RFK Jr. says cancer screenings are too 'woke' now. As an actual doctor, I disagree. | Opinion
Even if he doesn't go through with this purge, RFK Jr. is instilling a distrust in our expert medical and scientific institutions.
A 6-centimeter mass. These are the words that shattered my patient’s heart, but ultimately gave her a chance at saving and prolonging her life.
Weeks earlier, without any worries about her health, she had seen a doctor for a checkup. Following the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommendations, her doctor found out she was a former smoker and ordered a scan. Lung cancer was found, which is how she ended up in my hospital for chemotherapy and immunotherapy.
Without the task force guidelines, my patient’s primary care doctor may not have ordered this scan, and her cancer may not have been caught before it spread to Stage 4, or it was uncurable.
The task force has released screening recommendations for patients over the past 40 years that have caught infections, detected cancers and otherwise saved lives countless times. However, it is now reported that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is considering removing and replacing all 16 expert members of this task force for purely political and culture war reasons.
This would be a disaster for public health.
RFK Jr. thinks preventing curable disease is too 'woke'
The Preventive Services Task Force is tasked with providing screening recommendations for finding diseases before they become deadly. These guidelines are evidence-based and updated frequently as new scientific studies are released.
Primary care doctors rely on these as they approach which diagnostic tests are most impactful and highest yield for their patients. Insurance companies use the task force's recommendations to know what studies to cover. Their work is important and essential.
But we’ll be in danger if RFK Jr. wants to upend this institution.
He has already done it once. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a committee that makes recommendations on vaccine schedules, for reasons that made little sense.
He replaced them with known vaccine skeptics, hampering both sound scientific work and public trust in the organization. This, by the way, at a time when measles cases in the U.S. are at their highest in 30 years.
Now it’s reported that Kennedy might make these removals within the Preventive Services Task Force because the members are too "woke.”
Don't make America backward again in public health
Keep in mind, these are individuals who are recommending things like cervical cancer screening is good, or look for post-partum depression in pregnant persons.
These are sound recommendations that should be noncontroversial. What is woke in that? Some point to things like the word choice of “persons” instead of “women”? Don’t be a snowflake, and get over yourself. These are important recommendations that are meant to reach all Americans.
Even if he doesn’t go through with this purge, RFK Jr. is instilling a distrust in our expert medical and scientific institutions.
If he does go through with it, he will undermine the pillar of public health that is preventative services at the same time that another pillar, access to care for the vulnerable, has been hacked away at by the Medicaid cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill.
Taking these actions will not make America healthy again. It’ll make America backward again in public health, and backward in the fight against cancer and disease.
We need to sound the alarm to stop all these actions that are harming our fellow Americans.
Dr. Thomas K. Lew is an assistant clinical professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and an attending physician of Hospital Medicine at Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley. All expressed opinions are his own. Follow him on X: @ThomasLewMD