The Setup

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now running the Department of Health and Human Services. And according to The New York Times, he's bringing back something the medical establishment spent decades trying to eliminate: the language of personal responsibility.

The Times framed this as a return to "blaming and shaming." Their headline said so directly.

That framing warrants a closer look.

What Personal Responsibility Actually Means

There is a real difference between two things the Times is quietly conflating.

One: telling someone their lifestyle choices have health consequences. Two: publicly humiliating someone for being sick.

The first is a medical fact. The second is cruelty. They are NOT the same thing.

Kennedy's stated focus — eat better, move more, reduce processed food, cut pharmaceutical dependence — is standard preventive medicine. Doctors have said this for 50 years. Calling it "shaming" because a Trump appointee is saying it is pure politics.

What the Research Actually Shows

The same academic establishment alarmed about Kennedy's rhetoric spent little time on the shame epidemic that exploded during COVID.

Researchers Luna Dolezal, Arthur Rose, and Fred Cooper from the University of Exeter published a 2021 paper in The Lancet documenting exactly this. They found that "stigma and shame have been features of past pandemics" and that COVID was no exception — with online shaming targeting ordinary people AND healthcare workers who failed to perform sufficient public compliance rituals.

The same team published a full book through Bloomsbury Academic in 2023 — "COVID-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK" — cataloging how shame became a political weapon during lockdowns.

One documented case from April 2020: a British mother was publicly named on a neighborhood Facebook group for missing a "Clap for Carers" Thursday night ritual while exhausted after caring for her sick child. The post said she "didn't deserve to use the NHS" if she got ill. According to the NCBI Bookshelf entry on the book, the Mumsnet community agreed she was treated unjustly.

The Times did not publish an op-ed about that shaming campaign.

The Selective Outrage Problem

For four years, public health officials — including figures at the CDC and NHS — used shame as an enforcement tool. Mask shaming. Vaccine shaming. Lockdown shaming. Social media platforms amplified it. Governments tacitly encouraged it.

The Dolezal, Rose, and Cooper research in The Lancet confirmed that healthcare professionals themselves were targeted — shamed online for perceived failures in COVID compliance, creating documented psychological harm.

No New York Times trend piece followed about the dangers of shame in public health.

Now Kennedy says people should take responsibility for what they eat, and suddenly shame is a crisis.

Where Kennedy Is Right

The United States spends $4.5 trillion annually on healthcare, according to CMS data. Roughly 90% of that spending goes to treating chronic disease, per the CDC. And the majority of chronic disease in America is lifestyle-driven — obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease.

Telling people that diet and exercise affect health outcomes is NOT shaming them. It's basic medicine.

Kennedy's "Make America Healthy Again" framing may be branding, but the underlying premise — that Americans are sicker than they need to be, and personal behavior matters — is scientifically uncontroversial.

Where Kennedy Deserves Scrutiny

Personal responsibility is real. It is also NOT sufficient on its own.

Food deserts are real. Processed food is deliberately engineered to override satiety signals — that's documented. Economic stress drives poor health decisions. The agricultural lobby has shaped federal nutrition guidelines for decades in ways that don't serve public health.

If Kennedy's personal responsibility push is cover for gutting nutrition assistance programs, subsidized healthcare for low-income families, or food safety regulation — that's worth calling out hard. Loudly. By name.

Holding people accountable for their choices is fair. Pretending systemic factors don't exist is lazy.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

The Times piece and others like it are running a bait-and-switch. They're framing "personal responsibility" as synonymous with "public shaming" — and using that conflation to dismiss any accountability framework as morally suspect.

The peer-reviewed research — including the Dolezal, Rose, and Cooper work published in The Lancet — makes a more careful argument. The research distinguishes between shame that isolates and destroys versus accountability that empowers. That's a legitimate distinction.

The media isn't exploring it. They're picking a side.

The Real Story

Personal responsibility in public health isn't a right-wing attack on sick people. It's a foundational medical principle that the establishment abandoned when it became politically inconvenient — then weaponized against the wrong people during COVID anyway.

RFK Jr. deserves scrutiny on specifics: funding cuts, policy details, what programs get gutted and who pays the price. That's real accountability journalism.

What he doesn't deserve is a media establishment that ignored four years of lockdown shame mobs suddenly discovering that shame in public health is dangerous.