Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has faced heavy criticism over the latest turmoil at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on Tuesday said he will work to make sure the agency restores Americans’ trust, while touting his response to the largest measles outbreak in the U.S. in three decades as a shining example of “what a focused CDC can achieve.”
In an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy accused the agency of failing its mission.
The CDC “was once the world’s most trusted guardian of public health,” he writes. “Its mission — protecting Americans from infectious disease — was clear and noble. But over the decades, bureaucratic inertia, politicized science and mission creep have corroded that purpose and squandered public trust.”
Kennedy, one of the country’s most prominent vaccine skeptics, slammed the CDC’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming the agency “produced irrational policy” during the crisis, citing its promotion of “cloth masks on toddlers, arbitrary 6-foot distancing, boosters for healthy children, prolonged school closings, economy-crushing lockdowns, and the suppression of low-cost therapeutics in favor of experimental and ineffective drugs.”
