[Editorial] Robert F Kennedy Jr: 1 year of failure

In his first speech as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F Kennedy Jr laid out a plan to restore trust. The COVID-19 pandemic saw public faith in Federal health and science plummet—between April, 2020, and September, 2023, the percentage of polling respondents who trusted coronavirus and vaccine information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “a great deal” or “a fair amount”, fell from 83% to 63%—and the HHS employees to whom he was speaking were facing devastating mass lay-offs and funding cuts.