Which federal agency is the “most corrupt”? In fiery Senate testimony this week, United States Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. was reminded that he once described the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this way. Now he is in charge of it, and he hinted that he is not finished with his plans to shake up the organization. cdc Director Susan Monarez provoked a group of senior staff to resign in protest after Kennedy fired her, yet he is looking for more people to purge.

Kennedy has written a book titled The Real Anthony Fauci, exposing how Dr. Anthony Fauci hid the truth about the covid-19 outbreak to sell millions of experimental vaccines. But Kennedy’s beef with the cdc goes far beyond anger over the covid-19 pandemic. He has a fundamental disagreement with how modern medicine is practiced. The cdc ignores the causes of disease so it can make money selling “cures” for the symptoms. Kennedy wants to do more to address the root causes of health problems so that Americans do not need drugs to cure them.

This is the main reason why so many bureaucrats, doctors and health officials opposed appointing Kennedy. They don’t necessarily disagree with him about the root causes of disease; they simply want to keep focusing on treating symptoms. Plus, in many cases, these health officials are motivated by a vain desire to appear wise in the eyes of mainstream academia, which has been treating symptoms instead of underlying causes for generations.

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously,” novelist Jane Austen wrote. “A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” In many cases, cdc officials are willing to promote theories that are not backed by evidence, not because they are proud of their medical understanding but because they are too vain to risk looking “stupid” in the eyes of the “prestigious” institutes of the world.

The late Herbert W. Armstrong dealt with this problem in the Worldwide Church of God in the 1970s.

Ambassador College graduates and wcg ministers became more concerned with looking wise in the eyes of the world than actually being wise.

“A small few Ambassador graduates who had become ministers in the Church were somewhat scholarly inclined, especially one who had a specific problem,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in a 1985 Worldwide News. “He suffered from an inferiority complex. Because some of our graduates at the time were enrolling in outside universities for higher degrees, a few came to conceive that a ‘scholar’ was in the loftiest position of humanity. If this inferiority sufferer could feel in his own mind that he was a scholar, he would feel elevated above other people and therefore delivered from feelings of inferiority. He began to question some of the established doctrines of the Church of God, such as counting the day of Pentecost, divorce and remarriage, tithing and others.”

In other words, this particular minister was not proud. He actually had a low opinion of himself. He tried to make up for this inferiority complex by seeking praise and acclaim from worldly universities, and he became vain.

The Apostle Paul warned the Colossians, “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Colossians 2:8). Many ministers in the Worldwide Church of God would have done well to heed this warning, and many health officials in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would do well to do the same. It doesn’t matter what academia or the pharmaceutical industry thinks of you. What matters is following the actual evidence in a quest to make people healthier.

Paul continues in verses 18-19, “Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels [should read, demons], intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, And not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the increase of God.” This warning tells us that vain reasoning invites satanic influence, and excessive vanity can even be a door to demon possession. We definitely saw some satanic influence during the covid-19 pandemic, and Robert Kennedy’s book The Real Anthony Fauci exposes a lot of it, even if the author doesn’t know much about Satan, demons or the spirit world.

Jesus said, “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes” (Matthew 11:25). Understanding truth requires true humility. You cannot be excessively proud to the point where you think you already know everything. You also can’t let yourself develop an inferiority complex that makes you susceptible to flattery and vain reasoning. Academia is full of stupid people with a desperate need to appear smart.

Many were too cowardly to challenge Dr. Fauci for fear of looking ignorant, so they let him bully them, even though very few of his claims were backed by hard evidence. He just said, “I am science,” and people followed him. It was not until Robert Kennedy took over that people started thinking for themselves.

Pride and vanity get in the way of true education for most people. A lot of professors struggle with pride—believing they already know everything. But their students more often struggle with vanity—so they go along with whatever is being said out of fear of looking stupid. True humility is the solution to both problems.

In Malachi 2:12, God prophesies that He “will cut off” the “master and the scholar” out of His temple, not because scholarship is wrong but because the scholars in His temple became vain in their imaginations.

If Kennedy wants to purge the cdc of corruption and actually make America great again, he needs to find employees who have enough humility to admit what they don’t know and start seeking out answers. Otherwise, their vanity will corrupt them and slowly turn them into Dr. Fauci over time.

In my booklet Education With Vision, I write, “One of the fundamental problems with modern education is vanity. Humility, on the other hand, will pave the way for a right, God-centered education.” This is a fundamental point that everyone on Earth must learn if they want to avoid the problems that have destroyed the cdc.