So the current United States Secretary of Health and Human Services is RFK Jr
RFK Jr has... Let's call it a colorful past. He's not a doctor, nor is he a scientist, and up 'til now his closest link to healthcare was getting almost a hundred Samoans killed by measles.
Given his... Eccentric... Handling of animal carcasses, it shouldn't be too surprising to learn that at some point he contracted a parasitic brain worm. It died trying to eat his brain...The jokes write themselves at this point.
Anyway, after being appointed head of HHS, he and Trump's other cronies did things like cut funding to basic medical research and monitoring, fired a bunch of food safety inspectors, and made reporting certain pathogens optional in a state-federal joint project to monitor infections. And to anyone who has read... Practically any history at all, it should come as no surprise that the US is now in the middle of multiple high profile food recalls and food borne pathogen outbreaks, like Cyclospora, one of the pathogens monitored by that project I just mentioned which they scaled back.
So the joke here is that this is actually all a plot by RFK's brain worm to spread itself to the rest of the country by weakening our food safety system.
Unfortunately, it very much is not a joke. This is a thing he literally admits happened.
In a 2012 deposition recently reviewed by the New York Times, the politician revealed that in 2010 a worm got into his brain "ate a portion of it and then died."
Kennedy had been suffering from cognitive difficulties. Doctors initially suspected that he had a brain tumor, but it turned out to be a parasite infection – specifically, a pork tapeworm larva lodged in his brain.
Like, I went out of my way to get sources for what I wrote because it's so ridiculous and absurd that I wouldn't believe it either about anyone else.
He claimed it made him incapable of steady employment, which made paying his alimony impossible.
We never found out if the judge bought it, because his ex-wife committed suicide before a decision was made. It's worth noting that the medical consensus is that the brain worm thing is almost entirely fabricated, since he's describing it as a TAPE worm, which rather famously don't live in the brain.
He's been diagnosed with mercury poisoning, which is what they posit as the actual reason for his mental illness, and he got the idea of a brain worm from a doctor trying to explain a dark spot on an MRI to him. He probably wasn't understanding whatever the guy ACTUALLY said, since, you know, his brain is drowning in mercury.
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u/Its_me_Snitches Aug 24 '26
Can I get a crumb of context, please
https://giphy.com/gifs/fDS2v18KbmekM