In a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, Kennedy Vows to Restore Public Trust in the CDC

By Adam Garrie and Louis Conte, The MAHA Report

As Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. prepares to face scrutiny Thursday morning in Washington, in front of the Senate Finance Committee, he’s expected to draw from plans he laid out in an eloquent opinion piece on Tuesday, published in The Wall Street Journal.

In the article, the Secretary writes that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has lost the public’s trust and that its noble mandate to fight infectious disease has been diluted due to decades of “bureaucratic inertia, politicized science, and mission creep.”

Turning to the Covid era, a time of systemic failure in our public health agencies, Kennedy explains that the CDC’s “dysfunction” manifested itself in irrational and non-scientific policies, including “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.”

Kennedy points to a worrying statistic that makes the CDC’s failure clear: while the United States constitutes 4.2% of the world’s population, it accounted for 19% of global Covid deaths.

Kennedy further explains that since 2014 life expectancy in the U.S. has declined, while chronic disease rates are rising.

The story of the CDC’s decline has been one of death by a thousand cuts. Kennedy writes that only half of the CDC’s budget is directed to fulfilling its mission to fight infectious disease, while fewer than 1 in 10 CDC employees are epidemiologists.

The HHS Secretary also laments what he views as a pervasive attitude at the CDC: scientists there have failed to understand the link between the lethality of infectious disease and the prevalence of chronic disease. This, he writes, is one of the reasons the CDC failed the public during Covid.

In an interview with Matt Gaetz on One America News, Dr. Robert W Malone, a newly-appointed member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), said the clutch of people who recently resigned from the CDC had repeatedly obstructed and “slow-walked” requests for accurate data from the ACIP.

Malone noted that the scope of the discussion with CDC data analysts was not about vaccination policy but “the scope of what we would be able to look at.”

Apparently, CDC apparatchiks felt they, not Secretary Kennedy, had the authority to determine what data ACIP members could have access to. Malone said these employees claimed, much like Dr. Anthony Fauci, that they alone wore the mantle of science and had decision-making authority over data analysts.

Malone said Kennedy, like President Trump, wants nothing more than the data and the truth – not “happy talk.” Further, he stated that the president has placed Pfizer and Moderna on notice, demanding hard data.

Malone was appointed to the ACIP after Kennedy removed members who were found to have conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry.

Kennedy, in his opinion piece, outlines steps already underway to solve the CDC’s crisis of bureaucratic bloat, ideologically fueled anti-science, disorganization, and neglect.

“We have replaced leaders who resisted reform,” Kennedy writes in the WSJ. “The American people elected President Trump—not entrenched bureaucrats—to set health policy. That is the MAHA commitment—make America healthy again.”

While the legacy media continues to portray Kennedy as a reckless reformer taking a wrecking ball to a sacred and infallible institution, the CDC has failed by the most fundamental metrics. Internally, it has been captured by non-scientific political ideologies, and all the while its bloated bureaucracy has led it astray from its straightforward and vital mission.

Conflicts of interest have been another millstone hampering serious scientific progress at the CDC. “We have already taken steps to eliminate conflicts of interest and bureaucratic complacency,” Kennedy writes. “We have shaken up the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. We have replaced leaders who resisted reform.”

Those who have personally benefited from the malaise at the CDC are angry because their ability to ignore scientific rigor while enriching themselves is coming to an end.

“The CDC must restore public trust—and that restoration has begun,” concludes Kennedy in his WSJ op-ed. “It won’t stop until America’s public-health institutions again serve the people with transparency, honesty and integrity.”