Robert F Kennedy Jr

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    RFK Jr grilled on vaccine policies and healthcare fraud in bruising House hearing

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    Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, faced a bruising day on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, including being forced to retract accusations against a Democratic congressman after claiming the lawmaker’s vaccine stance was bought by $2m in pharmaceutical contributions.In a hearing held by the House health subcommittee, Kennedy was met with hours of contentious questioning over budget cuts, massive healthcare fraud and accusations he lied to senators to secure his confirmation.Kennedy launched his attack on representative Frank Pallone after the New Jersey Democrat hammered him over vaccine policy reversals. “You’ve accepted $2m from pharmaceutical companies,” Kennedy said. “Your enthusiasm for supporting the old [vaccine advisory committee] seems to be an outcome of those contributions.”The accusation appeared to reference Pallone’s shift from raising concerns about mercury in FDA-approved products in the 1990s to later supporting mainstream vaccine policy – a change Kennedy suggested was motivated by industry money rather than science.After a point of order, the Republican chair ordered Kennedy to retract the remarks after lawmakers accused him of impugning Pallone’s character. But the pharma attack was overshadowed by accusations that Kennedy lied his way into office. Representative Kim Schrier, a pediatrician, asked Kennedy: “Did you lie to senator [Bill] Cassidy when you told him you would not fire this panel of experts?”Two weeks ago, Kennedy axed all 17 members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, despite assurances to Cassidy during confirmation hearings.“You lied to senator Cassidy. You have lied to the American people,” Schrier said. “I lay all responsibility for every death from a vaccine-preventable illness at your feet.”Kennedy denied making promises to Cassidy.The hearing exposed the deepening fractures in Kennedy’s relationship with Congress, even among Republicans who initially supported his confirmation. What began as a routine budget hearing devolved into accusations of dishonesty, conflicts of interest and fundamental questions about whether Kennedy can be trusted to protect public health.In one moment, representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pressed Kennedy about his ignorance to the Trump administration’s reported investigation of UnitedHealthcare, the nation’s largest health insurer, for criminal fraud in Medicare Advantage plans.“You are not aware that the Trump Department of Justice is investigating the largest insurance company in America?” Ocasio-Cortez asked again after suggesting he couldn’t confirm that it was happening.When she said that for-profit insurers such as UnitedHealthcare defraud public programs of $80bn annually, Kennedy appeared confused about the scale: “Did you say 80 million or billion?”“80 with a ‘B’,” Ocasio-Cortez said.For Democrats, Tuesday’s performance confirmed their worst fears about a vaccine-skeptical activist now controlling the nation’s health agencies. For Kennedy, it marked an escalation in his battle against what he calls a corrupt public health establishment pushing back on his radical vision.But behind the political theater lay a fundamental reshaping of America’s public health architecture. Kennedy’s cuts have eliminated entire offices and centers, leaving them unstaffed and non-functional. While he defended the reductions as targeting “duplicative procurement, human resources and administrative offices”, he hinted that some fired workers might be rehired once court injunctions on the layoffs are resolved.Kennedy recently replaced the fired vaccine advisers with eight new appointees, including known spreaders of vaccine misinformation. The move alarmed even supportive Republicans such as Cassidy, who called Monday for delaying this week’s advisory meeting, warning the new panel lacks experience and harbors “preconceived bias” against mRNA vaccines.Kennedy has long promoted debunked links between vaccines and autism, raising fears his appointees will legitimize dangerous anti-vaccine theories.He also explained why he was pulling Covid-19 vaccine recommendations for pregnant women, claiming “there was no science supporting that recommendation” despite extensive research showing the vaccines’ safety during pregnancy.“We’re not depriving anybody of choice,” Kennedy insisted. “If a pregnant woman wants the Covid-19 vaccine, she can get it. No longer recommending it because there was no science supporting that recommendation.”In another sidebar, Kennedy unveiled his vision for America’s health future: every citizen wearing a smartwatch or fitness tracker within four years. The ambitious scheme, backed by what he promised would be “one of the biggest advertising campaigns in HHS history”, would see the government promoting wearables as a possible alternative to expensive medications.“If you can achieve the same thing with an $80 wearable, it’s a lot better for the American people,” Kennedy said. More

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      Key RFK Jr advisers stand to profit from a new federal health initiative

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      Federal health officials are seeking to launch a “bold, edgy” public service campaign to warn Americans of the dangers of ultra-processed foods in social media, transit ads, billboards and even text messages.And they potentially stand to profit off the results.Ultra-processed foods are a fixation for the US health and human services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine skeptic who believes the US industrialized food supply is a “primary culprit” behind many chronic diseases.“We need to fix our food supply. And that’s the number one thing,” Kennedy said at his confirmation hearing.Bringing healthier foods to Americans has proved to be one of the most resonant issues of Kennedy’s “Make America healthy again” (Maha) campaign – and arguably the only one that Democrats and Republicans agree on in principle.Kennedy has spent most of his tenure as health secretary dismantling key components of US vaccine infrastructure, instituting mass firings and defunding chronic disease prevention programs, such as for tobacco use.The secretary has been less successful in reigning in food makers. Food advocates have described voluntary changes between the government and manufacturers “disappointing”. Kennedy was criticized by congressional Republicans for targeting agricultural pesticides in the “Maha” report before it was even released – showing the limits of Republicans appetite for regulation, then the report itself was riddled with errors, likely generated by AI.“The campaign’s creative content will turn heads, create viral moments on social media, and – above all else – inspire Americans to take back their health through eating real food,” said a document published by the federal government that described the campaign.The campaign is expected to cost between $10m to $20m, according to documents. Anyone seeking to apply for the award will have a quick turnaround – the deadline is 26 June.“The purpose of this requirement is to alert Americans to the role of processed foods in fueling the diabetes epidemic and other chronic diseases, inspire people to take personal responsibility for their diets, and drive measurable improvements in diabetes prevention and national health outcomes,” it continued.The new public relations campaign also highlights the Trump administration’s unconventional approach to hiring – including its reliance on special government employees.A key adviser to Kennedy, Calley Means, could directly benefit from one of the campaign’s stated aims: popularizing “technology like wearables as cool, modern tools for measuring diet impact and taking control of your own health”.Calley Means is a senior Kennedy adviser, and was hired as a special government employee to focus on food policy, according to Bloomberg. He founded a company that helps Americans get such wearable devices reimbursed tax-free through health savings accounts.Casey Means is Calley’s sister. She also runs a healthcare start-up, although hers sells wearable devices such as continuous glucose monitors. She is Kennedy’s nominee for US surgeon general, and a healthcare entrepreneur whose business sells continuous glucose monitors – one such wearable device. Calley Means’s company also works with Casey’s company.Due to Calley Means’s status as a special employee, he has not been forced to divest from his private business interests – a situation that has already resulted in an ethics complaint. Consumer advocates, such as the non-profit group Public Citizen, had warned such hiring practices could cause conflicts of interest. HHS did not respond to a request for comment about Calley Means’s private business interests, or his role in crafting the publicity campaign.Although the publicity campaign focuses on the ultra-processed foods connection to diabetes, at least one high profile nutritionist was queasy about its focus.“The ultra-processed foods – some of those include breakfast cereals that are ultra-processed because they are fortified with vitamins,” said Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “Those are good if they’re whole grain breakfast cereals and whole grain breads,” he said.Ultra-processed foods are generally recognized as sodas, salty snacks and frozen meals engineered to be shelf-stable, convenient and inexpensive. Such foods are associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes – or insulin resistance.The mechanism by which such foods could increase risk of diabetes is unknown, a problem that extends in part from the “heterogeneous category” of foods that the ultra-processed category encompasses. The publicity campaign proposal does not venture into defining the category, even as Kennedy has fixated on it “poisoning the American people”.“When you say processed foods you don’t envision a Coke in your brain, and that’s the biggest problem,” said Willett, who added that most public service campaigns are carefully crafted and tested for effectiveness. More

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      CDC vaccine panel to review ingredient RFK Jr has targeted for removal

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      A key vaccine advisory panel reconstituted by health secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr is slated to discuss thimerosal-containing influenza vaccines in its first meeting – an ingredient which has been a fixation of anti-vaccine activists for decades.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will hold two separate votes later this month: one on “influenza vaccines” and one on influenza vaccines that contain thimerosal.Thimerosal is an ethylmercury preservative used in multi-dose vaccine vials to prevent fungi and bacteria growth. The preservative has been studied and deemed safe, but was nevertheless removed from all routine childhood vaccines in 2001 as a precaution.“I was there when we went through this the first time,” said Dr Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center and an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about debates over the preservative in the early 2000s.Offit served on the ACIP panel in question from 1998 to 2003. He said the issue of thimerosal was vigorously debated and found safe then, prompting him to ask: “What’s the point?”In a short history of the thimerosal controversy published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Offit described how some parents became convinced thimerosal gave their children autism, resulting in thousands of autistic children receiving heavy metal chelation treatments each year.Studies have found no link between thimerosal and autism, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has also denied claims of a thimerosal-autism link. Kennedy, however, has written a book arguing against the use of thimerosal.Offit said the discussion of thimerosal appeared to geared to, “accomplish [Kennedy’s] goals of making vaccines less affordable, less accessible and more feared”, he said.“Here’s what you do know – you do know RFK Jr is an anti-vaccine, science-denying conspiracy theorist. He is devoted to this, he is a zealot, there is no middle ground with him,” said Offit. “He believes we have merely substituted infectious diseases for chronic diseases.”The panel’s advisory recommendations are critical because they result in vaccine “schedules”. These schedules are relied on by health insurers to determine which vaccines to cover and by clinicians who use them as an evidence-based guide on immunization – effectively giving the American public access to the medicines.Although the CDC does not always take the panel’s advice, the CDC typically affirms the panel’s decisions. However, the agency is currently without a leader, as Senate hearings have not yet been held for nominee and CDC career official Susan Monarez. As a result, Kennedy has signed off on some previous ACIP recommendations.Kennedy wrote a book on the preservative thimerosal in 2014 called Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, in which he argues that “there is a broad consensus among research scientists that thimerosal is a dangerous neurotoxin that should be immediately removed from medicines”. Kennedy said in the book he is “pro-vaccine”.Until 9 June, the ACIP was an independent panel of 17 experts who served staggered terms and were rigorously vetted by career CDC staff. Kennedy broke with tradition when he fired the entire panel, claiming in a Wall Street Journal editorial that he was working to “restore public trust in vaccines”.The same week, Kennedy appointed eight new members to the committee, including medical professionals with little vaccine expertise and known vaccine skeptics.A wide spectrum of groups criticized the decision, from MomsRising, who said they were “alarmed and disgusted”, to major doctors’ groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, to public health leaders who described Kennedy’s actions as “a coup,” to the former members of the committee, who warned the independent panel was at “a crossroads”.The group is scheduled to meet the last week of June. Prior to Kennedy’s changes, they had been expected to discuss reducing the number of shots needed for human papilloma virus (HPV) and a meningococcal vaccine.On Wednesday, the panel released a draft agenda for its upcoming meeting. A wide range of vaccines will be discussed – including those against influenza; the tropical disease chikungunya; the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) vaccine; anthrax; Covid and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).The agenda scheduled a vote on recommendations for flu vaccines, including the multidose versions that still contain thimerosal. These vaccines are used only in adolescents and adults. The panel is also scheduled to vote on recommendations for maternal and pediatric versions of the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).Notably, despite Kennedy’s repeated pledges of “radical transparency”, the draft agenda does not include the names of many speakers, which are listed as “TBD” (to be determined) for instance on “Covid-19 safety update”.New ACIP members have not been added to a conflict of interest tracker for ACIP members developed by the Trump administration. A spokesperson for HHS said the new members ethics agreements “will be made public” before they start work with the committee.In addition to the new draft agenda, there have also been changes to the committee’s meeting times not reflected in the Federal Register, according to Politico. The group will meet for two days instead of three, and there does not appear to be a vote scheduled on Covid vaccines. More

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      What SJP’s selfie trick tells us about the terrifying rise of conspiracy theories | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Sarah Jessica Parker, the Sex and the City star and Booker prize judge, has a nifty trick for getting out of taking selfies with her fans. “I did this for a really, really long time and it worked for ever,” Parker said in an interview with Howard Stern. “I used to say, ‘I can’t, because of the government,’ and I’d do this,” Parker said, pointing up to the sky. “It really confused people. This was through different administrations, so it wasn’t political.”It is not entirely clear why Parker – who has said she refuses to take selfies and would rather “have a conversation” instead because “it’s much more meaningful” – stopped using this brilliant excuse. But one does have to wonder whether it is because the US has become a nation of conspiracy theorists. Rather than backing away from the weird “the government is watching” woman, perhaps fans started to excitedly engage her with theories about how Bill Gates has implanted us all with mind-controlling microchips. Or maybe she just got tired of the joke. I don’t know. But I’m sure someone out there (the government) does.Conspiracy theories have become so mainstream that they are even prompting nonsensical legislation. Earlier this month, Louisiana lawmakers sent a bill to the state’s governor seeking to ban “chemtrails” – which don’t actually exist. They are a longstanding conspiracy which posits that the white lines sometimes left behind by aircraft aren’t just due to condensed water vapour but are far more sinister. Some people believe that the government is spraying toxic metals to reduce populations; others believe they are evidence that dark forces are trying to control the weather or people’s minds.Lawmakers in at least 11 other states are trying to advance similar “chemtrail” bans. “Every bill like this is kind of symbolic, or is introduced to appease a very vocal group, but it can still cause real harm by signalling that these conspiracies deserve this level of legal attention,” a member of the National Association for Media Literacy Education told the Associated Press.Also causing real harm in the US with his obsession with imaginary problems is health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. The vaccine sceptic recently fired every single member of a critical advisory committee on immunisation practices. He has replaced them with people who reportedly have very little vaccine expertise and are accused of spreading misinformation. The ousted members of the vaccine committee have said that the shake-up may “impact people’s access to lifesaving vaccines, and ultimately put US families at risk of dangerous and preventable illnesses.”RFK Jr is also fixated on conspiracy theories about fluoride, which he calls “a dangerous neurotoxin”. There are, to be clear, valid concerns about ingesting too much fluoride, including its effects on IQ as well as potential tooth discoloration. But experts are pretty unanimous that fluoride in drinking water is a great public health achievement that has done wonders for preventing tooth decay. There are worries that RFK Jr’s meddling will cause a significant increase in dental cavities, especially among children in lower-income groups.Anyway, I’ve got a good idea for Parker. Since acting like a conspiracy theorist no longer seems to ward off unwanted attention, why not try engaging selfie-seeking fans with a rational fact-based discussion? Increasingly large numbers of Americans seem allergic to that; some fans will immediately run a mile. I have some other thoughts too but I’m afraid I can’t elaborate any more on this issue for top secret reasons. But here’s a hint: it’s because of the government. More

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      CDC official in charge of Covid data resigns ahead of vaccine meeting

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      The scientist responsible for overseeing the CDC team that collects data on Covid and RSV hospitalizations resigned on Monday.Dr Fiona Havers told colleagues in an email that she no longer had confidence the data would be used “objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions”, according to Reuters.She resigned before a planned meeting of a new vaccine panel put in place by Robert Kennedy Jr after he fired all 17 members of the CDC’s independent vaccine advisory panel. Kennedy also dropped a recommendation to get the Covid shot for healthy children and pregnant women.Havers, leader of the Resp-Net hospitalization surveillance team, did not respond to requests for comment.Her resignation follows moves by Kennedy, the health secretary, to abruptly fire all 17 members of the CDC’s independent vaccine advisory panel and drop a recommendation for administering Covid shots to healthy children and pregnant women.Kennedy, who has long sown doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, replaced the advisory board with eight members of his own choosing, some of whom have histories of objecting to Covid shots or vaccines in general.Havers said in her email that the Covid and RSV data collected by her team had been used in more than 20 peer-reviewed manuscripts and 15 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports issued by the CDC.The newly installed vaccine panel, known as the advisory committee on immunization practices, is expected to meet 25-27 June to vote on the use of Covid-19 boosters and other vaccines by the American public.A Health and Human Services spokesperson told Reuters that the agency is committed to “gold standard science” and that the vaccine policy will be based on objective data, transparent analysis and evidence. More

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      Who are the eight new vaccine advisers appointed by Robert F Kennedy?

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, named eight new vaccine advisers this week to a critical Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel after firing all 17 experts who had held the roles.New members of the panel include experts who complained about being sidelined, a high-profile figure who has spread misinformation and medical professionals who appear to have little vaccine expertise. Kennedy made the announcement on social media.“All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense,” Kennedy said in his announcement. “They have each committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.”Formally called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the panel advises the CDC on how vaccines should be distributed. Those recommendations in effect determine the vaccines Americans can access. This week, Kennedy also removed the career officials typically tasked with vetting ACIP members and overseeing the advisory group, according to CBS News.Kennedy is a widely known vaccine skeptic who profited from suing vaccine manufacturers, has taken increasingly dramatic steps to upend US vaccine policy.“ACIP is widely regarded as the international gold standard for vaccine decision-making,” said Helen Chu, one of the fired advisers, at a press conference with Patty Murray, a Democratic US senator.“We cannot replace it with a process driven by one person’s beliefs. In the absence of an independent, unbiased ACIP, we can no longer trust that safe and effective vaccines will be available to us and the people around us.”Robert W MaloneArguably the most high-profile new member, Robert W Malone catapulted to stardom during the Covid-19 pandemic, appearing across rightwing media to criticize the Biden administration while describing himself as the inventor of mRNA technology.Messenger RNA technology powers the most widely used Covid-19 vaccines. While Malone was involved in very early experiments on the technology, researchers have said his role was limited.Malone’s star rose quickly after appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast in 2022, where he and Rogan were criticized for spreading misinformation. On the show, Malone promoted the idea that both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine could be possible treatments for Covid-19, but said research on the drugs was being suppressed. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have not been shown to improve outcomes from Covid-19.“Malone has a well-documented history of promoting conspiracy theories,” said Dr Jeffrey D Klausner, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at the University of Southern California, who recently told the New York Times he was in touch with Kennedy about his appointments.Martin KulldorffKulldorff is a former Harvard professor of biostatistics and an infectious disease epidemiologist originally from Sweden. He said in an essay for the rightwing publication City Journal that he was fired because he refused to be vaccinated in line with the school policy.Like Malone, he rose to prominence during the pandemic as a “Covid contrarian” who criticized the scientific consensus – views he said alienated him from his peers in the scientific community. He voiced his opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates and, in his essay, complained of being ignored by media and shadow-banned from Twitter.Kulldorff co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for limited closures instead of pandemic lockdowns before vaccines were available. The document became a touchstone for the American political right.Before the pandemic, Kulldorff studied vaccine safety and infectious disease, including co-authoring papers with members of CDC staff, such as on the Vaccine Safety Datalink. He was a member of the CDC’s Covid Vaccine Safety Working Group in 2020, but said later he was fired because he disagreed with the agency’s decision to pause Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine and with Covid-19 vaccine mandates. He served on the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) drug safety and risk management advisory committee around the same time.He has since enjoyed support from people already within the administration, including the Great Barrington Declaration co-author Dr Jay Bhattacharya, current head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Dr Vinay Prasad, head of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, which handles vaccines.Cody MeissnerMeissner is a professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He previously held advisory roles at the FDA and CDC, including ACIP from 2008-2012.In 2021, Meissner co-wrote an editorial with Dr Marty Makary, now the head of the FDA, which criticized mask mandates for children. In April, he was listed as an external adviser to ACIP on the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) committee.Notably, Meissner is listed in a new conflicts of interest tool launched by the health department in March. Kennedy had criticized the fired ACIP members as “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest”.“He’s a card-carrying infectious disease person who knows the burden of these diseases, and he knows the risk and the benefit,” Dr Kathryn Edwards told CBS News. Edwards previously served as chair of the FDA’s vaccine advisory panel.Vicky PebsworthPebsworth is a nurse and the former consumer representative on the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee. She is also the Pacific regional director for the National Association of Catholic Nurses, according to Kennedy’s announcement.In 2020, Pebsworth spoke at the public comment portion of an FDA advisory panel meeting on Covid-19 vaccines. There, she identified herself as the volunteer research director for the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), “and the mother of a child injured by his 15-month well-baby shots in 1998”.The NVIC is widely viewed as an anti-vaccine advocacy organization “whose founder Barbara Lou Fisher must be considered a key figure of the anti-vaccine movement”, according to an article from 2023 on how to counter anti-vaccine misinformation.Retsef LeviLevi is a professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management who Kennedy described as an “expert in healthcare analytics, risk management and vaccine safety”.In 2021, he opposed Covid-19 booster shot approval during the public comment portion of an FDA advisory committee hearing. In 2022, he wrote an article calling for EMS calls to be incorporated into vaccine safety data, arguing that cardiovascular side-effects could be undercounted – an article that later required correction. The potential effects of Covid-19 vaccines on heart health have been a focal point of right-leaning criticism.Last month, Levi was criticized for publishing a pre-print paper – a paper without peer review – that he co-authored with Dr Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, a vaccine skeptic. The paper alleged that people who took the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine were more likely to die than those who received the Moderna vaccine.Michael A RossKennedy described Ross as “a Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, with a career spanning clinical medicine, research, and public health policy”.However, as first reported by CBS News, Ross’s name does not appear in faculty directories for either school. A spokesperson for George Washington University told the outlet that Ross did work as a clinical professor, but “has not held a faculty appointment … since 2017”.A spokesperson for Virginia Commonwealth University described Ross as “an affiliate faculty member” at a regional hospital system in the Capitol region.He is also listed as a partner at Havencrest Capital Management, as a board member of “multiple private healthcare companies”.Joseph R HibbelnHibbeln is a California-based psychiatrist who previously served as acting chief for the section of nutritional neurosciences at the NIH. He describes himself as an expert on omega-3, a fatty acid found in seafood.He also serves on the advisory council of a non-profit that advocates for Americans to eat more seafood. He practices at Barton Health, a hospital system in Lake Tahoe, California. His work influenced US public health guidelines on fish consumption during pregnancy.Dr James PaganoPagano is an emergency medicine physician from Los Angeles “with over 40 years of clinical experience”, and a “strong advocate for evidence-based medicine”, according to Kennedy. More

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      RFK Jr to remove all members of CDC panel advising on US vaccines

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      The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, is getting rid of all members sitting on a key US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panel of vaccine experts and reconstituting the committee, he said on Monday.Kennedy is retiring and replacing all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee for immunization practices, he wrote in piece published in the Wall Street Journal.“Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028,” Kennedy wrote.More details soon … More

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      RFK Jr’s report calls farmers the ‘backbone’ of the US – but Trump’s cuts hurt them

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      Independent and organic farmers say chaos created by the Trump administration’s cuts has hurt their businesses, even as the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, praises small farms and regenerative agriculture.The split-screen for small and organic farms – which one farmer described as the administration “talking out of both sides of their mouth” – comes on the heels of the release of the “Maha” report. The White House document mentions farms, farmers and farming 21 times, and argues conventional agriculture has led to more ultra-processed foods.“Reading that report, it’s like a small-scale organic farmer’s dream,” said Seth Kroeck as he slammed the door on his 1993 F350 truck. Kroeck owns the organic Crystal Spring Farm, 331 acres (135 hectares) in Brunswick, Maine. “But then at the same time, [secretary of agriculture] Brooke Rollins’s name is on this – she’s proposing to cut two-thirds of the agriculture budget.”Kroeck had just finished planting 2,500 brussels sprouts and one-10th of an acre of specialty peppers. He still needed to fix a flat on a piece of farm equipment that day. He said small-scale farmers have promoted local, organic and whole foods for decades.While Kroeck is presumably the kind of farmer Kennedy would laud, all he finds is frustration with the administration, and actions that will “undoubtedly” make food more expensive.“We’re dealing with two personalities with our government,” said Kroeck.As conventional farmers decry the Maha report’s criticism of agricultural chemicals such as atrazine and glyphosate (the active ingredient in RoundUp), some organic and independent farmers have found that the meager government support they depend on has been upended by an administration that claims it wants to support them.“Farmers are the backbone of America – and the most innovative and productive in the world,” the report, led by Kennedy, argued. “We continue to feed the world as the largest food exporter. The greatest step the United States can take to reverse childhood chronic disease is to put whole foods produced by American farmers and ranchers at the center of healthcare.”But by March, the administration had already cut a total of $1bn in programs that supported small farms that grow locally produced fruits and vegetables. For instance, they cut a program that helped tribal food banks provide healthy food and ended a $660m program that brought fresh local foods to school cafeterias. In just one example of impact, the cut quickly ended fruit and vegetable snacks in New York City schools.“This is a huge deal for small farmers,” Ellee Igoe told the New Lede publication in March. Igoe is a co-owner of Solidarity Farm in southern California. “We’re growing healthy food and providing it to local communities. And they are cancelling contracts without real reason. Out here, it feels like it is very politically motivated.”In just one example of direct impact to Kroeck, the Trump administration fired most of the staffers at Kroeck’s local Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) office, an arm of the US Department of Agriculture that provides technical assistance to farmers, including on-site visits. The staff shrank from six to one – only the director remains.“In my book, she’s a superwoman, but how long is that going to last?” said Kroeck. “And what farmer is going to want to take on new contracts when it’s going to take her months and months and months just to return a call?”Kroeck also criticized the Maha report for including apparently invented scientific references.“The citations in the report seem to be made up by ChatGPT – this is crazy,” said Kroeck, who said he’s not a cheerleader for occupants of ivory towers, but “we do have to have some standards”.Groups such as the Organic Trade Association have largely echoed Kroeck’s sentiments, noting that this is what the organic movement has been saying all along and they need money.“We’ve long known that health begins on the farm and encourage the administration to invest in meaningful policies that expand access to organic for consumers,” said co-CEO Matthew Dillon in a statement to the Guardian.While some organic farmers say their relationship with the government has always been tenuous, small farmers say chaos has only worsened that relationship. Coastal wild blueberry farmer Nicolas Lindholm said at least a portion of the funding he was expecting for the year – to mulch his blueberries with wood chips – was “dead in the water”.“My wife and I have an organic wild blueberry farm here on the coast of Maine,” said Lindholm.“Over the past five months, we had applied for three different funding programs – all different – and finalized them through December and into January – and as of February all three of them were basically frozen.” Like many farmers, Lindholm’s needs were time-sensitive: blueberries can only be mulched every two years because of their growing cycle.In addition to direct cuts by the administration, congressional Republicans proposed cuts to food programs that indirectly benefit farmers. House Republicans passed a bill proposing $300bn in cuts to food stamps, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), to fund tax cuts. They have also proposed cuts to a food program that helps new mothers and babies buy fruits and vegetables.The panic within conventional agriculture communities has also been pronounced – with pointed criticism of the report coming before it was even published. Corn and soybeans dominate American cash crops, accounting for $131.9bn in receipts in 2023, versus just $54.8bn in all fruits, vegetables and nuts combined.“It’s no secret you were involved in pesticide litigation before you became secretary,” said Cindy Hyde-Smith, a Republican senator for Mississippi, to Kennedy, leading into a question about the need for glyphosate (the active ingredient in RoundUp), and asking whether Kennedy could be impartial.Kennedy, who went on to pledge he would not put “a single farmer” out of business, said: “There’s nobody that has a greater commitment to the American farmer than we do – the Maha movement collapses if we can’t partner with the American farmer.” More

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      Has RFK Jr misdiagnosed America? – podcast

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