Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a sitting United States Health Secretary who looks like he was reupholstered in 1987 and left on a porch in Phoenix, has decided that the real public health emergency in America is teenagers not having enough access to tanning beds. Kennedy quietly withdrew a long pending FDA rule in March that would have banned minors from indoor tanning facilities and required adults to sign a waiver acknowledging the cancer risk before climbing into a sunlamp coffin. He framed it as a matter of personal choice and parental discretion, which is a generous read for a man whose face looks like a catcher’s mitt left out in the rain, then put back in the sun, then sat on.
Look at the man. Look at him. Skin like a Werther’s Original. Forehead like a busted football. The neck looks like it was deep fried at the county fair. Whatever a tanning bed is selling, sir has clearly bought the family pack, and now he wants the kids to have a taste too. This is the wellness icon. This is who is making decisions about American skin.
The rule he killed had been sitting on the shelf since 2015 and pulled in more than 9,000 public comments, the bulk of them from doctors and cancer research organizations begging the FDA to finalize it. Kennedy’s withdrawal notice clarified that pulling the rule does not mean UV radiation fails to cause skin cancer, which is the kind of sentence a person writes when they know exactly what they are doing.
This is the same Health Secretary who has waged war on sunscreen, fluoride, vaccines, raw milk regulations, and now, apparently, the radical idea that fifteen year olds should not be allowed to bake themselves at the strip mall. Meanwhile real health crises are sitting on his desk collecting dust. Maternal mortality rates for Black women are still roughly three times higher than for white women. The federal response to ongoing measles outbreaks has been incoherent. Medicaid cuts are gutting access to basic care in rural and urban communities alike. None of that produced the kind of urgency Kennedy summoned to make sure American teenagers can keep paying for the privilege of giving themselves melanoma.
For the record on the actual science, tanning beds blast users with ultraviolet radiation at five to fifteen times the concentration of the midday sun. The World Health Organization classifies them as a Group 1 carcinogen, which puts them in the same category as tobacco and asbestos. The American Academy of Dermatology says tanning before age 20 raises melanoma risk by nearly 50 percent. A 2025 study found that frequent tanning salon users develop melanoma at more than double the rate of people who simply leave their skin alone. None of this is new. None of it is contested. The man in charge of American health just decided he did not care.
The optics are not helping him. Kennedy has been photographed leaving a Washington tanning salon looking like a rotisserie chicken on its third spin, which would be a fireable offense in any administration that actually believed in science. Nearly a dozen states, including California, Illinois, and Minnesota, already ban minors from using tanning beds and will keep those laws on the books. The federal retreat simply means the rest of the country is back to a patchwork system where a teenager in one zip code is protected and a teenager three miles away is not.
There are real things a Health Secretary could be doing right now. Greenlighting other people’s kids to end up looking like a vintage handbag is not one of them. But here we are.
This article is Fucking Great!