RFK Jr.'s Summer Sh*t Show

Americans want straight answers about the cyclosporiasis outbreak, but the nation’s top health official is too busy talking about orange juice and TikTok.

Jennifer Schulze is a longtime Chicago journalist. She’s on Bluesky @newsjennifer.bsky.social. Subscribe to her Substack, Indistinct Chatter.

Going to the grocery store these days is a nightmare. Almost everything costs more than it did the week before, and now you also have to worry about whether explosive diarrhea-causing parasites are infecting the fruit and vegetables for sale in the produce section.

I went to three grocery stores near my home this week. At Trader Joe’s, which is like Disneyland for people craving a pre-mixed salad kit, I saw a fully stocked salad section but no shoppers in sight. At Jewel, a large nationally-owned chain, the produce aisles were also eerily empty, but the thing that really jumped out at me was the fire sale on all Taylor Farms products.

Taylor Farms is, of course, the mega produce producer linked to the outbreak. If you dare, you can grab a deeply discounted southwest salad for $2 or a head of lettuce for next to nothing. The same was true at Kroger-owned Mariano’s where I saw an entire wall of Taylor Farms salad products deeply discounted. But why were those products even in the store to begin with? Wasn’t there a recall?

I’m clearly not alone in being both curious and confused about the cyclosporiasis outbreak that has so far made over 12,000 people sick in 41 states. There are many unanswered questions including: Is the problem just lettuce or is it all greens? What about fruit? Is washing your vegetables enough or should you steer clear of all produce right now? Do I need to see a doctor if I get sick?

Americans who want answers have been Googling like mad. Since about June 20, searches for “explosive diarrhea and diarrhea parasite” have skyrocketed.

Explosive Diarrhea Is Big News

Local and national news coverage has been helpful in answering many of these questions about cyclospora while also keeping consumers up to date on the latest findings. Some standouts include The Guardian and Consumer Reports. This piece in The American Prospect details how the DOGE cuts to food safety programs and personnel figures into this mess.

The New York Times broke the story about Taylor Farms execs meeting with the White House to “try to distance the company from the outbreak.” Days later, the FDA announced a false positive test on Taylor Farms lettuce and things got even more confusing. Bloomberg does a good job unraveling that part of the story including the subsequent “apology” controversy. Wired is chasing the money and found that Taylor Farms has donated buckets of cash to Trump and MAGA groups plus funded food safety deregulation lobbying efforts.

Another terrific resource is Katelyn Jetelina of the Substack newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist. Along with regular updates, Jetelina and her team provide explainers and answers to top 10 questions including is local produce safer and can pets get this?

I also learned a lot from this NBC5 Chicago interview with an expert from IIT’s Institute for Food Safety and Health, who among other things, recommended buying your lettuce at the local farmer’s market.

Kennedy’s Distractions

While so many journalists and experts are covering this ongoing story, Trump’s government fired the talent that would have contained the outbreak. Now they can’t be trusted to provide information or to take steps to protect us. That includes the federal government’s top health official — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. — who’s no help at all in getting reliable information.

Kennedy has made only one public comment about cyclospora and it was misleading at best. At the end of a news conference about a completely different topic, Kennedy claimed the cyclosporiasis outbreak was “under control” (it’s not) and that DOGE cutbacks to food safety programs are not to blame (they are).

Instead of helping Americans understand the growing cyclospora outbreak, Kennedy spent the last few weeks talking about orange juice, peptide injections, dental fillings … and his new TikTok account. He only mentioned cyclospora because a reporter asked him about it, not because he deemed the problem serious enough to hold a press briefing. Despite both the actual risk and Americans’ growing concerns, neither Kennedy nor anyone from health agencies he oversees has bothered to address the American people directly on cyclosporiasis.

Some of the information we do get from the FDA and the CDC — two of the lead agencies dealing with food borne contaminates — has been just as confusing as what we’ve heard from Kennedy himself. Now Politico is reporting that a former FDA deputy commissioner is calling for an independent investigation into how badly Kennedy and his teams have mismanaged all of this. Frank Yiannas said “... it is starting to approach a catastrophic level in terms of how mismanaged it’s been on multiple fronts.”

The Outbreak Isn’t Under Control

Deborah Blum is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Poison Squad, which details the beginnings of the country’s food and consumer safety protection efforts. I asked her what she made of RFK Jr.’s response to this new health crisis. She told me:

“Well, I do not think an HHS secretary should be saying that an outbreak is under control when it so clearly isn’t. CDC expanded its investigation from five states to nine today (Friday). Taylor Farms’ recall, such as it is, applies in 27 states but there have been illnesses in many more than that. More than 10,000 cases of cyclospora infections have been recorded and that’s undoubtedly an estimate as people with mild cases often don’t go into the medical system. We haven’t even identified all the produce involved yet. I don’t know how he says that with a straight face.

What he should be saying is that we’ve made this a top priority, we’re putting extra resources into it, we’re determined to figure it out. Your food safety is a top concern of this administration. Not that this would necessarily be true but it would be an appropriate public health response.”

Blum’s also not buying Kennedy’s claims that DOGE cuts to food safety programs have no impact on the government’s response to the outbreak. She said:

“This is the worst cyclospora outbreak in decades so I think that’s definitely part of it. The CDC’s FoodNet program that was slashed included proactive monitoring for cyclospora which is a big deal because as I’m sure you read, it’s a very difficult organism to isolate once it has entered the food supply. And all the food safety programs are severely understaffed at the moment.”

We are in the midst of the biggest measles outbreak since … oh wait, that’s the other health-related disaster Kennedy doesn’t want to talk about. Americans once could count on their government — no matter who was president — to monitor our food for pathogens, to issue timely recalls, to inform us on risks, to provide guidance on how to avoid those risks, and to offer the best medical counsel about what to do if we became ill.

Because Donald Trump put his faith in Elon Musk’s DOGE program and Robert Kennedy’s sniff-the-cocaine-off-the-toilet-seat leadership, America’s federal government no longer provides any of these benefits. Luckily, we can count on robust news coverage to help us navigate this sh*t show.

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