“It is your patriotic duty, I’ll say it again, the patriotic duty of all Americans to take care of themselves because it is important for serving in the military, but it is also important because healthy people don’t consume health care resources,” Dr Oz during his swearing in a ceremony at the White House in April 2025
“Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children,” […] “They’ll never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” RFK Jr. an HHS press conference in Washington, D.C. on April 16th.
These are dangerous words, and it doesn’t matter if it seems like they are talking about specific groups of people who are disabled or unhealthy. When you start down that path you end up with anyone who doesn’t fit a narrow definition of “normal” being excluded from society. We cannot allow this rhetoric to be believed and accepted. All lives are worthy no matter what they can or cannot do. The ability to work and / or pay taxes should not be a determining factor of who is worth keeping.
Their rhetoric around disability and illness has strong elements of eugenics. Both highlight the idea that people who are disabled and/or unhealthy, and are unable to work are harmful to society. Their attitude seems to be that people who are ill and/or disabled cost too much money and if we weren’t around spending money everything would be fine. They also seem to be big on the idea of “personal responsibility” in a way that implies that any illness or disability is the fault of the person who has it rather than something that happens. They are suggesting that if we ate better food and exercises we would never get sick or ill and our children would never be disabled. All of this is untrue and harmful to those of us with disabilities and/or chronic illness.
Additional Reading
“Disability, Eugenics, and the Value of Human Life” by Talia Lavin at The Sward and the Sandwich
“RFK Wants to Send People to ‘Wellness Farms.’ The US Already Tried That” by Kathryn Waring at Teen Voque
“All Autistic People Have Value, Something RFK Jr. and Profound Autism Parents Refuse to Understand” by Shannon Des Roches Rosa at Thinking Persons Guide to Autism
