RFK Jr.’s memory lane rants damage MAHA

While many are too quick to dismiss the entire Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement as a compilation of Instagram health advice and fast-talking pseudo-science, it’s undeniable that parts of MAHA—at least, the parts promoted by the legitimate and genuine members of the movement—are crucially important to the health of our society. Concerns over ever-expanding vaccine schedules, government subsidies driving the use of high fructose corn syrup, and the inclusion of carcinogenic food colors in children’s cereal are among the many subjects on which MAHA has gained significant—and well deserved—momentum in recent years.

But while MAHA might have celebrated the selection of its somewhat overnight spokesman, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (or, if we can add yet another acronym to this column, RFK), perhaps they need to worry whether he is endangering the same movement he hijacked on his path to power?

During a joint press conference between the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration to announce plans to ban petroleum-based food dyes, RFK went into yet another one of his carefully-worded and potentially damaging rants, describing ADD, ADHD, speech delays, language delays, tics, Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, and autism as “injuries” he’d “never heard of when [he] was a kid.”

“They were not part of the nomenclature,” he added. “They weren’t part of the dialogue,” before discussing the amount spent on chronic disease today compared to when his uncle, John F. Kennedy, was president.

First, phrasing these various disorders, syndromes and medical issues as “injuries” is intentional, subtly assuming his favorite premise: that these are a result of behavior or environment and are, therefore, preventable.

Second, despite his latest claims, these issues existed long before RFK was a child, as if that’s even a meaningful moment in time after which everything apparently went oh-so-wrong.

The symptoms of ADHD were first described by a Scottish physician in 1798. Was McDonald’s to blame? The first recorded case of Tourette syndrome was described by a French doctor in 1825. Was the MMR vaccine the culprit? The first official case reports of narcolepsy were given in the late 19th century by German and French doctors. Too much Red-40?

Now, this isn’t to say that modern factors don’t contribute to some of these issues. But what it does indicate is that RFK’s memory-fueled image of what was common and uncommon when he was a child—even if he was the most medically-aware child in the history of children—is both inaccurate and irrelevant.

The problem with RFK—well, one of many problems—is that he takes something that could be interpreted as an objective data-backed problem—such as the rise of autism among children—and then proceeds to ignore every reasonable explanation (or even part-explanation) in order to reach the conclusion he was looking for all along.

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