Last week's Senate Finance Committee hearing was supposed to be about oversight, to ask the tough but necessary questions on how a federal agency is moving toward its authorized mandate. Instead, it became a bipartisan spectacle of scorn aimed squarely at Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Republicans and Democrats alike excoriated him for daring to question the orthodoxy of public health. The outrage was predictable. It was also desperate.
When entrenched interests feel threatened, they attack the messenger. That's what happened Thursday, Sept. 4. Kennedy stood before the committee asking questions a captured, regressing medical establishment cannot afford to entertain. And so they tried to silence him.
At its core, what is so dangerous about questioning the traditional ways of protecting American health? The United States spends more than $13,000 per person per year on health care -- more than twice what other wealthy nations spend -- yet our life expectancy is lower, our infant mortality is higher, and our chronic disease rates are spiraling. We have the most expensive health system in the world and one of the sickest populations among our peers. That's not health care. That's sick care. And big pharma knows it. It's what they're selling.
Instead of working with Kennedy to find the root causes of this crisis, the system closes ranks. Politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats -- they attack the man who dares to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Fee-for-service medicine is rewarded. More tests, more scans, more billing codes. Yet does more spending translate to better outcomes? Hardly. It fuels the industrialization of medicine while Americans grow sicker.
The same pattern played out with vaccines. We were promised that the COVID-19 shot would outright prevent infection, full stop, then told it would merely lessen symptoms. Now the message has shifted so many times that Americans no longer know what to believe. Is it any wonder that parents want the right to decide what shots their children receive? Skepticism is not a crime; it is a duty when government and corporations have already proven themselves willing to shade the truth.
Trust in public institutions has cratered. Barely half of Americans believe drug companies or government health agencies tell the truth about vaccine safety. And why should they? Officials downplayed concerns, dismissed reasonable questions and labeled debate as misinformation. When the system refuses transparency, it breeds suspicion. Kennedy has called that out, and for his honesty he is vilified.
But here is the reality: Public health in America is collapsing. Obesity is rampant. Children are medicated at staggering rates. Food is engineered for profit, not nourishment. We spend more money than any other country on medicine, yet we are sicker than ever. These are not the markers of a functioning health system. They are the symptoms of a nation in decline.
And that brings us to the heart of the matter. What Kennedy represents -- and why the establishment fights him so viciously -- is not simply a debate over vaccines or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is the question of whether America will keep propping up a broken model or reset the system entirely.
Because that is what is needed now: a reset. Not a tweak. Not another government program layered on top of failure. A fundamental reset. A shift from treating illness to cultivating wellness. From corporate profit to public trust. From silencing dissent to embracing debate.
The old model is exhausted. It is bankrupt in trust, in outcomes, in morality. Kennedy's critics may sneer, but the truth is plain: America cannot medicate its way to health, cannot propagandize its way to trust and cannot silence its way to credibility. The reset will come, whether the establishment likes it or not.
And when it does, history may well show that Kennedy was right to ask the hard questions -- that he had the courage to say what others would not.
Armstrong Williams is manager/sole owner of Howard Stirk Holdings I & II Broadcast Television Stations and the 2016 Multicultural Media Broadcast owner of the year. To find out more about him and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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