RFK Jr. Swaps Vaccine Talk for Healthy Foods and Reading to Tots in Push To Woo Voters
TOLEDO, Ohio — The little boy, dressed in a Toy Story sweatshirt, wrapped himself around the nation’s health secretary.
“What do you want to do when you grow up?” » asked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to a carpet full of preschoolers.
“A dinosaur!” » the boy replied, squeezing tighter.
Just weeks ago, Kennedy sat before lawmakers on Capitol Hill and faced intense questions about a dangerous rise in infectious diseases among American children.
Today, with the midterm primaries underway, Kennedy sat in a child-sized chair in Ohio, on a mission to change the subject.
Advised to stay away from the anti-vaccine rhetoric that propelled him to political stardom, Kennedy was dispatched by the White House to evangelize on the less controversial – and more popular – parts of his agenda. Republicans hope Kennedy’s “Take Back Your Health” tour will help them retain voters, many of whom are deeply unhappy with President Donald Trump.
So Kennedy was there in early May, crisscrossing a swath of northern Ohio that includes one of the few congressional districts that Republicans are confident they can flip in November, alternating between a wardrobe of blue suits and blue jeans.
He inspected the kitchen of a Toledo day care center, where hundreds of the city’s smallest residents learn and play through the federally funded Head Start program. Under the watchful eye of a surgeon, he briefly operated the famed Cleveland Clinic’s robotic hands on a living patient, wide open for heart surgery. And he snacked on pesticide-free squash blossoms from a 400-acre farm.
“I’m dismantling a corrupt system and replacing it with something better, with something that actually addresses the decline of America’s healthy population,” Kennedy said from a farmhouse dining room table during an exclusive interview with KFF Health News. He highlighted what he considers his biggest accomplishments over the past year: pressuring some companies to remove coloring from some foods, updating nutritional guidance and defining ultra-processed foods.
“People are watching what they eat and the industry is listening; the industry is evolving.”
But hundreds of miles from Washington’s partisan interrogations, Kennedy could not escape the contradictions and uncomfortable consequences of the Trump administration’s policies.
Taboo budget cuts
Classrooms at Clever Bee Academy featured freshly printed posters featuring Kennedy’s “Eat Real Food” slogan and the redesigned food pyramid.
Kennedy came with one offer, a $30,000 federal grant to help the center upgrade its kitchen and community garden.
Perched in front of staff and parents, he distanced himself from a White House initiative last year that could have been devastating for many young Clever Bee students, most of whom live in poverty: the proposal to eliminate the $12 billion Head Start program.
Most of the students at the Toledo daycare Kennedy visited live in poverty and rely on the federally funded Head Start program, which the Trump administration proposed eliminating last year. (Amanda Seitz/KFF Health News)
Daycare classrooms displayed posters featuring the slogan “Eat Real Food” and the redesigned food pyramid. (Amanda Seitz/KFF Health News)
“We have been asked to significantly reduce our agencies,” Kennedy said. “The two programs that I went to the wall to protect and find money elsewhere were Indian Health Services, which is still underfunded, and Head Start.
The next day, Kennedy stood in front of goats on a farm in Medina, Ohio, being cared for by people sobered from drug or alcohol abuse at the Hope Recovery Community.
He was there to promise more investment from an administration that has dramatically cut staffing and budgets over the past year.
Kennedy, who still attends daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to deal with a heroin addiction that gripped him for 14 years, said he hopes to replicate the recovery center model nationally, describing it as a “critical role of government to make sure these services are there.” »
Broader access to drug treatment is part of the Trump administration’s new national drug control strategy.. But stimulus supporters are skeptical that more people will receive help, with millions expected to lose their health insurance under Trump’s leadership due to the Affordable Care Act’s rising premiums and nearly $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Kennedy dismissed those challenges, pointing to a $100 million investment in drug treatment services, including sober housing, announced this year.
“We’re trying to make it more accessible,” Kennedy told KFF Health News.
Trouble in paradise MAHA
Rows of beds of green and purple microgreens awaited Kennedy at Chef’s Garden, a farm in Huron, Ohio, that rejects the use of chemicals in growing its produce.
The health secretary plucked handfuls and tossed them into his mouth, chewing them quickly before bringing him another sample.
“We are absolutely thrilled that someone at this level of government cares about how food is grown and where it comes from,” said Bob Jones Jr., co-owner of The Chef’s Garden.
Seeing more farmers produce chemical-free leafy greens is at the top of the wish list of those who support Kennedy and the Make America Healthy Again movement, and many who supported Trump in 2024. But in a move that threatens to fracture this constituency, Trump has pushed to protect the production of glyphosate, a weed-killing and potentially carcinogenic chemical commonly sprayed on crops and lawns.
Although the MAHA Ohio group touts Kennedy’s agenda and supports candidates aligned with his movement, director Elizabeth Frost acknowledged tensions between MAHA and conservative policies.
The glyphosate issue is an example “where you have the conservative interests to look out for the industry’s interests, and you have the MAHA interest to be aware of the downstream health impacts,” said Frost, who volunteered for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
Some prominent MAHA influencers have suggested that Trump’s White House staffers were preventing Kennedy from implementing more aggressive policies on certain issues, including further limiting the use of vaccines, a notion he rejected.
“To say the White House has tied my hands — the only people who could say that are people who haven’t paid attention for a year,” Kennedy said. “President Trump let me do more than any HHS secretary in history.”
He added: “The only thing members of the MAHA movement are complaining about is the President’s glyphosate order. »
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Republicans view Kennedy as an asset in the recently redrawn northern Ohio district, which Democrat Marcy Kaptur has represented for more than 40 years and is considered one of the most competitive in the country.
After winning the district’s Republican primary last week, Derek Merrin smiled as he shook Kennedy’s hand.
“We discussed protecting Lake Erie, strengthening rural hospitals, and our shared vision to improve food quality,” Merrin later posted on Facebook. “Let’s Make America Healthy Again!” »
Yet even though Kennedy had been advised against avoiding any anti-vaccine rhetoric, the problem found him in Ohio. At a forum in Cleveland, family physician Patricia Kellner said the best way to prevent hepatitis B was to vaccinate newborns — a recommendation that was abandoned under Kennedy. She spoke to Kennedy about treating patients with the disease.
“Some of them didn’t know about it because it can be asymptomatic. Some of them found out about it when they had liver cancer,” Kellner said. “So why are you opposed to a birth dose of hepatitis B?
Kennedy responded by suggesting that the hepatitis B vaccine was not safe for babies and was only necessary for certain people.
“Hepatitis B is for high-risk groups like drug addicts or prostitutes, or promiscuous homosexuals,” he added, drawing gasps from the crowd.
Although the risk of contracting hepatitis B is higher among people who inject drugs or men who have sex with men, the disease can be transmitted by other means, including contact with contaminated surfaces or during childbirth.
Public health researchers have warned that abandoning the universal recommendation on hepatitis B would lead to hundreds of new infections among children, costing millions of dollars in additional health care.
