During Sunday’s episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” host and comedian John Oliver took aim at President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s mismanagement of public health.
Kennedy has tried to frame the downsizing of HHS as a streamlining and consolidation into a new agency called the Administration for a Healthy America.
“It sounds less like a government agency and more like Manhattan real estate jargon used to describe the neighborhood above Hank Azaria,” Oliver joked.
As part of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts, important federal funding has been cut, stifling important scientific research on everything from childhood cancer to lead poisoning.
“The point is, you wouldn’t ask a research scientist to do that job without a computer or lab equipment. The same way you wouldn’t ask a DOGE employee to do their job without an iron deficiency and a deep-seated conviction that he’s the smartest boy in the world,” Oliver said.
Oliver went on to address Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracy bullshit, his ignorance about autism, and his use of completely fabricated statistics, like the claim that half of China’s population has diabetes, while the actual number is closer to 12%.
From firing senior veterinarians working on the largest bird flu outbreak in U.S. history to promoting inconsistent messages on the measles vaccine, Kennedy has proven that he is anything but qualified to run HHS.
Playing a clip of Kennedy claiming that chicken soup will cure measles, Oliver said, “Chicken soup is not a cure for anything. It is floating meat water parents trick their kids into eating by saying that it will make them feel better.”
Trump’s HHS has no idea what it’s doing, and with Kennedy at the helm of the rapidly sinking ship, it doesn’t look like things are about to improve any time soon.