy's newly appointed CDC deputy, Ralph Abraham, responded to this perspective by calling it “Just the cost of doing business.” Three people died of measles in this country last year. The cost of doing business.

So when I see the Secretary of Health and Human Services drinking whole milk in a pool with Kid Rock, I don't see comedy; nor should the response be memes or sarcasm. I see a man who bears direct responsibility for the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases in the most medically advanced nation on the planet, performing a grotesque feel-good pantomime while children fall ill. That's not a joke. It's a scandal. And it's time we treated it as such.

Robert B. Shpiner is a clinical professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, with more than 40 years of ICU experience at Ronald Reagan. UCLA Medical Center.