Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tested a robotic surgery machine as an open-heart surgery patient lay on the operating table during a bonkers MAHA moment on a national health tour.
President Donald Trump’s controversial health secretary visited Ohio this week as part of his “Take Back Your Health” tour, which is designed to plug his Make America Healthy Again movement.
In the Buckeye State, the birthplace of Vice President JD Vance, RFK Jr. visited a regenerative farm, an addiction recovery facility, and met with the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, Tom Mihaljevic.
At the clinic, which is consistently ranked as one of the best hospitals in the United States, he was given extraordinary access to a patient who was “splayed open for heart surgery,” according to KFF Health News.
The person, presumably under anesthesia, would not have known then that Kennedy was fiddling with the controls of a disconnected robotic arm teaching console. KFF reported that Trump’s health chief, who was gripped with a heroin addiction for 14 years, “briefly tested the teaching console” as the patient lay there.
The article had previously been amended to make clear that Kennedy “did not operate robotic hands on a heart surgery patient.”
The author, Amanda Seitz, explained where the confusion arose. “The Cleveland Clinic called me a few moments ago to say the robotic hands were disconnected to the patient as Kennedy sat at the console. I asked about his use of the machine in the OR [operating room] and was not told it was disconnected,” she wrote on X on Wednesday.
She added in a follow-up: “To be clear, the secretary and I were in the OR with a live patient who was being operated on. The issue was his use of the robotic hands.”
Seitz said doctors were actively working on the patient while Kennedy sat at the machine. “There were multiple doctors working on the patient who continued their work. Kennedy, I and others observed for a few moments. Then, Kennedy sat at the machine that controls the robotic hands with a surgeon. Cleveland Clinic did not allow anyone to take photos/videos in OR,” she explained.
A surgeon replied to Seitz’s post, explaining why the moment was still risky. “Do they mean the hands were inactivated? You need to ‘swap’ the instruments to take control on the Da Vinci platform, so he could do whatever he wanted on a console and nothing would happen so long as he didn’t hit the swap pedal to take control of the instruments,” Vamsi Aribindi wrote.
The Cleveland Clinic says it uses “robot-assisted technology to deliver safer, more precise, and minimally invasive procedures.” One example is Da Vinci robotic surgery, which uses an endoscopic camera and four robotic arms that a surgeon controls.
A clinic spokesperson told the Daily Beast: “Secretary Kennedy toured an OR and observed a robotic heart procedure. During the visit, he was able to sit at a disconnected teaching console. He could watch the operation via the console, but he did not operate anything.”
The swap pedal is a critical control that allows the surgeon to switch control between different robotic instruments.
“I am dismantling a corrupt system and replacing it with something better, replacing it with something that actually addresses the declining healthy American population,” Kennedy told KFF Health News.
“People are paying attention to what they eat, and the industry is listening; the industry is changing.”
