Transparency

The Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for keeping Americans healthy. Under RFK, Jr., not so much. He’s spread false claims about vaccinations, discouraged their use, slashed vaccination research, and undermined science. He has overseen a revival of measles in the country.

Kennedy has shut down programs at the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He’s slowed or cancelled important biomedical research. And the list goes on.

The point is, RFK, Jr. should be required to wear a warning label reading, “This HHS Secretary may be hazardous to your health.” To be fair, he’s taken up Michelle Obama’s campaign to encourage Americans to eat less processed food. And the CDC last week issued an advisory encouraging Americans to refresh their polio vaccinations before traveling to Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and 27 other countries where the once nearly eradicated disease is having a resurgence. But doing occasional good does not offset doing continuous harm.

When Trump rebranded the Department of Defense we should have taken it as an omen (and Iran should have taken it as a promise, apparently). Transparency suggests that if Trump is rebranding for accuracy, HHS cries out for a new name.

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P.S. I use Claude AI to proofread Sketchiers. It noted that this strip fittingly mentions three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Pestilence, and Death. I wish it were intentional, but a fortunate literary accident is acceptable. And yes, I did try to include the Fourth Horseman, Famine, but savaging food security programs is the purview of the Department of Agriculture. And we here at Sketchier HQ are sticklers about such details. Apparently.