by Jennifer Porter Gore
With more than two decades leading the American Public Health Association, the nation’s largest, Dr. Georges Benjamin knows a thing or two about how to keep people and communities healthy. As the first Black doctor to serve as executive director of the APHA, Benjamin has paid particular attention to the health gaps between Black and white people in the U.S.
So earlier this month, when he called for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy to “resign or be fired,” Benjamin brought the receipts in a scathing public statement, complete with bullet points detailing the damage Kennedy has done to the nation’s health — so far — during his brief tenure.
“Americans deserve better than someone who is trying to impose his unscientific and judgmental view of public health and science,” Benjamin said in his statement. “We deserve better than RFK, Jr. He demonstrated his incompetence in only a few weeks.”
Given the current state of affairs — the raging measles outbreak, mass layoffs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, Kennedy’s own chaotic HHS leadership, his antiquated views on race — it’s no wonder Benjamin thinks Kennedy must go.
Adding to the urgency: data showing health outcomes are bad for Black people in general and worse for Black women, a stubborn gap Benjamin has tried to bridge through his work, one that’s likely to get worse if Kennedy stays.
Word In Black wanted to know more, so we contacted Benjamin for a one-on-one interview. He gave us his uniquely informed perspective on our nation’s state of healthcare and what’s on the horizon for healthcare in the Black community.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIB: You’ve called for Kennedy’s resignation as Health and Human Services secretary. Why?
Georges Benjamin: First of all, he didn’t have a health background. And even though there have been other health secretaries that haven’t had a health background, most of them were certainly grounded in health policy. We felt that the President deserves to have someone with a health background advising him and the nation.
Secondly, [Kennedy] had really no serious administrative experience. [HHS] is an almost $2 trillion agency with over 14 operating divisions, including several other departments. So it’s a big, complicated organization with lots of overlapping parts in terms of decision-making.
In the last few weeks that he’s had the job, each and every day, he’s demonstrated our misgivings.
WIB: But he has been on the job just a few weeks. Wouldn’t it be unusual for President Donald Trump to fire him so quickly?
GB: You know, [former HHS Secretary Tom Price], the secretary in Trump’s first term, didn’t last a year. [Ed. note: Price was fired over a travel scandal just weeks after taking office.] We’re hoping that [Kennedy] leaves his job sooner than later. Because he’s destroying the department by doing things like firing people that he doesn’t know he’s firing.
WIB: What do you mean? Has Kennedy done specific harm to the Black community?
GB: He was just in a TV interview the other day about his department having $11 billion cut out of his budget, and he said he didn’t know anything about those cuts. Then he said those were diversity, equity, and inclusion cuts. Well, there may be some grants in there that supported DEI, but the people he fired were the very people that were out there trying to fight the measles epidemic, the tuberculosis epidemic, the obesity epidemic, and the chronic disease programs that he says he wants to support.
WIB: Those issues disproportionately affect Black and other minority communities.
GB: Racialization of services that serve people is racist in its very core, in my view. And while they articulate they want to make this non-race-based, the fact of the matter is we are still in a racialized society in this country. Structural racism is alive and well, structural inequality is alive and well.
For example, he has been advocating to get fluoride out of our drinking water. Well, fluoride can naturally be in our water. That’s how it was discovered that people who were drinking water with fluoride from natural sources had fewer dental problems. But the other thing he doesn’t talk about is the fact that one of the leading causes of children not being able to go to school is poor dental health.
So, when you’re talking about kids who are already living challenged in communities and have a whole bunch of other barriers that keep them from getting a good education, good dental health shouldn’t be one of those barriers. And the fact is, we don’t offer dental insurance for a lot of kids, particularly lower-income and underserved populations. Unless they are on Medicaid, they may not have access to dental health care at all.
WIB: The APHA statement called Kennedy a purveyor of misinformation. Do you have a specific example?
GB: He’s actively promoted the theory that vitamin A is a preventive cure for measles, when actually, vitamin A is very dangerous to give people, particularly kids. Vitamins in general help you remain in good health, particularly when you’re not eating a really great diet. In most cases, they don’t hurt. But there are certain vitamins, like vitamin A, which get stored in the body’s fat, that when taken in anything more than very low doses can cause liver damage.
And his articulation of utilizing vitamin A in this current measles outbreak has resulted in increased utilization of vitamin A, and some kids getting very, very sick and having liver injury.
WIB: The APHA says Kennedy reneged on promises he made during his Senate confirmation hearings. What do you mean?
He promised that many of the vaccine advisory committees would be left alone. And he’s going back on that word. He went into a community, which has been hesitant to get vaccinated, where we have a raging measles outbreak, and in that community, he was espousing disinformation [about vitamin A].
You’d think a guy who had already had an experience in which his talking with elected leaders in another nation was linked to a serious measles outbreak and deaths would be more cautious in how he approached that language going forward.
WIB: Why do you think Trump nominated him? How did we get here?
GB: He is an environmental lawyer, right? And he has had some success in his advocacy around the environment, which is why he has a following. You never know what’s in the minds of people. But, you know, Kennedy supported the president politically, and I personally believe it was a political payback.
You know, he went to Vice President Harris, and he offered her a deal. He said, ‘I’ll come on board if you support me.’ And she said, ‘No.’ And then he went to Trump and offered him the same deal. And Trump said yes.
I would argue that we [APHA] really tried to do the President a favor by telling him he shouldn’t have nominated him. And now, Mr. President, please listen to us. There are many people that we think are highly qualified who, quite frankly, are conservative. And I may not agree with everything that they say, but I know they’re competent, and we’d be happy to give him our list.
WIB: In the meantime, how can Black people protect their health? What steps should we take?
GB: First thing is to become more health literate. This means you understand your body and how it functions. So you can understand how to be healthy within your own community. Because 80% of what makes you healthy occurs outside the doctor’s office.
Also, it’s important to advocate for things that we know we don’t have. For example, in many of our communities, we don’t have access to grocery stores that sell affordable, healthy foods, and that we have a lot of convenience stores.
When I was a health commissioner in Washington, D.C., there were lots of grocery stores in Northeast and Northwest Washington, but no grocery stores in the overwhelmingly Black section east of the [Anacostia River] until fairly recently. Our communities need to advocate to our elected leaders for them to do what is necessary to get grocery stores to come to our community now. Then we have to, as the customers, go over there and shop at those businesses.
But we also have to recognize that there are unhealthy foods for us, and we do have to improve our own individual health. So, it’s both a population approach and an individual responsibility approach that are important parts of this process.
