In a livestreamed meeting Tuesday afternoon, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drew a dark portrait of the state of America’s health while addressing the MAHA Commission’s most recent report, which includes plans to research potential links between vaccines and rising rates of chronic disease.
The Make America Healthy Again Commission released its second report Tuesday, complete with recommendations on diet, against overmedication and plans to research a potential connection between vaccines and the rising rate of chronic disease. At a livestreamed MAHA Commission meeting, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. painted a dire picture of the state of the country’s health.
“We are now the sickest country in the world,” Kennedy said. “We have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world, and yet we spend more on health care than any country in the world.” The secretary went on to say that 76.4% of Americans are suffering a chronic disease compared to 11% when his uncle, John F. Kennedy, was president between 1961 and 1963, despite the U.S. spending two to three times that of European nations on healthcare.
The MAHA Commission, created by President Donald Trump in February with a mission to overhaul the country’s food supply and chronic health outcomes, previously published a 73-page report in May focused on many of the same key points. It was quickly revealed by the nonprofit news organization NOTUS that the report was riddled with errors, including the citing of at least seven nonexistent studies.
On Tuesday, Kennedy listed several other statistics, without providing evidence or citations for them, including that American girls are hitting puberty six years earlier than they have historically. In the report, entitled “Make Our Children Healthy Again,” the authors write that “children are particularly vulnerable to chemicals during critical stages of development—in utero, infancy, early childhood, and puberty.”
Kennedy added that the U.S. has lost “six years of lifespan to Europe in the past 20 years,” that “our young men have sperm counts that are half of what they ought to be,” and that diabetes is now endemic in the country, again without providing citations. Autism rates, Kennedy contended, have increased from one in 10,000 in 1970 (the report attributes this statistic to 1960) to one in every 31 children today.
The MAHA report lays out four potential drivers behind the rise in childhood chronic disease: poor diet, aggregation of environmental chemicals, lack of physical activity and chronic stress, and, of particular interest to the pharmaceutical industry, overmedicalization.
“There is a concerning trend of overprescribing medications to children, often driven by conflicts of interest in medical research, regulation, and practice,” the report reads. “This has led to unnecessary treatments and long-term health risks.”
Later in the meeting, Health and Human Services deputy secretary Jim O’Neill—who also took over as acting CDC director after the controversial ouster of Susan Monarez late last month—took the microphone.
“Under Secretary Kennedy, HHS supports rigorous science and radical transparency, and we need that everywhere, but nowhere is that more pressing or more valuable than CDC,” O’Neill said. “Over the past 15 years, sadly, CDC presided over rising chronic disease and flatlining longevity and trust in our public health agencies collapsed.”
“We’re working to refocus CDC to its original 1946 mission of protecting Americans from infectious disease,” O’Neill added.
In an op-ed published last week in the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy outlined a new structure in which the CDC would prioritize infectious disease over other forms of disease control, while breaking out the management of chronic disease programs into a new Administration for a Healthy America.
On the vaccines front, the MAHA report emphasized what it described as “the growth of the childhood vaccine schedule,” which has expanded from three to 29 injections since 1986, including in utero exposures, by 1 year of age. This number of shots exceeds that of many European nations, according to the report, which notes that Denmark has nearly as many as the U.S.
The report calls for vaccine clinical trials with “more rigorous clinical trial designs,” including the use of true placebo controls, larger sample sizes and longer follow-up periods, to further understand vaccine safety and any links to chronic disease, as well as changes to the vaccine safety surveillance system.
“Tools that are meant to fight disease, such as vaccines, antibiotics and therapeutics can save lives, can also trigger adverse events in some patients and that truth must no longer be denied or distorted,” O’Neill said.
