Newly Released Emails Reveal Just How Little RFK Jr. Cares About Public Health

We should all be angrier that our lives are in the hands of Secretary Roadkill and his MAHA brigade

By Charles P. Pierce

Published: Jun 30, 2026 3:19 PM EDT

I have been charmed by the videos of Senator Bernie Sanders shooting hoops at various locations throughout the past several years. Man still has a nice, if earthbound, shooting touch. He’s just a couple of inches on his vertical away from being Hank Luisetti. And it turns out, in his day job, he’s still got some moves too.

In his role as the ranking Democratic member on the Senate’s HELP committee, Sanders obtained and released a trove of emails from the Department of Health and Human Services. The emails provide a window into what happens when a position in a president’s Cabinet is handed over to the medical equivalent of the Ancient Aliens guy. 

From CBS News:

In mid-February 2025, during flu season, then-CDC communications official Nicole Coffin told colleagues in an email that HHS communications chief Andrew Nixon “asked that we pull out of circulation all campaign ad buys related to flu or anything encouraging shots or vaccinations.” The request “came directly from the Secretary,” Coffin said she was told, adding that the plan was to focus on “informed consent,” or messaging that informs patients of risks and benefits. Another CDC official then looped in Monarez and Houry and warned of possible consequences.

“Given that this is the worst flu season in years, halting a campaign currently in the field presents significant reputational risk to the agency,” he wrote in an email. “There are also likely legal issues with contracts/appropriated funding.”

The memos are a window into a bull-in-a-china-shop approach to running an institution without respecting anything that institution ever has done—or, for that matter, the agency’s essential mission and purpose. From the Hill:

Emails indicate that Kennedy directed the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel to restrict access to vaccines, allowed researchers to access “confidential data” to indicate the disproven claim that vaccines cause autism and changed recommendations for the public to receive COVID-19 shots without input from the CDC.

Other emails also show that Kennedy’s then-chief of staff, Matthew Buckham, emailed former CDC Director Susan Monarez in August 2025 about the need for a “political review of major decisions at CDC … to ensure that [the Immediate Office of the Secretary] and the CDC political leadership all have eyes on the decisions for approval/changes before they go into effect.”

When we all get a chance to fumigate the government after all this is over, the story is not going to be all we discover about this abominable decade but all we already knew and ignored. That’s on us.