John Oliver called for the resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a searing monologue Sunday night.
“RFK needs to go. And by impeachment if necessary,” Oliver said on Last Week Tonight.
Oliver echoed an April 9 statement from Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, leader of the American Public Health Association, which outlined many of the devastating deaths and losses resulting from policy changes and budget cuts after Kennedy’s first three months at HHS.
Oliver bluntly told Kennedy, “F— you!” after recounting his depiction of autistic people as an epidemic, while claiming, without any evidence, that “these are kids of who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
“Look. I’m not saying that our system was perfect before this,” Oliver explained. “Over the years we’ve done multiple stories about shortcomings in various parts of HHS. But our solution was always: It needs to be strengthened. And not, here’s a good idea: Let’s cut its budget and put a dipshit screaming ‘A-ha!’ in charge.” Oliver continued: “But unfortunately it feels right now we’re all about to get a harsh lesson in what each part of our public health system does as it gets taken away. Which is sort of like finding out what each of your organs does as someone removes them one by one.”
Oliver said his staff had reached out to many of the doctors and scientists they’d spoken to over the years while reporting on various other health-related topics.
“They’ve been utterly shattered by the last few months,” Oliver said. “When we started making calls after the election, they sounded alarmed but they were still holding off judgment, saying ‘Well, let’s just see how this goes.’ But more recently those same people have been telling us, flat out: ‘This is a disaster. People will die because of the mistakes we’re making right now.’”
Although Republicans in the U.S. Senate have been willing to give Kennedy the benefit of the doubt, Oliver said: “That grace period is emphatically over, because too much damage has already been done.”
He added: “This is a man who is clearly in way over his worm-riddled head. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know who he’s fired. He doesn’t even know how many diabetic people there are in China. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s currently spreading dangerous nonsense and gutting life-saving research all while bringing in a basement quack.”
Oliver even harkened back to that time when RFK Jr. was caught bare-footed in 2023 roaming the aisle of a commercial flight, referring to how his fellow airline passengers felt then: “There is something deeply wrong with this guy and we need to stop him before he makes us all f—ing sick.”
The post John Oliver Calls for RFK Jr.’s ‘Worm-Riddled Head’ appeared first on The Daily Beast.
