FORT WORTH, Texas — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was in Fort Worth on Tuesday to announce a new national kidney care plan at JPS Health Network, Tarrant County’s public hospital system.

Kennedy launched the national plan with a focus on three priorities: preventing kidney failure, improving dialysis care, and reforming kidney transplantation.

“(The) organ transplant program had a monopoly that ended up corrupting the system,” Kennedy said at JPS on Tuesday.

Health Resources and Services Administration Administrator Tom Engels said the new plan was focused on ensuring that there was no corruption in the dialysis and transplant systems and stopping monopolies in those systems.

Rates of chronic kidney disease have been increasing in the U.S. and across the globe in recent decades, as risk factors like diabetes and high blood pressure have also increased. Chronic kidney disease was the ninth leading cause of death worldwide in 2023, up from the 27th leading cause in 1990, according to a study published in The Lancet last year. Kidney disease was the 10th leading cause of death in Tarrant County in 2023.

Kennedy has gained popularity as a leader of the Make America Healthy Again movement, and has identified Americans’ high rate of chronic diseases as a target for his administration. But Kennedy’s work as an anti-vaccine activist has also made him a controversial figure among doctors and other public health experts. Before he became secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy founded the Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group that has long tied routine shots to an increased risk of autism, a theory that numerous studies have debunked.

There have been multiple measles outbreaks in the last two years, including one in West Texas that infected 762 people and killed two children. So far this year, there have been more than 4,000 cases of measles reported in the U.S., the most since 1991, and six deaths.

In Tarrant County, the vaccination rate for the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine has dropped in the last year, from almost 94% of kindergartners vaccinated to almost 93% vaccinated. At the same time, conscientious exemptions to the shot increased from 5.3% to 6.8%, according to state data. Vaccine experts worry that the decline in coverage is linked to skepticism about vaccines from Kennedy and others.

“We want parents to vaccinate,” Kennedy said in response to a question Tuesday. “Unfortunately, during COVID, because of the overreach during COVID, because of the dishonesty by my department, a lot of Americans lost faith in vaccination, and we are trying to rebuild that by being honest with the American people, by making people know that we’re trustworthy.”

Under Kennedy’s leadership, the Department of Health and Human Services has started multiple studies looking at possible connections between vaccines and other health problems. Kennedy recently held a ribbon cutting for a new clinic to study vaccine injuries.

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