President Donald Trump has thrown the nation’s health systems into chaos. In just the first month of his presidency, the administration has made drastic cuts to medical research and epidemic surveillance, and mounted serious threats to Medicaid, Medicare, and essential childhood vaccination. With last week’s confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, it has now also delivered the nation’s health systems into the hands of conspiracy theorists.

Dangerous quacks promoting “health care freedom” like RFK Jr have risen in prominence by manipulating widespread anger at the US health care system to foment distrust of public health, science, and government. They brand their “alternative” interventions as antiestablishment and even liberatory, but as the RFK-Trump alliance reveals, their project dovetails perfectly with efforts to further defund, deregulate, and privatize US health infrastructure. Although this will create yet more opportunities for the rich to profit off preventable disease, desperation, and death, it will only deepen the violence of capitalist health care.

In response to attacks on the credibility of medical knowledge, many health leaders and politicians have decried the “politicization” of public health. Such condemnations of the supposed intrusion of politics into public health became pervasive during the early months of COVID-19, focusing then on distortion and suppression of scientific evidence by the first Trump administration.