We are worried.
We are worried about our future careers, about our own well-being, our loved ones, and future children. We spent our teenage years as climate activists fighting for our future, and now we are college students studying to be researchers and doctors. We have already spent a significant portion of our lives fearing a future defined by more intense hurricanes and wildfires. Now we hold another fear: the health of the world and the people we love. This is why we are organizing to #StopRFK.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK) is the Trump administration’s nominee for Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. This position would give him the power to make decisions about the health, security, and well-being of millions of people. Decisions about who should receive such instrumental power cannot be taken lightly.
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During his presidential run, RFK said he wanted to defund research for treatments and cures to deadly infectious diseases. He has a history of opposing lifesaving vaccines, and falsely claimed in a July 2023 podcast interview that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” In 2019, he met with anti-vaccine activists in Samoa, where a measles outbreak killed 83 people, mostly infants and children, later that year. RFK has embraced what we see as racist and antisemitic viewpoints on public health, such as the bizarre idea that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack Caucasians and Black people, while sparing Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish people.
In the months since RFK’s nomination, our phones have been filled with headlines about doctors and public health experts warning the Senate about his views. But young people haven’t had a voice in this conversation.
This is why we started Students for Science. We are undergraduates and high schoolers; future doctors, scientists, and policymakers from all over the country. We are student researchers in fields such as neuroscience, biochemistry, and health policy. Many of us met through climate activism in high school. As young people, we have unique concerns about RFK and what his confirmation would mean for our future.
Science has saved us our entire lives. As children we were lucky to have vaccines protecting us from measles and polio. As teenagers we lined up for vaccines to keep us safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether it’s over-the-counter Advil we take when we are sick or prescription medicines many of us depend on to live a normal life, we rely on treatments that were created by research — by the best available science. As we grew up, we chose to dedicate our lives to science in hopes that our work and our discoveries could improve the lives of those after us, especially those who are most marginalized.
That future may not come to pass if RFK is in power. Defunding research may lead to our labs shutting down. It means we might not be prepared for the next pandemic. We could lose the infrastructure and means to do the lifesaving research to which we want to dedicate our lives.
