HHS Is Now The Department Of Disease Efficiency

Alexandria Petri (The Washington Post) satirizes Kennedy's pick to head HHS: 

Well, President-elect Donald Trump has picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the new head of the Department of Health and Human Services. “He wants to do some things and we’re going to let him go to it,” Trump said. “Go have a good time, Bobby.”

Everyone who is an HHS employee and is not the measles virus: You are on notice! We’re taking this department in a new direction! Measles, stand back and stand by. It’s about to be your time.

We’re doing our best to give the people what they want. For many years we thought what they wanted was clean drinking water, safe and tested vaccines to drive down deaths from childhood diseases, and food that is produced in sanitary conditions so the people who eat it don’t get sick. But we were wrong, and the change starts now.

Similarly, we mistakenly thought that finding a dead mouse in your frozen ravioli dinner was a shock. Now, we know better. It’s a surprise! People love surprises. People love danger! Our ancestors didn’t stare down death every time they went out to hunt and eat food that had not been subject to Food and Drug Administration inspection so we wouldn’t have to stare down death every day as we went out to buy food that has not been subject to FDA inspection. You want to consume a can of beans and live? TOUGH LUCK! THIS IS DONALD TRUMP’S AMERICA!

In light of this, and of the nomination of RFK Jr. as our leader, we at the Department of Health and Human Services are announcing a rebrand as the Department of Disease Efficiency. Given our new mandate to root out expertise wherever it might lurk and replace it with Something That Came To RFK Jr. In A Dream Once, we felt it was proper to release “Health” and “Human Services” back into the wild, where maybe RFK Jr. can hunt them down with his falcon and eat them before they have undergone an FDA inspection.

Look, most Americans are not equipped to test food safety or vaccine safety on their own. And that’s because, unwisely, we have delegated these tasks to the FDA. It’s time we gave them back to the people. Every citizen should learn to inspect his own meat, like the Founders did. George Washington (who apparently only had one real tooth left at the end of his life) did not drink fluoridated water. Abraham Lincoln (one of whose children actually made it to adulthood!) never gave his children safe, routine childhood vaccinations. Franklin D. Roosevelt (who had polio) had polio. It’s time we went back to that.

Now is not the time to rest on our laurels. Now is the time to throw our laurels away. We’re going to think outside the box. For too long, our ideas have been limited to “things medical professionals recommend” and we have mistakenly viewed each death as a disgrace and failure. Now, it’s time to abandon that hidebound, old-fashioned thinking. Maybe disease is an ally, not an enemy! Maybe we can attract a new consumer, someone who is as excited as RFK Jr. is to wonder if water is turning children gay.

Gone are the days when we saw tainted food as something to be eradicated and roadkill as something to be driven past and not consumed. No longer! We are EATING roadkill. If anyone gets a brain parasite, we are CELEBRATING them, not shaming them. Who is to say it is better or worse to have more functional brain and less disease? The point is, there are no bad ideas in this new department. We can’t wait to hit the ground running, like that cockroach in your pasta sauce.

For too long, American citizens have been complacent, having fewer and fewer children, under the misapprehension that if you like your child, you should get to keep your child. And what’s to blame for that? Safe, accessible vaccines that mean nobody gets measles. What better way to drive up birth rates (don’t interrupt me, JD Vance) than to increase the rates of childhood deaths? Also, maybe we can stop approving birth control! None of it seems safe. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, using science — or something that is just as good as science: nothing.

Every time you get to do something as simple as sit down with your healthy family and eat food from a grocery store, it is the result of a cavalcade of miracles. Each health and safety regulation that made your food safe to eat, each childhood vaccine that means you are at the table with Tiny Tim and not his Sad, Empty Chair and Abandoned Crutch, is the product of decades — no, centuries! — of painstaking effort. And these efforts came from all kinds of people: brilliant, dedicated medical minds, crusaders who were sick of finding dead mice in their lunch meat and just ordinary families who were willing to do whatever they could not to lose their loved ones. Well, we’re going to take those decades of painstaking, breathtaking achievement and treat them as RFK Jr. treats a bear carcass: dump it somewhere, for no reason, after it has been struck by a car.

Finally, we can declare victory in the long, bitter war against lifesaving human innovations like pasteurization and the polio vaccine! I don’t know why we want to declare victory in this war, but I guess it’s what we’re doing.