By Jeff Nesbit

With his latest public relations disaster—a Make America Healthy Again commission scientific report that cited non-existent studies to support conclusions that appear to have been written by artificial intelligence—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems utterly determined to stumble and fumble his way into the record books as the worst health secretary in American history.

President Donald Trump’s senior staff are constantly trying to cover for him, as they did with Kennedy’s most recent HHS disaster over the MAHA commission report fiasco.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was forced to defend Kennedy from the press briefing room podium on Thursday after NOTUS broke the story about a MAHA report that was “rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions,” and that “seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all.”

“We have complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and his team at HHS,” Leavitt said. “I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed, and the report will be updated.”

Leavitt then did her best to reverse spin the Kennedy/HHS public relations disaster. “But it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that has ever been released by the federal government and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the government.”

Putting aside, for the moment, that Leavitt’s valiant public relations spin around the embarrassing MAHA commission report is simply not true (it is neither “transformative” nor “backed on good science”), what Kennedy’s latest stumble shows is this: He is just not qualified or prepared to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Even those who would ordinarily be fans have become Kennedy’s loudest critics and are trying to get Trump’s attention, imploring him to recognize that Kennedy just might be Trump’s weakest, most incompetent Cabinet secretary.

For instance, the Cato Institute (a libertarian think) published a scathing review of Kennedy’s MAHA report on its blog. “Oddly, however, the data in the report bears little relationship to its conclusions,” wrote the Cato authors.

And leading conservative commentators have also been blunt in their assessment of Kennedy and his ability to lead HHS.

“The guy’s a crackpot,” conservative news commentator Brit Hume wrote on Twitter.

James B. Meigs, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, was even harsher in a post this weekend in Commentary. “A scattergram of RFK Jr.’s beliefs would map almost precisely with the ideas embraced by the wackiest characters on Fred Armisen’s Portlandia series combined with a smattering of X-Files conspiracy theories,” Meigs wrote.

To appease MAHA’s core conspiracies, Kennedy simply denies basic, proven science. “Our new head of HHS doesn’t believe germs are the main cause of infectious disease,” Meigs wrote. “It’s like learning that the new NASA administrator thinks the Earth is flat. To him, the discovery of pathogens—the most important advance in the history of medicine—is just another plot.”

In his effort to placate the MAHA movement—which Trump’s team has bolted onto his Make America Great Again political coalition—Kennedy has reverses decades of sound medical, scientific and health work at dozens of HHS agencies.

In just the short span of three months, to appease MAHA, Kennedy’s HHS has:

• Downplayed the critically important role that vaccination plays as a deadly measles outbreak continues spreading across the country, with close to 1,000 cases and three deaths so far.

• Fired a quarter of HHS’ staff, including hundreds of senior career experts in medicine, public health, infectious disease tracking, and food safety.

• Abolished or gutted entire agencies and offices that respond to disasters such as hurricanes and track infectious disease outbreaks, leaving us both blind and woefully unprepared for those threats.

• Defended massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, which could substantially raise health care costs for seniors and strip health coverage for millions of Americans living at or near the poverty line.

• Canceled billions of grants from the National Institutes of Health, which could cripple the nation’s gold-standard biomedical research institutions.

• Called prestigious medical journals “corrupt” and suggested that government scientists might soon be barred from publishing their work in these peer-reviewed journals.

"They seem to be on a quest to totally destroy the infrastructure of the nation's public health system,” Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told NPR. “It's amazing that they are looking to cut the parts of our health system that give the best value for prevention and wellness."

After months of silence, Kennedy and HHS officials have finally begun to promote their MAHA agenda on HHS’ website. They have a new timeline called “Celebrating Big Wins.”

But even a glance through the “big wins” shows that Kennedy’s MAHA team at HHS is more focused on photo ops with CEOs and trying to prove that vaccines cause autism than anything else. There are no plans to deal with potentially catastrophic epidemics, including bird flu, or how HHS will coordinate medical responses to disasters during hurricane season.

In short, Kennedy’s HHS simply is not serious or even remotely dealing with the medical, scientific, or public health issues that Americans rely on HHS to manage.

The stark truth is this: Kennedy should never have become HHS secretary. He isn’t qualified, and his anti-science theories are now jeopardizing the core health and science missions of the department. Trump’s White House knew it, but it put him there anyway to appease the MAHA movement. Let’s hope we don’t eventually pay an awful price for that political decision.

Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary of health for public affairs at HHS in the Biden administration.