Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dragged Medicare chief Dr. Mehmet Oz up a cliff face in a bizarre show of MAHA strength.
Less than a week after a gunman opened fire at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Atlanta headquarters, killing a police officer, Kennedy posted a video of himself and Mehmet hiking at the Garden of the Gods park in Colorado Springs.
The 3.5-minute video starts out innocently enough with Kennedy and Oz—the celebrity doctor serving as President Donald Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—walking through the park and discussing the myriad health benefits of doing physical activity in the outdoors.
No surprise there since much of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” ethos focuses on diet and exercise. About a third of the way in, though, things get weird.
“God talks to us through many vectors… but nowhere with such texture, grace, joy, and detail as through creation,” Kennedy says. “We come here because this is the way that God talks to us, to link us to our creator, to link us to the 20,000 generations of human beings that were here before laptops.”
Moments later, Mehmet turns to the camera and says, “Big news! You walk 15 minutes a day, you save the country $100 billion in health expenses.”
After some more talk about longevity and walking, Kennedy says, “Mehmet, we got to go. This mountain is not going to climb itself.”
The video then cuts to Kennedy looking a bit shaky as he climbs up a rock face in jeans, a T-shirt, and hiking boots. He then pulls himself up to sit on a boulder. Oz follows him, and Kennedy reaches out a hand to pull Oz up.
Kennedy then addresses the camera and says, “You’re going to have a much better life if you spend some of it outdoors.”
“So how do we get down?” Oz asks, before they slide awkwardly back down the rock.
Garden of the Gods allows “technical climbing” in parties of two or more with proper equipment, though it forbids “rock scrambling,” which is defined as climbing on a rock formation more than 10 feet up from its base.
The boulder that Kennedy and Oz scaled seemed to be right around the limit, though it wasn’t entirely clear from the video. The Daily Beast has reached out to HHS for comment.
Kennedy has come under fire this week for his “tepid” response to the shooting at the CDC. Police officer David Rose was killed by a 30-year-old shooter who blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal.
Kennedy waited 18 hours to put out a statement and didn’t visit the CDC until Monday, three days after the shooting. CDC employees told the Washington Post that Kennedy’s own anti-vaccine rhetoric had undermined and politicized the CDC, contributing to the violence.
Last week, Kennedy canceled $500 million worth of research into mRNA vaccines that would have cost $500 million, citing unproven concerns about their safety. In a statement, he said, “The data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”
In fact, peer-reviewed studies have found that the COVID-19 vaccine saved millions of lives, and the ground-breaking mRNA discoveries that led to its rapid development were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
This week wasn’t the first time that Kennedy went hiking in the middle of a departmental crisis.
In March, Kennedy was slammed for going hiking in California’s Coachella Valley while health officials struggled to contain a deadly measles outbreak that raged through West Texas.
Like in the Atlanta shooting, critics also accused Kennedy’s anti-vaccine rhetoric of exacerbating the measles crisis.
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