Make Public-Health Officials Stay in Their Lane Again
By Conor Friedersdorf
On Monday, amid a measles outbreak, a bird-flu epidemic, and a disturbing report of poor safety precautions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a surprising new area of focus for his agency: fighting anti-Semitism.
According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr:
“Anti-Semitism—like racism—is a spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues,” he wrote on X, linking to a Department of Health and Human Services press release. In it, the Trump administration accuses Columbia University of “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students.” It is more accurate to say that Columbia has reacted to anti-Semitism in ways that some find insufficient and others find excessive, but regardless, HHS, along with the Department of Education and the General Services Administration, is undertaking “a comprehensive review” of Columbia’s $51.4 million in federal contracts and $5 billion in federal grant commitments. In Kennedy’s telling, “censorship and false narratives of woke cancel culture have transformed our great universities into greenhouses for this deadly and virulent pestilence.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/03/rfk-public-health-officials-overreach/681950/
RELATED: https://freedomresources.info/2025/03/11/campus-free-speech-controlled/
