John Oliver kicked off his Sunday evening episode of Last Week Tonight by acknowledging the death of Pope Francis at the age of 88 last Monday. Francis died “just a day after meeting with JD Vance – which, honestly, relatable”, he quipped.
The host speculated on who could replace Francis, including potential candidates Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi and Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, “whose last name apparently translates to pizza dance”. “And I know that it sounds almost offensively Italian,” said Oliver, “but do keep in mind every last name in Italy means pizza dance.
“Now, would electing a Pope Pizzadance instantly repair the reputation of the Catholic church? Obviously the answer is we won’t know until we try,” he continued. “So JD Vance, you stay the fuck away from Cardinal Pizzadance. You don’t meet him, you don’t go near him, you don’t even think about him.”
In his main segment, Oliver looked into the decimation of the US public health system under Donald Trump’s health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. RFK, as he’s often known, has overseen the “radical downsizing of HHS”, with 10,000 layoffs and another 10,000 people who retired or resigned and won’t be replaced. “Which is alarming,” said Oliver, “because HHS is an absolutely vital agency with just about every high-stakes job related to health you could think of.”
Among the agencies HHS oversees are the National Institute for Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services and many others, accounting for 28% of all federal spending. “So these cuts are going to have a huge impact on our day-to-day lives.”
The cuts, which Kennedy labeled “Administration for a Health America” or “AHA”, were “as sudden as they were cruel”, said Oliver. They included cutting studies that couldn’t be restarted, not telling staff who found out they were fired when their badges stopped working, and slashing funding for diabetes research – which Kennedy was informed of by a news reporter. “The rules for restructuring HHS should be the same as the ones for a bris,” said Oliver. “It is crucially important to know exactly what you are cutting. Speed is just not the most important thing.”
The cuts have particularly devastated the NIH, by far the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research and often called the crown jewel of American science – “which, if anything, is understating it, because it’s clearly better than a crown jewel”, said Oliver. “Those things don’t really do much besides bedazzle a fluffy hat that we occasionally balance on top of a collection of recessive genes.
“The NIH, however, is really important. And it’s now in trouble,” as it stopped considering new grants entirely weeks into Trump’s new administration, which has since cut about $750m in HIV-targeted grants, among other cuts to studies affecting minority groups. HHS has also abruptly canceled more than $12bn in federal grants to states for their health services, inflicting damage that can’t be undone.
Furthermore, Kennedy is a longtime promoter of “rabid” conspiracy theories, including that psychiatric drugs make school shooters and that Anthony Fauci was engaged in a coup against western democracy, as well as going barefoot to the bathroom on commercial flights. “I know, I literally just said 9/11 out loud” – which RFK said he “won’t take sides” on – “but RFK dragging his urine-soaked free-range piggies through first class is literally the worst thing to ever happen in American airspace,” Oliver joked.
Oliver also called bullshit on some of Kennedy’s widely stated “statistics”, such as falsely claiming that the US buys 70% of pharmaceutical drugs on Earth, or that half of the population in China has diabetes. He noted that emailing diabetes researchers about that claim was more embarrassing than previous inquiries, including asking for comment on Vance’s much-memed couch sex insinuation. One response from a doctor called Kennedy’s statement “ludicrous”, adding: “these stats might be related to the worm in his brain.”
“When you get key information about problems that wrong, you’re probably going to fuck up any attempt at a solution,” Oliver surmised. “And that’s not even the biggest issue with Kennedy’s approach, because for all his loud talk of ‘making America healthy again’, some of the cuts he’s overseeing are going to do the exact opposite of that.” Kennedy made a big show of eliminating eight artificial food dyes in the US, while quietly firing everyone at the CDC’s office of smoking and health, which one former agency head called “the greatest gift to the tobacco industry in the last half-century”.
And despite promising otherwise in his confirmation hearing, Kennedy has continued to sow doubt about vaccines, sought data for conspiracy theories that doesn’t exist and peddled fear around a nonexistent “autism epidemic”.
“Most people agree the vast majority of the rise in autism diagnoses is due to there being more research, better awareness and more access, so people can get a more accurate diagnosis,” Oliver noted. “That is what can happen when you put time and money into health services. But RFK has persisted in treating the rise in diagnoses as a tragedy. And the way he talks about autistic people in general can be utterly dehumanizing.”
Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism is already having dire consequences: the US has experienced the first pediatric measles death in 22 years, while whooping cough cases soar and experts raise concerns about bird flu spreading among animals.
Oliver concluded by acknowledging that the system pre-RFK wasn’t perfect, citing multiple Last Week Tonight segments about shortcomings within HHS. “But our solution was always it needs to be strengthened” and not “let’s cut its budget and put a dipshit screaming AHA in charge.
“Unfortunately, it feels right now like we’re all about to get a harsh lesson about what each part of our health system does as it gets taken away,” he said. “Which is sort of like finding out what each of your organs does as someone removes them one by one.”
Oliver reminded that they talked to many, many people for this segment, all of whom were “shattered” and said unequivocally that the cuts will result in needless death. Kennedy “needs to go and by impeachment, if necessary”, said Oliver.
“This is a man who is clearly in way over his worm-riddled head,” he concluded. “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. RFK in this job is dangerous.”
