Ever since President-elect Donald Trump announced Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his pick for health secretary, critics in the media have taken aim at Kennedy, calling him a danger to public health due to his views on vaccination and other health policies. But these unfounded critiques ignore the inconvenient truth that under recent leadership the Department of Health and Human Services has abjectly failed in its core mission.

We have endured a series of dramatic health policy failures: the FDA-approved Vioxx drug that triggered thousands of heart attacks, the opioid crisis, disparities in access to health care, rampant gun violence, the surge in autoimmune diseases and obesity, and others too numerous to list.

It is because of unchecked abuses and breaches of the public trust like these that Kennedy is a sound choice to head up HHS, which oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and other agencies. As a tough, experienced litigator who has brought to heel some of the most wealthy and powerful corporations in the world, he is the right person to take on the entrenched malfeasance, corruption and research fraud rampant among our three-letter agencies. His decades of advocacy and action for public health and the environment demonstrate he is capable and qualified to take on this important mission.

Pandemic preparedness is a basic function of HHS, a test our nation failed. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our public health apparatchiks instead unethically incited hysteria and fear as a calculated response tactic. Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pushed 6 feet social distancing despite, as he later acknowledged, the fact that the recommendation wasn’t based on any data. He and his staff undermined efforts to determine the origins of COVID. The mRNA shots are not “safe and effective.” They were overhyped and under-delivered, don’t completely prevent transmission and are medically unnecessary for young, healthy adults and children. Mandating them was an outrage. Quarantining healthy, low-risk populations was a grievous error, as was closing schools for two years. These mistakes should disqualify any person in authority who endorsed them and should never be made again.

Other questionable policies include conflating relative risk with absolute risk to drive fear, direct-to-patient pharmaceutical marketing and COVID shots for 6-month-olds. Government administrators are free to hit the revolving door to work in the industry they were formerly regulating, personified by Kennedy detractor Scott Gottleib, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration who now works for Pfizer. It’s another unacceptable conflict of interest that the majority of the FDA’s human drug regulatory budget is funded by companies seeking to sell health products.

The standard argument against Kennedy is that he is an “anti-vaxxer.” So are virtually all Americans, according to Merriam-Webster, which defines the term as “a person who opposes the use of some or all vaccines, regulations mandating vaccination, or usually both.” Kennedy has publicly stated that he, and his children, all are vaccinated. What he wants is sanity, science and safety to be injected into all our public health policies. He was drawn into the vaccine safety controversy by three major events: The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 created a broad legal indemnity for vaccine manufacturers; under this legislation, the childhood schedule expanded from four routine shots by age 18 in 1986 to dozens of shots today; and the health of our children began a decades-long spiral.

Kennedy’s work in the late 1980s and 1990s, founding the Waterkeeper Alliance, was about getting mercury out of rivers, starting with the Hudson River. That brought him into contact with the people he calls the Mercury Moms, who implored him to investigate the mercury loading in the pediatric vaccine schedule. When former NIH director Bernadine Healy went public on CBS News in 2008 with her concerns about vaccines being associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, that strongly influenced him as well to look more closely at the vaccine regulatory process.

The citizens of the United States have been sold out, misinformed and traumatized by the current crop of public health fraudsters. Our health policies are out of step with every other country. Kennedy can’t make it any worse. We are already at rock bottom. The United States spends more per capita on public health than any other Western industrialized democracy, and our health outcomes are the worst. Our life spans have been in decline for years, and our children are the sickest among nearly all developed nations, mentally and physically.

The slop we feed ourselves under the current regulatory regime is its own indictment of the current leadership.

Kennedy is a man of faith, integrity and morality. He is the perfect iconoclast we need at this moment to rescue the public’s faith in our public health and research institutions. I wish him Godspeed on his mission.

Josh Mazer (josh@kennedymd.org) was the Maryland state director for the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign.