Washington – In just a few months, the Secretary of Health and Social Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began to transform American health policy: reducing staff in health agencies, restructuring the objective of certain regulators and researchers, further modifying the vaccination regulations and going up the mission of his department to focus more on alternative medicine.
The guidelines are all part of the same set of questions that have led a slice of American and left -borne Americans to be voting possibly for a republican president whose favorite meal is McDonald’s, Trump and Kennedy have treated a type of voter who was wary of American health policy in any case.
Bernadine Francis, a life democrat who supported Joe Biden for the president in 2020 before supporting Donald Trump in 2024, told NBC News in an interview that she approves Kennedy’s efforts so far, despite her “linked hands” by forces rooted in administration and congress.
“From what I have seen so far with what RFK has tried to do,” she said, “I’m really, really proud of what he does.”
Francis is one of the voters who left the Democratic Party and voted for Trump because “nothing else matters” outside of public health, as they – like Kennedy – thought in the wrong direction.
The concerns about chemicals in food and toxins in the environment, long defended by Democrats, have become a question of galvanization to a key part of Trump’s republican party, with a supersaturation of information which, in some cases, have not been proven. It is also wrapped in concerns about the hairstyle vaccine, which has been accelerated under Trump, administered under Biden and armed by anti-vaccine activists like Kennedy in the middle of locking and shots following the devastating pandemic.
“We knew that to bring RFK to do so that he could help with the situation we have in the health industry, we knew that we had to do,” said Francis, retired from Washington, DC, director of public schools, who said that she had left her “beloved” career because she had refused the vaccine.
“It seemed to me, as soon as (Biden) became president, the vaccine was mandated, and it was at this point that I lost all hope among the Democrats,” Francis told NBC News, referring to the vaccination mandates set up by the Biden administration for a large part of the federal workforce at the top of the pandemic. There are currently no federal cocvid vaccine mandate.
According to data from centers for disease control and prevention.
How the choices of RFK Jr. change public health agencies
Dr. Marty Makary, Kennedy Food and Drug Administration Commissioner and a scientist and researcher of John Hopkins, told NBC News in an interview he wanted to transform the agency, which, according to him, faced the “corruption” on the influence of the pharmaceutical and food industries.
“I mean, you are looking at the food pyramid, it was not based on what suits you best, it was based on what companies wanted you to buy,” he said, referring to the 1992 and subsequent nutritional advice of the government. He said there would be “completely new nutritional advice” published later this year this summer.
He praised the FDA research and regulation mission, saying that the agency is “incredibly well oiled, and we have trains in time”.
He also underlined the report of the 75 -page commission “Make America Healthy Again” – which focused on ultra -proposed food and toxins in the environment – as having established “the agenda of research” of the FDA, HHS and agencies supervising social security nets such as health insurance and food coupons. (The Maha report initially cited certain studies that did not exist, an error that advisers Kennedy Calley means said was a “big bad service” to their mission.)
“I think there are a lot of things we are going to learn. For example, the microbiome, which attracts attention to the Maha report, must be on the map. We don’t even talk about our medical circles,” said Makary. “The microbiome, food is medicine, the immune response that occurs when the chemicals that do not appear in nature descend our gastrointestinal tract.”
Pressed in other areas of administration, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, making decisions that go against pro-regulatory ideas presented in the Maha report, Makary said that he could “comment only on the FDA” where they are “attached to the vision of secretary Kennedy”.
But Kennedy’s public health program goes beyond the search for food supply and chemicals. Recently, Kennedy said in a video published in X last month that the cocovid vaccine was no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women, a change in CDC advice that jumped the normal public exam period.
A few days later, after criticisms questioned the decision and raised concerns concerning a lack of public data behind this decision, the administration again updated its directives, urging parents to consult their doctors in place.
Pressed on confusion and if the Americans now exchange a side of public distrust for the health system for another, Makary defended Kennedy, who was criticized for propagating disinformation.
“My experience with secretary Robert F. Kennedy is that he listens. He listens myself, he listens to Jay Bhattacharya, listens to Dr. Mehmet Oz, he listens to a multitude of scientists who give him advice,” said Makary, referring to the director of the National Institutes of Health and the administrator for the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid, respectively. “He can therefore have big questions, but the questions he asks are the questions that most Americans ask.”
The intersection of medicine and healthy lifestyle choices
Dr. Dawn Mussallem, breast cancer oncologist and integrative medicine doctor – a doctor who combines conventional treatments with alternative research -based therapies – tried to help his patients browse the medical disinformation they meet online and in their social circles.
Mussallem has an incredible story of personal survival: during her medical studies, she was diagnosed with stadium IV cancer and, after conventional therapies like chemo saved his life, was diagnosed with heart failure. After undergoing a heart transplant, Mussallem ran a 26 -thousand marathon a year later.
“I learned a lot in the medical school, but nothing compared to what I learned as a patient,” said Mussallem, who spends an average of 90 minutes each in head-on-one sessions with his patients. “This is not a political choice. But we know that the lifestyle is important. ”
For example, a new study by the American Society of Clinical Oncology which finds a diet that reduces inflammation in the body can help people with advanced colon cancer survive longer.
Mussallem’s mission, as well as his colleagues, is to raise modern medicine that saved his life, as well as encourage her patients to live healthy lifestyles, including regular exercise, minimum transformation foods, less screen time, more social connections and better sleep.
But politics hinders millions of Americans flooded daily with influencers on social networks and “non -medical experts”, as Mussallem says, which Stoke is afraid in its patients.
“Patients come with all these questions, fears,” she said. “I have heard this patients several times, that their nervous system is affected by what they see in government.”
Mussallem recognizes that “many individuals” have questioned traditional medicine. For her, it is not one or the other – it’s both.
“We have to trust conventional medicine,” she said. “With conventional care that works alongside a greater integrative modality to examine the deep causes of the disease, as well as to help optimize with the lifestyle, this is where we must be.”