Contributor: RFK Jr.’s focus on viral nonsense is putting children’s lives at risk

This week, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the individual entrusted with safeguarding the health of 330 million Americans — posted a 90-second video of himself and Kid Rock doing shirtless calisthenics in blue jeans, riding a stationary bike in the sauna, doing a slow-motion cold plunge and toasting glasses of whole milk in the pool. The internet responded with memes and mockery. I sat in my office at UCLA, where I’ve practiced pulmonary and critical care medicine for more than 40 years, and I did not laugh.

I felt the anger, real anger.

Because here’s what was not in that video: the more than 2,200 Americans who contracted measles in 2025, in a country that effectively eliminated the disease in 2000. The three who died. The more than 900 confirmed cases already reported in the U.S. in 2026. The children in South Carolina — totaling nearly 1,000 cases from a single outbreak — whose parents were persuaded by rhetoric this secretary spent decades amplifying about how the MMR vaccine was more dangerous than the disease. It is not. Decades of rigorous science have shown it is not.

When the absurd reaches a certain pitch, mockery is a natural defense. But I worry we’ve become so numbed by spectacle, so conditioned to treat governance as entertainment, that we’ve lost our capacity for the emotion this moment demands: genuine outrage. The real thing. The kind that mobilizes physicians, parents and legislators to say, “This is not acceptable.”

Let me be precise about what Kennedy has done in his first year as HHS Secretary, because the shirtless antics are designed to distract you from it.

He fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — the expert panel that has guided national vaccine policy for decades — and replaced them with vaccine skeptics. He forced out Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez. He cut National Institutes of Health funding, gutting cancer research and addiction treatment programs. He stopped federal support for mRNA research — one of the most significant advances in the history of immunology, being developed for vaccines against multiple sclerosis, influenza and certain cancers. When the FDA initially rejected Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine this month on what experts called ideological grounds, only public backlash forced a reversal — during one of the worst flu seasons in modern history.

Then, last month, Kennedy gutted the childhood immunization schedule, reducing universally recommended vaccines from ages 11 to 17. Hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rotavirus and influenza were relegated to “shared clinical decision-making” — a bureaucratic euphemism for abandonment. Routine recommendations trigger automatic prompts in electronic medical records and allow nurses to vaccinate under standing orders. Shared decision-making requires a physician at every vaccination decision, creating bottlenecks that will reduce uptake among the more than 100 million Americans without regular primary care access.

During Kennedy’s 2025 confirmation hearings, he told senators under oath: “I support vaccines. I support the childhood schedule.” Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican physician from Louisiana, voted to confirm Kennedy explicitly on those pledges. Every pledge has been broken. The lone Republican who voted against him — Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a polio survivor — warned his colleagues. They did not listen. Trust in the CDC has since plummeted from 66% to 54%. Confidence in MMR vaccine school requirements among Republicans has fallen 27 points in just six years.

These are not poll numbers. They are harbingers of future outbreaks, future hospitalizations, future deaths.

I’ve seen this before. I was an intern at UCLA in the early 1980s when the first cases of what we would come to call AIDS appeared on our wards — young men dying of infections we had never seen in previously healthy patients. I watched an institution and a government fail to respond with the urgency a nascent epidemic demanded, and I watched people die because of that failure. The lesson was not subtle: When public health leadership falters, when ideology supplants science, when the people in charge decide that politics matters more than medicine, people die. Not in the abstract. In beds. In hospitals. In Los Angeles.

I am watching it happen again. The United States is poised to lose its measles elimination status — an achievement that took decades to build. Kennedy’s newly appointed CDC deputy Ralph Abraham responded to this prospect by calling it “just the cost of doing business.” Three people died of measles in this country last year. The cost of doing business.

So, when I see the secretary of Health and Human Services drinking whole milk in a pool with Kid Rock, I do not see comedy; nor should the response be memes or sarcasm. I see a man who bears direct responsibility for the resurgence of vaccine-preventable disease in the most medically advanced nation on Earth, performing a grotesque pantomime of wellness while children get sick. That is not a joke. It is a scandal. And it is long past time we treated it as one.

Robert B. Shpiner is a clinical professor of medicine at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, with over 40 years of ICU experience at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.