Author, Lecturer, Ethicist

#1,039 The Ketamine Kid Has Left the Building, But RFK, Jr. Just Might Be Here to Stay

                  The “Ketamine Kid”

We begin the month of June with a bit of good news: Elon “The Ketamine Kid” Musk has taken his shiny chainsaw and moved out of both the White House and Mar-a-Lago. His stint as co-president and leader of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) has been, by any reasonable measure, an abject failure; in the language of Space-X, (his privately-owned, federally-funded [$3.8 billion in 2024 alone] version of NASA), his dream of shrinking the federal government workforce has had a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” While he originally claimed that he would save the taxpayers $1.6 trillion through cutting out “waste, fraud and abuse, and irrelevant programs” his most recent estimate is a paltry $175 million; experts believe the real number is significantly lower. And, in addition to seeing sales of his Tesla automobiles and cybertrucks (the ugliest looking vehicle in history) tank by as much as 50%, his personal net worth has shrunk by more than 25%. Poor fella!

Truth to tell, the Ketamine-addled Musk (who has also admitted to using Adderall, Ecstasy and psychedelic mushroom [Psilocybin]) has done real damage to both the federal government and the nation’s ability to do good for the impoverished masses at home and around the globe.  Our reputation as a caring partner has been shattered.  To my way of thinking, one of the very worst things Musk did during his unsupervised tenure was the shredding of the United States Agency for International Development. Though a rump operation is operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

So that’s the good news . . . the Psychopath from Pretoria has left the building.

                 H.H.S Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Now for the bad news: we’re still stuck with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is potentially an even greater threat to the nation’s health (physical, psychological, educational and financial) than the Ketamine Kid.  Even before he was approved by the United States Senate, more than 17,000 members of America’s medical establishment signed a letter from the Committee to Protect Health Care, urging senators to reject his nomination, saying he was “unqualified to lead” and was “actively dangerous”.

RFK, Jr., once known as a highly successful and respected environmental attorney has, over the past many years, morphed into a dysphonic demon who holds dangerous, medically medieval views on everything from vaccines, pesticides, prescription drugs to a description of America’s children as being overmedicated and undernourished. He still  contends that the MMR (Measles, Mumps & Rubella) vaccine is a contributing cause of autism in children . . . a decades-old lie which has been disproven by virtually every epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist on the planet.  In matter of fact, the few “medical people” who agree with RFK seem to be working under him at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which was headed from 1984 to 2022 by Dr. Anthony Fauci, M.D. and  the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, whose administrator, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who promoted the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine as a cure for Covid.

Kennedy’s cuts in research funding are absolutely mind-numbing. As but one example, just last week HHS pulled millions of dollars in funding for a human bird flu vaccine developed by Covid vaccine-maker Moderna. Before IT took office for his second term, the Biden administration had awarded $766 million to the Massachusetts-based drugmaker. They invested $176 million last summer, and tacked on another $590 million in January. According to Moderna CEO Stėphane Bancel “While the termination of funding from HHS adds uncertainty, we are pleased by the robust immune response and safety profile observed in the interim analysis of the Phase 1/2 study of our H5 avian flu vaccine. . . . These clinical data in pandemic influenza underscore the critical role of mRNA technology has played as a countermeasure to emerging health threats.”

Moreover, RFK’s call for a blanket requirement for placebo-controlled trials threatens research ethics and vaccine access. HHS says the new plan will “promote transparency” in vaccine research.  In matter of fact (and from my decades of experience vetting clinical trials through an Institutional Review Board [IRB]), I can state that it would affect vaccine access and diminish the public trust.  The change would require all new vaccines to undergo placebo-controlled trials before approval, which means that some people would receive the vaccine and others would get an inert substance, like a saline injection, before the results are compared.  If this had been the case with the initial COVID-19 vaccine, tens - perhaps hundreds - of millions more people would have died during the pandemic for the simple reason that the vaccine would still not be available to the public.    

Now mind you, these - and many other - medical and research policy changes are coming from a Cabinet Secretary who is not an MD, never (to the best of my knowledge) served on an IRB, and who, while telling mothers and fathers not to trust what medical experts say about vaccines one moment, then tells Congress “ . . . people shouldn’t take medical advice from me” the next. I don’t know, perhaps that’s what comes from being a recovering heroin addict who had his brain partially eaten away by a Taenia solium - a pork tapeworm.  Whatever the case, he and his entire department represent a clear and present danger to the health and welfare of the American public.

Make America Healthy Again (MAHA), the Regime’s signature omnibus health program, was created by Executive Order (EO) 14212 on February 13, 2025. It established the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, whose stated purpose was/is “to improve the health of Americans, particularly children.” From day one, medical professionals took a “We’ll believe it when we see it” stance. A week ago, HHS and its leadership issued their first report, a 73-page “assessment” of the program. According to Los Angeles Times’ business columnist Michael Hiltzik, “A sloppier, more disingenuous government report would be hard to imagine.“ At least seven sources cited in the report do not exist. HHS hastily reissued the report with some of those citations removed, but without disclosing the changes — an extremely unkosher action in the medical research community. The MAHA report attributes the rise in childhood obesity and diabetes in part to ultraprocessed foods (UPFs). But it’s silent on what experts call the “social determinants of disease,” which are heavily related to economics.  And although the report mentions that safety net programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — SNAP, or food stamps, school lunch and breakfast programs, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, could play a role in promoting healthy eating, it doesn’t mention that those programs face severe budget cuts from the White House.

There can be no doubt that RFK. Jr. and his medical conspiracists - who are also in favor of giving children raw milk and getting fluoride out of our drinking water - pose an even greater danger to society than the Ketamine Kid.  For while Musk’s chainsaw approach to reducing the federal spending footprint will undoubtedly cost far more than it saved, Kennedy’s “remedies” will likely affect the health and wellbeing of everyone . . . regardless of how rich or poor they are.  Being a multibillionaire (or even a multimillionaire as is RFK, Jr., one of the “poorest” members of the Cabinet) cannot save you from succumbing to a disease for which clinical trials no longer exist.  This is an issue that the vast majority of the American public should understand and get behind: that conspiracies cannot heal the sick, and that properly, ethically-run clinical trials do save lives.

To paraphrase the rabbi in Fiddler on the Roof, “May G-d bless and keep RFK and his conspiracists . . . far away from us.

Copyright©2025 Kurt Franklin Stone