Make America Shit Again

Another blundered move by RFK Jr. puts Americans health at risk - again.

From the moment RFK Jr. was confirmed by the Senate to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, I have written about the dangers Americans would be exposed to under his stewardship. Not because I have the ability to see the future, but because I know science and he has a history of denying it. He is not trained in it. He lies. We’ve seen him capture a segment of the population around vaccine safety, claiming, for example, that vaccines cause autism. We’ve seen him attack the safety of acetaminophen in pregnant women, also suggesting it causes autism. None of which is true. And now we’ve seen rates of measles explode. Children are dying, and the mechanism is not complicated. The vitamin K shot has been given to newborns since the 1960s. It is not a vaccine. It is a nutrient that lets an infant’s blood clot, and without it a baby can bleed into the brain and die. It is standard care. It works. But refusal rates have climbed for years, more than doubling at some hospitals since 2020, and babies who never got the shot have started to bleed out again. At least two died at one Idaho hospital system in a single year. Asked at a congressional hearing to simply tell parents the shot is safe, Kennedy refused.

His reckless campaigns against tried-and-true medicine and sound public health policies are now measurable.

But it’s not just his crazy theories that are endangering children and pregnant mothers. It is all of us. The outbreak of Cyclospora causing widespread GI symptoms is just another example of his lack of training and his inability to recognize it. Though I suppose even if he were aware of his limitations it would not change his behavior.

Under the umbrella of his MAHA food policies, he warns the public about the dangers of processed foods. Some of them are valid. Not all, but some. I don’t think most people believe a diet of Mountain Dew and Doritos is healthy. But food safety and factory farming do not just apply to highly processed foods. For most Americans, the entire food chain comes from factory farms. Food contamination in one farm can cause illness across the entire country. Because of this, our food chain needs monitoring and protection. It’s basic.

Historically, the CDC’s foodborne surveillance network monitored for eight pathogens. Last July RFK Jr. reduced that number to just two: Salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E. coli. The other pathogens are still out there, but RFK Jr. decided to stop counting them. The reason? Supposedly money. For the first time since 1997, Cyclospora was no longer being monitored. And of course, the consequences of this move are upon us.

By this month, the CDC had logged more than 4,000 domestically acquired cases across 34 states, with over 5,000 more waiting to be confirmed. Michigan’s own tally runs near 7,000. (State counts run ahead of the federal one.) Every one of those figures is a minimum number of infections. Nobody in America knows the real figure.

Cyclospora does not announce itself. It is a microscopic parasite, and it settles into the gut and stays. It causes watery, explosive diarrhea, cramps, nausea, and unintended weight loss. The infection and its symptoms can last for weeks if it is untreated.

Insidiously, the symptoms of the infection come and go. The illness comes and goes in waves, which is one reason the case counts are soft. People recover, or think they have, and never get tested at all.

For those who see their doctors and get a typical stool test, most labs would miss it because a routine stool panel does not catch Cyclospora. A diagnosis requires a specific molecular test that a clinician has to request. If the CDC is no longer monitoring the food chain for Cyclospora, how is a doctor or PA supposed to be on the lookout for an outbreak? That is the vital role of this agency. To share information it gathers through its surveillance programs.

Now after the outbreak the CDC has issued an alert reminding doctors the parasite exists and to test for it. This alert is the surveillance system Kennedy canceled and called redundant. This adds to our healthcare expenses and removes the burden from the industrial farmers to check and ensure safety to the customer. Nice. But not a shock in Trump’s world of keeping the rich richer and less responsible.

Senator Jon Ossoff wrote to Kennedy on July 16. Three questions. Has FoodNet’s required tracking of Cyclospora been restored. Why was it terminated in the first place. What is the status of the investigation into the source and the scope. He gave Kennedy 72 hours and called the cut a “foolish and self-indulgent demolition” of public health defense. Kennedy said nothing. So Ossoff wrote again on July 24 and called the silence “reckless arrogance.”

The FDA, for its part, still cannot say what made anyone sick. Investigators traced shredded iceberg lettuce from a single grower in central Mexico, through the produce processor Taylor Farms, to Taco Bell counters in five states. (Michigan interviewed 190 sick people who had eaten at Taco Bell. Ninety percent had eaten iceberg lettuce.) One lettuce sample came back positive on July 18. On July 19 the agency announced the positive was its own laboratory error, a signal that “does not represent true amplification.” The case against the lettuce now rests entirely on traceback and interviews. No contaminated food has ever tested positive.

Consider what that traceback describes: one field, one processor, and a national footprint.

This is the part that should frighten anyone who eats. The recall covered iceberg lettuce from a single facility in Guanajuato, distributed over eighteen days in late June and July, and it did not stop at Taco Bell. Marketside lettuce at Walmart. Jack in the Box. Food-service distributors across 27 states. That is the American food chain now. A handful of enormous growers and processors feed the country, so a single contaminated harvest does not sicken a town. It sickens a continent, in dozens of states, before anyone connects the cases. Consolidation is efficient. It is also a delivery system. The same architecture that puts the same shredded lettuce on counters in 27 states puts the same parasite there too.

Efficiency of that scale is only safe if someone is watching it closely and can trace it fast. Neither is true. Federal surveillance of the parasite was cut a year ago. And the rule that would force companies to hand over their supply-chain records within 24 hours of a request, the single measure built to make a traceback like this one fast, does not take effect until July 2028. The compliance date was pushed back thirty months. The FDA is chasing a central-Mexico lettuce field with interviews and a lab that produces false positives, because the tool designed for exactly this moment is sitting three years in the future.

Kennedy walked up to a microphone on Tuesday and said the outbreak is “under control.” He said the source was identified and the recall implemented. He said criticism of his cuts was “invalid,” that there were “no cuts in our surveillance program.” The cuts to FoodNet, he explained, were for “redundant surveillance.”

He should not be believed. He should be fired. People are dying because of him. One might call it irony that our top public health advocate is pushing bad policies and crippling good ones that are resulting in the death and illness of the citizenry, but it’s not ironic. It’s Trumpian.

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