Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has in recent years demonstrated his relative immunity to group-think, particularly the strain that infected the medical establishment during the pandemic.

For rejecting the zoonotic origins narrative curated by Anthony Fauci and accepted by prominent personalities in the American medical community, the conservative Christian virologist and HIV researcher received death threats. These, however, did not secure his silence, and Redfield's theories about the virus, its lab origin, and the outbreak timeline have since been recognized widely as the best explanations.

The esteemed virologist appears to have found another narrative to quash, arguing that contrary to claims made by so-called health experts, President Donald Trump stands a good chance of making America healthy again with the help of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"President Trump has pledged, if elected, to establish a panel of top experts working with Kennedy to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases," Redfield noted in a Tuesday op-ed. "He specifically mentioned autoimmune disorders, autism, obesity, and infertility. In 2019, when we took steps to take on the chronic disease epidemic, we also focused on creating earlier interventions in diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease, and more."

Over 40% of school-aged children and adolescents have at least one chronic health condition.

Highlighting Kennedy's commitment to begin lifting the chronic disease burden dramatically inside two years, Redfield wrote, "I believe him. And I think President Trump will empower him. I support their noble effort to heal our children."

Redfield stressed that America has "become a sick nation," noting that:

• chronic disease accounts for over 75% of the country's $4.5 trillion in annual heath care expenditure;
• over 40% of school-aged children and adolescents have at least one chronic health condition; and
• childhood obesity has skyrocketed from the mid-1960s from around 4% to 20% this year.

Redfield indicated that highly processed foods are largely to blame for childhood obesity, which 15 million youths aged 2-19 years suffer from.

A massive peer-reviewed study published in the BMJ, the British Medical Association's esteemed journal, found evidence earlier this year indicating "direct associations between greater exposure to ultra-processed foods and higher risks of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease related mortality, common mental disorder outcomes, overweight and obesity, and type 2 diabetes."

Ultra-processed foods exposure was consistently associated with 32 adverse health outcomes, including all-cause mortality; cancer-related deaths; cardiovascular disease-related deaths; heart disease-related deaths; breast cancer; central nervous system tumors; chronic lymphocytic leukemia; colorectal cancer; pancreatic cancer; prostate cancer; adverse sleep-related outcomes; anxiety; common mental disorder outcomes; depression; asthma; wheezing; Crohn's disease; ulcerative colitis; obesity; hypertension; and type 2 diabetes.

'Private industry uses its political influence to control decision-making at regulatory agencies.'

Redfield noted that highly processed foods are part of a much bigger problem that also includes pesticides, which he indicated are "proven risk factors for neurodevelopmental outcomes in kids, causing maladies like ADHD."

The Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology published a study from the Environmental Working Group earlier this year revealing that among the pesticides the vast majority of Americans have been exposed to is chlormequat, a toxic agricultural chemical linked in animal studies to disrupted fetal growth, damage to the reproductive system, delayed puberty, and reduced fertility.

The EWG researchers said food samples purchased from 2022 and 2023 "show detectable levels of chlormequat in all but two of 25 conventional oat-based products." Quaker Oats and Cheerios were allegedly among the affected cereals.

Redfield underscored that a major problem that Kennedy would have to tackle in concert with a future Trump administration is the "increased special interest and corporate influences on our federal agencies."

"Across a century-plus of cozy courtship, the federal regulators have nearly married the regulated, especially in health care. Today, private industry uses its political influence to control decision-making at regulatory agencies, law enforcement entities, and legislatures," said the virologist.

Redfield said Kennedy was right in accusing the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the CDC of agency capture:

All three of the principal health agencies suffer from agency capture. A large portion of the FDA's budget is provided by pharmaceutical companies. NIH is cozy with biomedical and pharmaceutical companies and its scientists are allowed to collect royalties on drugs NIH licenses to pharma. And as the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I know the agency can be influenced by special interest groups.

While these three agencies are apparently among the worst offenders, Redfield suggested that the U.S. Department of Agriculture is similarly a "captive of industry."

"To cure our children, we must reevaluate our food choices and the underlying practices of the agricultural sector. We must prioritize wholesome and nutritious food," wrote Redfield.

This is made all the more difficult by deceptive marketing claims. Blaze News recently highlighted the findings of researchers at Australia's George Institute for Global Health, which analyzed 651 foods marketed for babies and toddlers at 10 supermarket chains in the United States.

According to the study, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nutrients, 60% of the foods failed to meet international nutritional standards. More than 99% of the baby food analyzed had misleading marketing claims on the labels, in some cases lying about an absence of artificial colors or flavors, and in others lying about an absence of BPA — a lucrative, ubiquitous, and potentially dangerous endocrine disruptor that the FDA still claims is safe.

Redfield concluded his piece, writing, "The exorbitant cost of the failing health of our kids, the needless suffering and death, can be ended by a Kennedy Commission on Childhood Chronic Disease — and the vast burden of chronic disease that now demoralizes and bankrupts our nation can disappear. The key is to see the possible, and lead our nation to act."

'We're in a lot of trouble if he has any role.'

Kennedy revealed on Aug. 23 that a key factor behind his decision to endorse President Donald Trump was the opportunity to help "Make America Healthy Again" in a future Trump administration.

"Don't you want healthy children?" said Kennedy. "And don't you want the chemicals out of our food? And don't you want the regulatory agencies to be free from corporate corruption? And that's what President Trump told me that he wanted."

Kennedy and Trump's joint promise of a healthy America did not appeal to everyone in the medical establishment, which makes most of its money treating chronic ailments.

Robert Murphy, a professor of infectious disease at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told The Hill, "From a health perspective this would be nothing short of chaos."

"He's proven himself to be a dangerous fanatic who doesn't have a science background and who doesn't believe in science," continued Murphy. "We're in a lot of trouble if he has any role, any leadership position related to many things, but health in particular."

W. Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, told The Hill, "The notion that RFK Jr. would have any say in who's selected [to be part of Trump’s administration] is very worrisome to me and many of my colleagues in public health."

"Many of us are old enough to remember what happened before there was a polio vaccine or a measles vaccine ... there were millions of children that were adversely impacted due to the lack of protection from these types of diseases," added Lipkin.

In fairness to Redfield, Lipkin may have a chip on his shoulder.

After all, unlike Redfield, who appears to likely have been right about the Wuhan lab leak, Lipkin was a prominent zoonotic origins theorist. In fact, he was an author on the "scientifically unsound" "Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" paper that Fauci used on multiple occasions to suggest to the American public that COVID-19 was not a lab leak but rather an animal virus that jumped to a human.

Lipkin joined Kristian Andersen, Edward Holmes, and Robert Garry in concluding, "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."

Prominent scientists have since demanded that Nature Medicine retract the paper "due to multiple ethical violations."

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