Trump also signed an executive order this week to
terminate President Joe Biden's successful efforts to lower the prices
of many common pharmaceutical drugs. The drug price move ties off the
thread that ties Kennedy and Trump's views together: health care should
be a privilege of the wealthy, and not a basic human right. Kennedy's
vague words about healthy eating might sound good on paper. In practice,
he's setting up a pretext to deny healthcare access to lower-income
people, by saying they deserve to be sick because they supposedly didn't
take care of themselves. It's why Kennedy is so hostile not just to
vaccines, but any acknowledgement of infectious disease. It's a lot
harder to blame the victim when the illness is caused by a virus. If
he's confirmed to HHS, this attitude will prevail. The talk about
healthy eating will almost certainly not translate into helping people
access better food. It'll just be an excuse to blame people's
"lifestyles" when public health declines on Kennedy's watch.
-- Amanda Marcotte, "Donald Trump is not waiting for RFK Jr. — he has already started his war on public health" (SALON).
