WASHINGTON — The United States Senate on Thursday voted 52-48 to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, entrusting the nation’s $1.7 trillion health apparatus to a man who, as recently as last summer, was photographed sawing the head off a dead whale and strapping it to the roof of a minivan.
The vote fell along predictably craven party lines, with Majority Leader John Thune declaring the new Secretary a “bold outsider” — the same phrase Republicans used for the dentist who tried to sell mercury fillings back to the FDA in 2009, and the same phrase they’ll use again in six months when the measles wing of Bethesda Naval runs out of beds.
Kennedy, who spent the morning of his confirmation vote explaining to a reporter that seed oils are “what happened to John F. Kennedy, really, if you think about it,” took the oath in a voice that has been medically described by three separate otolaryngologists as “a man trying to gargle a hornet.” He immediately pledged to “Make America Healthy Again,” a slogan his own team admits was workshopped during a nine-hour cold plunge in somebody’s Vermont creek.
“This is a historic day for public health, assuming you define public health the way Bobby defines it, which is as a conspiracy run by the Rothschilds and Tony Fauci out of a bunker shaped like a syringe,” said Dr. Pritham Okafor, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who spent the entire phone call audibly typing his resume into LinkedIn. “I will say the man is genuinely charismatic. If you stop listening at word four.”
Senator Mitch McConnell was the lone Republican to vote against confirmation, citing his own history with polio and his presumably limited enthusiasm for reintroducing it as a lifestyle choice. His no vote was immediately dismissed by the White House as “the last gasp of a man who can no longer metabolize raw organ meat,” per a statement from a deputy press secretary who appears to be nineteen.
Kennedy’s first stated priority, according to a transition memo obtained through a staffer who is already looking for other work, is the creation of a “Wellness Audit” task force empowered to review every vaccine approved since 1986, every fluoridation program in the country, and — in what aides describe as a “passion project” — the molecular structure of Froot Loops. The memo includes a bullet point reading, verbatim, “Investigate whether bears are being poisoned on purpose.”
Insiders at HHS, which employs roughly 80,000 people who did not sign up to be managed by a man who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park as a prank, report widespread despair. One career official described the mood as “the week after a divorce, except the divorce was your job.” Another was seen at a Dupont Circle bar drinking something called a Double Merck and refusing to answer questions.
“Look, I understand the concerns,” said Brenna Halversen, a paid Kennedy spokeswoman whose LinkedIn lists her previous role as “lifestyle coach, crystal-adjacent.” “But the Secretary has always said that the cure for most ailments is sunlight, raw milk, and removing the word ‘doctor’ from your vocabulary. The American people voted for disruption. Well — the American people voted for a different guy, and then that guy lost a primary, and now here we are. But spiritually, they voted for this.”
Democrats mounted what observers are calling “the opposition equivalent of a firm email.” Senator Chuck Schumer delivered a floor speech in which he accused Kennedy of “playing fast and loose with the very science that keeps our children alive,” then voted present because a staffer handed him the wrong card. Senator John Fetterman voted yes and, when asked why, said the word “vibes” and walked into a coat closet.
The confirmation comes on the same week the Senate also installed Brooke Rollins atop the Department of Agriculture and greenlit a White House visit from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was reportedly briefed en route that America’s new top health official believes, with his whole chest, that chemicals in the water are turning frogs transgender. A source inside the Indian delegation described Modi’s facial expression during the briefing as “the face of a man calculating how much of his own bottled water he brought.”
Kennedy capped the day with a victory address delivered from the steps of HHS headquarters, in which he thanked his wife, his dog, his falcon, the ghost of his uncle, and “every American who has ever looked at a piece of broccoli and thought, that might be lying to me.” He then produced, from inside his jacket, what he identified as an unpasteurized cheese. He ate it on camera. Nobody stopped him.
By 6 p.m., the official HHS website had been updated to feature a rotating banner of Kennedy shirtless at various elevations. The CDC’s vaccine schedule page now redirects to a Substack. And somewhere in the bowels of the Humphrey Building, a 31-year career epidemiologist is quietly teaching herself to code.