RFK Jr. May Purge Cancer Screening Panel for Being Too ‘Woke’

It looks as though Robert F. Kennedy Jr. isn’t quite done tearing apart the country’s public health system. The antivaccination supporter turned health secretary is reportedly planning to retire the current roster of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF).

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report on Kennedy’s plan last Friday. RFK Jr. is expected to remove all 16 members of the USPSTF, allegedly because they’re too “woke.” The move would follow Kennedy’s recent gutting and reshaping of the CDC’s similar advisory panel on vaccines, which has already ushered in unscientific policy changes.

The USPSTF operates under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, but its members are voluntary outside experts. These experts meet throughout the year to review the evidence and weigh in on various preventive health topics, including if and when people should get screened for certain cancers. Doctors widely follow the guidelines created by the USPSTF, and insurers are required to cover preventative services that receive the strongest backing from the USPSTF.

While some experts and doctors have occasionally disagreed with the USPSTF’s guidelines or its interpretations of the evidence, recent objections from the right wing of the government appear to be ideological. The WSJ quotes “people familiar with the matter” who say that RFK Jr. wants to get rid of the USPSTF’s current members because they’re “woke.”

The WSJ report additionally highlights an essay published earlier this month in The American Conservative by Joseph Addington, in which Addington calls for Kennedy to kill the USPSTF for supposedly being an “instrument of social justice” and its “advocacy of left-wing ideological priors.” Addington pointed to the USPSTF’s efforts to address systematic racism and health inequalities within medicine in some of its recommendations as one such example. The GOP-aligned U.S. Supreme Court also recently issued a ruling affirming the constitutionality of the USPSTF while reaffirming the health secretary’s authority to remove and appoint members at will.

This wouldn’t be the first outside expert group RFK Jr. has taken a hatchet to since taking over HHS. In early June, he unilaterally fired all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), then quickly restocked it with people friendlier to his worldview, including people who have misrepresented the science on vaccine safety or who have financially benefited from testifying against vaccine manufacturers.

It didn’t take long for the new ACIP to secure a victory for the antivaccination movement. In late June, the ACIP voted to recommend against people taking the few remaining vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal. Antivaxxers have long blamed thimerosal in vaccines for causing autism in children, and the ingredient was taken out of all childhood vaccines as a precaution in the early 2000s. However, an abundance of evidence since has failed to show any link between thimerosal (or vaccines in general) and autism. This reality didn’t stop RFK Jr. and HHS from wholeheartedly accepting the ACIP’s recommendation last week.

Just prior to RFK Jr.’s reshuffling of the ACIP, he cancelled the group’s next scheduled meeting—something he’s now also done with the USPSTF. The American Medical Association and other groups have pleaded with Kennedy to restart these meetings and to leave their current iteration as is. Given the promise he’s already broken to leave the ACIP alone, though, it seems unlikely these pleas will amount to much.