Beautiful little babies born without arms, or without legs, or suffering other extreme deformities. I still remember, as a young boy, paging through the latest issue of Life magazine and seeing all these shocking and heart-breaking photos. An estimated 10,000 children had been born with such severe deformities in a short period of time, most of them in Europe, though a small number in the U.S.
Introduced as a sedative to help pregnant women with morning sickness, anxiety or sleeplessness, thalidomide has long been regarded as the cause of one of the greatest medical scandals in world history.
That was 1962. Two years later, in 1964, the surgeon general of the United States revealed with maximum publicity that smoking tobacco – at the time widespread, heavily advertised and glorified throughout the culture – causes cancer. Oops.
Fast forward to today, in a time of much greater scientific and medical knowledge, experience and supposedly far stricter drug-testing requirements … and everything is worse.
How can that possibly be?
A brief overview of Americans’ alarmingly declining health demonstrates conclusively that “Make America Healthy Again,” the new Trump administration agenda inspired and led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., couldn’t be more vital – indeed, crucial. Consider:
* The U.S. is in the grip of a full-blown obesity epidemic, with well over 200 million Americans – including millions of children – being overweight or obese. According to the CDC, over 40% of adults in the United States are clinically obese – a serious medical condition – in stark contrast with the 1950s, when approximately 10% of U.S. adults were obese.
* The number of American children and adults with autism spectrum disorders has exploded, rising by 175% over just the last decade. One out of every 36 children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with autism, up from 1 in 44 as recently as 2021. In contrast, during the 1950s, autism was virtually nonexistent, afflicting between 0.01% and 0.05% of Americans born during that decade.
* Early-onset cancer cases rose almost 80% over the last three decades and show no signs of slowing down. One major 2022 study reveals the incidence of early-onset cancers – including breast, colon, esophagus, kidney, liver and pancreas – has been dramatically increasing since around 1990.
* A staggering 38 million Americans are suffering from diabetes, a number expected to increase to almost 55 million in the next five years. During the late 1950s, the prevalence of diabetes in the U.S. was estimated to be 9 cases per 1,000 people, for a total of 1 million cases.
What’s going on? Why is the health of Americans degrading so radically? With the rapid growth of knowledge and technology, including medical technology, one might expect the exact opposite to be the case – that everyone’s health would be ever improving.
Yet Americans are becoming less and less healthy, including, tragically, the nation’s children. Statistics vary, but as many as half of America’s children are dealing with some sort of chronic health issue, up from less than 1% five decades ago.
Obviously, with Americans’ health in crisis, the goal to “Make America Healthy Again” is welcome and necessary. But there’s one major obstacle to achieving this goal that needs to be addressed up front.
They all lied
As deadly and traumatizing as the COVID-19 pandemic was, it did bring about a mass awakening in at least one important area: Americans discovered they absolutely could not trust the government agencies tasked with safeguarding their health. From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to the Food and Drug Administration, to the National Institutes of Health and other branches of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, they all lied to Americans, either explicitly or by willful suppression of the truth.
Most visible, of course – and setting the standard for all other government bureaucrats – was Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, under the NIH. Fauci acted the part of the kindly, grandfatherly presidential adviser on all things COVID. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a classic sociopath, smiling while lying about virtually everything – from mask-wearing (he initially admitted the truth, that masks are ineffective, only later doing a full 180 and insisting on universal masking, even outdoors!) to imposing the “six-foot rule” (later admitting this arbitrary rule was based on exactly zero science), to perversely denying that natural immunity provided ideal protection against COVID-19 just as it does for other viruses – a pivotal and unconscionable lie that flung open the doors to ruthless vaccine mandates.
Some of Fauci’s lies were not only dangerous, but jaw-droppingly corrupt – like his insistence that COVID-19 arose spontaneously from an open-air food market in Wuhan, China, rather than from the level-4 biohazard research facility just a few blocks up the street (the Wuhan Institute of Virology) where ongoing mad-scientist “gain-of-function research” – funded by the NIH at Fauci’s direction – was focused on rendering bat coronaviruses more dangerous and more transmissible to humans.
Meanwhile, the CDC and FDA perversely denigrated and mocked the use of ivermectin, a Nobel Prize-honored drug that had saved literally millions of lives from various other deadly infectious diseases, as documented in the peer-reviewed “Journal of Antibiotics.” Yet despite multiple studies proving ivermectin to be an effective and life-saving early treatment for COVID-19, it was ridiculed mercilessly by the federal health bureaucracies and their news media “echo chamber.” Similar story with hydroxychloroquine.
Why did they all lie, mocking and discouraging Americans from taking advantage of these drugs, whose safety was long-acknowledged by the FDA, and which could have saved many more lives and enormously reduced suffering during the COVID pandemic?
That’s easy: They maniacally wanted every man, woman and child in America to take “the jab” – that is, the various experimental mRNA COVID-19 shots that turned out to be some of the most problem-ridden vaccines in medical history.
Clearly, the medical bureaucracies within Big Government have not been worthy of Americans’ trust. Nor has Big Pharma, which has proven itself to be far more motivated by gargantuan profits than safeguarding human lives.
Fortunately, figuring out what’s destroying Americans’ health and reducing or eliminating the causes doesn’t require the cooperation of bloated, power-obsessed government bureaucracies, nor of giant profit-obsessed mega-businesses.
It’s not that complicated. In fact, the fundamentals couldn’t be more obvious.
‘Mass poisoned by Big Pharma and Big Food’
As noted earlier, until the early 1960s, millions of Americans smoked tobacco with no awareness of its serious health consequences. It was cool, sophisticated and relaxing. Indeed, even medical doctors and surgeons were frequently depicted in the movies as smoking cigarettes, perhaps to add character and drama to their portrayal.
Then, suddenly Americans learned that smoking tobacco causes cancer. On Jan. 11, 1964, the federal government released “Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service.” Ever since, cigarette packages are required by law to include this or a similar warning: “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.”
Today, America is basically where it was before the surgeon general’s warning about tobacco – but now it’s with regard to many of the food and drug products hundreds of millions consume daily.
Strangely, even though the food everyone consumes literally becomes the very substance of their bodies, most people somehow assume that what they eat has little or no effect on their health and wellbeing. This represents a monumental rejection of reality that “Make America Healthy Again” hopes to remedy.
In reality, insists RFK Jr., Americans are being “mass poisoned by Big Pharma and Big Food.” He claims the federal agencies tasked with looking out for the public’s interest not only have failed to stop the poisoning, but have enabled it. The result, he says, is an unprecedented and worsening epidemic of chronic disease in the U.S.
Thus, three days before the Nov. 5, 2024 election, Kennedy announced that Donald Trump “asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic in this country. And he said, ‘I want to see results, measurable results in the diminishment of chronic disease within two years.’ And I said, Mr. President, I will do that.”
To say that Kennedy is not a fan of the processed, sweetened and chemicalized “foods” that tens of millions of Americans consume daily is an understatement. He often ridicules “Big Food” products like McDonald’s French fries and highly sweetened and artificially colored breakfast cereals like Cap’n Crunch and Fruit Loops as food products sold in the U.S. that include ingredients banned in other countries.
“It’s easy to fix,” he said a week before November’s election. “We have a thousand ingredients in our foods that are illegal in Italy and other countries in Europe.” And Donald Trump, adds Kennedy, agrees with his plans to “get the chemicals out” of the foods Americans are eating.
Then there is the strange obsession with vaccines – all vaccines, regardless of their safety, effectiveness or appropriateness – which now constitutes something of a quasi-religion in America. For example, parents of all newborn children are pressured to give their one-day-old baby a vaccine shot to protect them from contracting a disease (Hepatitis B) that can be transmitted only by having sex or using an infected drug-user’s hypodermic needle. Yet, if you question the wisdom or timing of this, you are denounced as an “anti-vaxxer!” RFK Jr. is justified in trying to bring some common sense and science into the hysteria that many – generally on the political and cultural left – have over vaccines.
Regarding the decades-old vaccine-autism issue, ridiculed endlessly by the media and Big Pharma, Kennedy says vaccines are not “the only cause of autism,” but explains: “Our kids today are swimming around in a toxic soup coming mainly from their foods that operate along the same biological pathways. But some of it’s coming from pharmaceutical drugs.”
Far from being “anti-vaccine,” Kennedy says he just seeks to “restore the transparency” surrounding vaccines. And Trump has promised to finally get to the bottom of the supposed vaccine-autism link.
Yet another big issue is that of pesticides and herbicides like Roundup commonly used by farmers, also a concern of Kennedy’s. Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, has been classified by some major organizations, including the International Agency for Research on Cancer, as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Indeed, some people have filed lawsuits against Bayer AG, the pharma company that acquired pesticide-maker Monsanto, alleging Roundup caused their cancer. This obviously deserves scrutiny, especially since glyphosate is found in far more food products than most Americans would imagine. This is one of the main reasons, in turn, that more Americans than ever are choosing to serve their families organically grown foods.
So there is hope. Even before Donald Trump’s inauguration – perhaps seeing the writing on the wall pursuant to the new “Make America Healthy Again” mission – the FDA at long last officially banned the common food dye known as “Red 3” from all food products, due to its long-known cancer risk.
As FDA Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods Jim Jones explained, “Evidence shows cancer in laboratory male rats exposed to high levels of FD&C Red No. 3.” The synthetic dye, made from petroleum, gives food products like children’s cereals and candies a “bright cherry-red color,” the FDA acknowledged.
Currently, almost 3,000 foods Americans are eating are known to contain Red No. 3.
(Note: Although “Red 3,” or Erythrosine, is now officially banned from all foods, dietary supplements and medicines, food manufacturers have until January 2027, and drug manufacturers until January 2028, to actually get the red out.)
Ironically, the exact same red dye was banned from cosmetics nearly 35 years ago due to the same risk – cancer. Dr. Peter Lurie, director of the group Center for Science in the Public Interest, which led the petition effort to ban the dye, said: “This is a welcome, but long overdue, action from the FDA: removing the unsustainable double standard in which Red 3 was banned from lipstick but permitted in candy.”
You are what you eat
Finally, a 35,000-foot view: When considering the specter of massive numbers of people suffering grievously from eating the wrong foods and/or putting dangerous substances into their bodies – all because some entity, pretending to care about them but harboring a hidden agenda, persuaded them to do so – it may be edifying to reflect on the obvious spiritual/biblical parallels.
According to the Book of Genesis, the downfall and corruption of the first man and woman, a lasting consequence inherited by all of their progeny, down to the present day, centered around their having been seduced – by an entity pretending to care about them but harboring a hidden agenda – into eating the wrong food, in defiance of God’s specific command.
Likewise, as is proclaimed boldly throughout the New Testament, every person’s redemption, healing, salvation and eternal happiness has something to do – in a mystical and spiritual, yet very real way – with partaking of the right heavenly “food,” the body and blood of Jesus Christ, Who frequently referred to Himself as the “bread of life” and Who offers “living water.” This is reinforced and re-experienced every time a Christian believer participates in communion.
Of course, the earthly food we eat every day does not save our souls. Yet it seems, at least to the Creator of the universe and of mankind, that there is something about making the right eating choices that can be pretty important to our wellbeing.
All of which is just to say that our choices as to the food we eat, and whatever other substances we put into our bodies, are truly consequential. Our bodies are temples of the living God, according to Scripture. So let us not defile ourselves with substances that are contaminated, adulterated, corrupted or forbidden … no matter how appealing they may be.
As Adam might well have said after the Fall: Trust me, it’s not worth it.
The preceding is adapted from David Kupelian’s cover story in the February 2025 issue of Whistleblower Special Report, titled “MAKING AMERICA HEALTHY AGAIN! How Big Government, Big Pharma and Big Food are making Americans overweight, addicted and chronically ill,” and available in both a print and digital edition.
