“We are the sickest country in the world; that’s why we had to fire people at the CDC,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed at a September 4, 2025 Senate hearing to explain his actions. “They did not do their job.”
In this article, I look to see if his words are supported by the evidence from a variety of sources, and if it’s a valid reason to fire people at the CDC.
The most comprehensive health report on countries comes from the World Health Rankings. I shared the rankings so you can see for yourself. For more than 50 health rankings, the USA finishes last in the world in only one area: drug use. In only three other cases does the USA have a poor ranking: Hepatitis C, Multiple Sclerosis, and “Alzheimer’s & Dementia” (one category).
Contrast that with ten indicators where the USA ranks as “good” compared to other countries.
Well, maybe Kennedy meant we didn’t have the best healthcare in the world. Analysis from World Population Review shows the USA is behind countries like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, Sweden and Norway, but on par or ahead of other European countries, and well ahead of the rest of the world.
So that can’t be it…
In 2024, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation showed why we’re not better, and it’s not due to the CDC. We rank number one in the world in science and technology, but that could change after we gutted funding to universities for medical research and attacks on science. We’re sixth in choice. But our quality is dragged down by fiscal sustainability, which involves having people pay for it and not losing coverage, whereas other countries do a better job of ensuring everyone is covered.
It is likelier to get worse for the USA, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” boots people from Medicaid, a lifesaver for lower-income Americans.
“On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law,” reports the Urban Institute. “To partially offset the cost of trillions of dollars in tax cuts, the legislation includes nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid.” The bill is so unpopular that supporters are trying to change its name, the first I’ve seen ever for a passed bill.
RFK Jr. could perhaps signal his opposition to the OBBBA to boost America’s healthy standard.
Even the normally supportive publication The Telegraph had to admit Kennedy’s claim was quite incorrect. “Mr. Kennedy, the man tasked with ‘Making America Healthy Again’, is well known for making outlandish statements. He has, after all, claimed that toxic chemicals are turning children transgender, that wifi causes cancer, and that heroin use was the key to his success at university. You only have to look to Nigeria, where your chances of dying during childbirth are about one in a thousand, or to Pakistan, where 30 per cent of people are living with diabetes, to see the absurdity of his statement about America’s health.”
Senators from both parties skewered Kennedy at the September 4 hearing, calling out past outlandish claims, or contradictions made in real time (see these in the BBC article), that he’s not anti-vax and is against every vax. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican, “said Kennedy was denying people the current COVID-19 booster. Cassidy shared emails from constituents, including doctors, describing the hoops they have to jump through to secure the vaccine even for high-risk people.” Even Trump criticized Florida’s recent decision on vaccines.
But here’s what I would ask Kennedy had I been in the room. If these vaccines were such a killer, why didn’t other countries which had higher vaccination rates have higher death rates than America with its vaccine-skeptic crowd that lowered our vax rates? Why did Republicans have higher death rates, confirmed by several studies?
It’s time to end the headline-seeking hyperbole, the pandering to political supporters, and attacks on the CDC, or else we might actually become “the sickest country in the world.”