National Guard stewards handed out reheated chicken quesadillas, which Kennedy declined in favor of the quart of plain, organic, grass-fed yogurt his body man had secured for him. A few weeks earlier, a man who believed that he’d been poisoned by a COVID vaccine had fired nearly 200 bullets at the CDC’s campus in Atlanta, hitting six buildings and killing a police officer. Kennedy, who as secretary of Health and Human Services oversees the CDC, had just told me that his security team recently circulated a memo warning him of threats to his own life. “It said the resentments against me had elevated ‘above the threshold of lethality,’ ” he said. Kennedy greeted the threat assessment with remarkable equanimity. He put down his spoon in order to finish his yogurt in gulps directly from the container.