Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has confirmed what even his defenders must quietly suspect: he is wholly unfit to lead America through any health crisis. His “bull in the china shop” management of the CDC has left career scientists exasperated, his erratic pronouncements have further undercut the agency’s already fragile credibility, and his politicization of advisory panels has prompted respected authorities to resign in protest.
The irony is that Kennedy’s fiasco has finally provoked the watchdog journalism we should have seen years ago — scrutiny that might have made his appointment impossible. When Donald Trump in his first term bludgeoned the FDA and CDC with brute force, the press screamed about authoritarian meddling. When Joe Biden’s administration bloodied the same agencies, the mainstream press largely applauded the president’s minions for “following the science.”
With Kennedy’s deserved reputation as an anti-vaxxer, the media’s Trump outrage machine has roared back to life. What’s changed isn’t the politicization — it’s the mainstream media’s selective willingness to call it what it is when it furthers their anti-Trump agenda.
Much to criticize
There is much to criticize about the CDC and FDA, but let’s not forget these agencies were once global gold standards of public health. The CDC helped eradicate smallpox worldwide and polio in the United States. The FDA famously spared America the Thalidomide tragedy — when a Canadian-born official, Frances Oldham Kelsey, withstood Big Pharma’s vilification as a “bureaucratic nitpicker” and refused to approve a drug that produced severe birth defects abroad.
For decades, these agencies guarded not just science, but the perception that they were independent and above politics. Within CDC there was always a whispered fear of a “bankruptcy of trust” — that if the public stopped believing its guidance, the agency would be useless in a real crisis.
That fear was realized not under Kennedy, but under Joe Biden. A PLOS Global Public Health study published in June revealed that the percentage of Americans expressing high confidence in the CDC plunged from 82% in early 2020 — the last year of Trump’s presidency — to just 56% by 2022, Biden’s second year in office. The NIH saw a similar 25-point decline. Despite slight increases between June 2022 and October 2024, confidence in all healthcare regulatory institutions remained significantly lower than in February 2020.
A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released this January, but taken before Trump returned to office, showed trust in the CDC falling from 66% in 2023 to 61% in 2025. The FDA slipped from 65% to 53% over the same period.
“Mr. Fix-It”
America’s pandemic response under Joe Biden precipitated the public’s loss of trust. While Britain relied on Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance, Germany leaned on virologist Christian Drosten, New Zealand on physician Ashley Bloomfield, and Israel on physician and health ministry official Nachman Ash, Biden put Jeffrey Zients in charge.
Zients was no epidemiologist or virologist. He was a management consultant and private equity millionaire whose main credential was loyalty to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The supposed political “Mr. Fix-It” had all the scientific gravitas of a McKinsey PowerPoint deck, yet he was christened “COVID czar” while accomplished scientists were sidelined. Adding insult to injury, Zients made his fortune in healthcare ventures, including firms implicated in Medicare and Medicaid fraud.
Zients is popular with the Beltway media, so they gave him a pass. When Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins called out the Biden administration’s attempt to use COVID as a political distraction from its Afghanistan debacle — noting there was little science justifying universal boosters — outlets like The New York Times and Washington Post presented the push as evidence-based.
“Many medical experts are aghast,” Makary warned, as boosters were sternly recommended to all Americans regardless of age or natural immunity.
Leading vaccine experts
The resignations of Dr. Marion Gruber, a 32-year FDA veteran, and her deputy Phil Krause should have been front-page news. Both quit in protest over the White House’s political pressure to approve boosters for all Americans 16 and older. FDA’s own advisory panel agreed with them, voting 16–2 against broad approval, limiting boosters to seniors and those at risk. Biden’s FDA and CDC authorized them anyway.
Endpoints News called their departures a “massive blow” to confidence in the agency. Rick Bright, former director of Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), tweeted that Gruber was a “visionary mastermind behind global clinical regulatory science.” Gruber and Krause were not minor bureaucrats — they were among the most respected vaccine experts in the world.
The mainstream media mostly yawned.
Contrast that silence with today’s saturation coverage of longtime CDC staff resigning under Kennedy. The imbalance isn’t subtle. When Biden pressured regulators and ignored experts, it was framed as strong leadership. When Kennedy does the same, it’s portrayed as sabotage.
And let’s not forget the Biden-era media chorus that echoed the administration’s divisive “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” That narrative, embraced by hospitals, airlines, and corporations, justified firings and social ostracism. Makary cautioned at the time that unvaccinated individuals posed “no risk to the vaccinated beyond that of a common cold.” His dissent barely broke through the din.
Discrediting Ivermectin
Underscoring the FDA’s dishonesty and shame, the agency maligned the drug Ivermectin — deemed one of the world’s essential medicines — as mere veterinary paste and entirely ineffective against COVID. The campaign targeted Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a Houston physician publicly tarred for reporting success treating early-stage patients with a drug cocktail that included Ivermectin. Bowden also took a beating for expressing doubts about the COVID vaccine and its risks.
Here’s a detail courtesy of Australian investigative medical journalist Maryanne Demasi, who obtained emails under a Freedom of Information request. Dr. Janet Woodcock — before Biden appointed her interim head of the FDA — privately supported testing ivermectin as a pandemic treatment.
“Wow — we should definitely test it,” she wrote in a June 2020 email. “Safe drug.”
In January 2021, Woodcock reaffirmed her support: “We are trying to put together a pragmatic trial that can include ivermectin. I’ll do everything I can to help get that up and funded.”
Woodcock changed her tune weeks later after her interim appointment to oversee the FDA.
Undisclosed vaccine dangers
As for Bowden’s concerns about vaccine safety, Woodcock told The New York Times last year that some recipients had indeed experienced uncommon but “serious” and “life-changing” reactions beyond what federal agencies had described. “I feel bad for those people,” she admitted. “I believe their suffering should be acknowledged, that they have real problems, and they should be taken seriously.” She also conceded: “This is one of the few things I feel I just didn’t bring home.”
Then there was the Biden administration’s censorship of critics who questioned its COVID policies — censorship gleefully embraced by mainstream outlets and social media platforms. Mark Zuckerberg admitted he was contacted by senior Biden officials about suppressing vaccine criticism. Given that Zients was a former Facebook director, it seems a safe bet he made some of the calls.
Inspector General findings
Under Biden’s leadership, the FDA was compromised in other alarming ways. An Inspector General report released in January concluded the agency approved three drugs despite concerns from its own reviewers and advisory committees. For one drug, meetings with the sponsor appeared to be missing from the administrative file; other meetings were not fully documented.
Perhaps if the media had held the Biden administration accountable for politicizing the CDC and FDA, warnings about Kennedy’s damage wouldn’t now be falling on deaf ears. It’s comical that Biden-era CDC chief Rochelle Walensky was among the signatories of a New York Times op-ed accusing Kennedy of “endangering every American’s health.” This is the same Walensky widely regarded as a Biden rubber stamp, who admitted two years into the pandemic: “In our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations.”
It’s tragic what has become of the CDC and FDA, but Americans can take heart that Marty Makary — who bravely called out the Biden administration’s politics — is head of the FDA (at least at the time of this posting). Makary has reversed the FDA’s blanket policy of recommending COVID vaccines in perpetuity, warning: “The FDA can approve products only if we believe there is substantial certainty that the benefits outweigh the risks. Currently, we don’t have that confidence for, say, a seventh COVID shot for a healthy 12-year-old girl who recently recovered from COVID.”
Some may question whether Makary’s background as a surgeon makes him a vaccine expert. But thanks to Joe Biden and Jeff Zients, Makary no longer has access to the insights of the world’s leading vaccine authorities.