Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced a new American-made label for seafood grown in the United States.
President Donald Trump, during his Oct. 23 rally in Fort Myers, Florida, for the state’s Republican candidates in the midterm elections, called the health secretary to the stage to make the announcement. Kennedy was met with cheers of “Bobby, Bobby, Bobby,” from the hundreds of supporters in attendance.
“Today, we’re also taking historic action to support an important industry here in the shores of the Gulf of America,” Trump said. “That’s the seafood industry. We’re doing things for the seafood industry that they can’t even believe.”
Kennedy said, “[Trump] is rebuilding the infrastructure, he’s reopening the markets for our commercial fishermen, and today, he’s announcing a label for all American-made seafood that says it’s American-made.”
Kennedy said he spent decades working with the commercial fishing industry before he started in his current role.
The health secretary said that commercial fishermen have the strongest environmental and sustainability regulations but that this puts them at a disadvantage to foreign seafood industries.
Other countries with fewer regulations “poison” marine environments and the wildlife in it to grow their own seafood to sell to the United States, Kennedy said.
“The shrimp are so loaded with antibiotics and disinfectants that no European country will take them. They ship them all over here,” he said. “Our shrimpers here, Fort Myers, the greatest shrimpery in Florida—big shrimp—and they have to compete against criminal enterprises abroad.”
Trump thanked his 72-year-old health secretary as he left the stage, complimenting Kennedy for having “the body of a 30-year-old.”
About an hour before making the announcement, Kennedy gave a roughly 20-minute speech and received multiple standing ovations before Trump took the stage. A number of Florida and federal officials also spoke before the president, including Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican who is running for governor against David Jolly, a former Republican representative.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks to a large crowd of Republican Floridians about the Trump administration’s progress against America’s chronic disease epidemic, at a rally in Fort Myers, Fla., on Oct. 23, 2026. (Troy Myers/The Epoch Times)
Medicare and Medicaid Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, and more officials addressed the growing socialism under the Democratic Party, pointing to Donalds and Moody as candidates who would stand against that movement.
Fight Against Chronic Disease
Kennedy’s first speech focused on the Trump administration’s fight against chronic disease among U.S. citizens.
“I got into this position because I had 11 siblings, and I had about 71 cousins, and I knew what a healthy child is supposed to look like,” he said. “I never knew anybody who had diabetes when I was a kid. … When my uncle was president, a typical pediatrician would see a single case of Type 2 diabetes over a 40- or 50-year career.”
Currently, 38 percent of American children are diabetic or pre-diabetic, Kennedy said.
The health secretary said that when he was a child, he never knew any other children to have food allergies, but five out of his seven children have anaphylactic allergies.
“The autism rate in this country in 1970, according to the biggest epidemiological study ever done, was 0.8 in 10,000—less than one in 10,000,” Kennedy said. “Today, it’s one in every 31 kids. In California, it’s one in every 19 kids, one in every 12.5 boys. This is the biggest crisis we face: this chronic disease epidemic.”
About three-quarters of U.S. children cannot qualify for military service, he said.
Kennedy has frequently tied the United States’ chronic disease epidemic to its food supply, describing the issue as an existential crisis.
When his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, was in office, zero money was spent on chronic disease, the Make America Healthy Again icon said. Now, the Trump administration spends $4.3 trillion on it.
“We cannot survive if we allow this to continue,” Kennedy said. “For 18 years, I got on my knees every morning and prayed to God that he would put me in a position where I could fix this problem.”
Kennedy said he believed God sent him Trump, which enabled him to become the health secretary.
In 2025, age-adjusted mortality dropped among Americans of all age groups for the first time in 40 years, Kennedy said, down 4.6 percent.
“We are reversing the decline in longevity in this country. Twenty years ago, we lived the same as Europeans. Now we live six years shorter,” he said. “We are gaining back our distinction as the healthiest country in the world.”
“Real-food” sales at grocery stores increased by 7 percent in a year, Kennedy said, and the share value of processed-food companies decreased by 70 percent. The obesity rate this year dropped for the first time in 40 years by 7 percent.
