'Poison' — and Trump’s favorite bev:

HHS secretary faces resistance in push to 'Make America Healthy'

Former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under President Donald Trump, is taking aim at carbonated soft drinks. As part of his Make American Healthy Again Campaign, RFK Jr. is pushing for soft drinks to be excluded from food aid programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

But according to Wall Street Journal reporters Kristina Peterson, Josh Dawsey and Laura Cooper, he is facing some obstacles — from beverage companies to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials who believe the proposal would be difficult to implement.

Moreover, Trump is, they note, a major consumer of Diet Coke.

In an article published on March 3, the WSJ journalists explain, "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls it 'poison.' President Trump has multiple cans of it every day. Welcome to the 2025 soda wars. At both state and federal levels, the Kennedy-led Make America Healthy Again movement is backing efforts to prevent people from spending food-aid benefits on sugary, carbonated beverages. Now, they are gaining momentum with an administration led by a man who enjoys soda so much that he had a red button installed on his desk for a valet to bring him a Diet Coke."

Peterson, Dawsey and Cooper note that in the past, "liberal-leaning states" like New York and Minnesota tried to "strip soda from state food-aid programs" but encountered resistance from the USDA — which maintained that doing so would be difficult and complicated.

In 2025, however, right-wing Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is on board with that proposal.

Sanders told WSJ, "Nobody is anti-Diet Coke. Nobody is anti-soft drink. I like a soft drink, too. It's whether or not the government should be paying for it."

Meanwhile, Health Texas Style (no sugar)

The last few weeks have felt like deja vu for Lubbock public health authority Dr. Ron Cook. A deadly disease is on the warpath. There’s a vaccine that can save lives. But too many in his community simply won’t take it.

“There’s all kinds of social media stuff, anecdotal treatments, or people saying, ‘let’s have a measles party,’ or this is just big government overreach,” he said.

Cook and his team are having to battle long-standing misinformation about the measles vaccine, as well as new concerns from people who developed anti-vaccine views during the pandemic, he said. The number of people requesting vaccine exemptions for their children has almost doubled since 2018, to almost 100,000 families in 2024.

In previous outbreaks, some areas have taken more extreme measures to enforce vaccination, either by revoking religious exemptions or, in the case of an outbreak in New York in 2019, mandating people in the most impacted areas get the shot, with a $1,000 fine for non-compliance. The Orthodox Jewish community at the heart of the outbreak challenged the order in court, but it was upheld by a judge.

"A fireman need not obtain the informed consent of the owner before extinguishing a house fire," Judge Lawrence Knipel wrote in his ruling. "Vaccination is known to extinguish the fire of contagion.”

But Troisi and other public health experts don’t anticipate similar action in Texas. Since the pandemic, Texas’ elected leaders have shown more support for the opposite, opposing vaccine mandates and loosening Texas’ vaccine exemption rules. There are bills proposed this session that would make it easier for parents to opt out of vaccines and prohibit schools from excluding unvaccinated students during an outbreak like the one Texas is currently facing.

It remains to be seen whether the current measles outbreak will impact the direction of these bills, but Dr. Peter Hotez, a leading vaccine expert and dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said he’s not optimistic that this will be a turning point.

“There was no auto-correction after 40,000 Texans needlessly died because they refused the COVID vaccine,” he said. “It just spilled over more to childhood immunizations. So I don’t know what brings us back, exactly.”