A state that prides itself on health policy leadership cannot afford to be outrun by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
On May 29, RFK Jr. stood at the New Hampshire State House and announced multi-million-dollar federal investments to combat Lyme disease with new funding for research, tick-population management, and an AI-powered innovation accelerator for patients living with invisible illnesses. He called the current situation a “science fiction nightmare” for American families.
I am a Conway resident. I have been diagnosed with Lyme disease three times, in 2014, in 2023 when I was sick enough to require emergency care, and once more since. My first tick bite was in 2011. I had to beg my physician for antibiotics because I had no fever, even as I lived on 10 acres of wooded land in Franklin County and had spent 16 years harvesting wood from it. My doctor finally came to terms with the disease when he contracted it himself from his dog.
Massachusetts is not a bystander in this epidemic. The CDC estimates that an estimated 476,000 Americans are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease annually. New England has historically been at the epicenter, and tick season is worsening each year as climate conditions extend it. Franklin, Hampshire, Hampden, and Berkshire counties, the rural western Massachusetts communities that receive the least concentrated public health infrastructure, carry a disproportionate burden of exposure risk with the least resources for response.
Secretary Kennedy is not a public health official I agree with on most matters. His tenure at HHS has raised serious concerns about vaccine policy, scientific integrity, and the dismantling of public health infrastructure. Yet even he understands that Lyme disease is a crisis requiring structural investment, not just personal vigilance. He has convened roundtables. He has announced pilot programs targeting tick transmission at its wildlife source. He has directed federal funding toward communities that have been told, for decades, that their suffering was exaggerated or imaginary.
The question I must ask the Massachusetts public health administration is this: If a federal official whose overall public health record I find deeply troubling can identify Lyme disease as demanding serious government action, what is Massachusetts waiting for?
We have no comprehensive statewide tick-borne disease surveillance system that disaggregates by county, income, race, or housing type. We have no formal public education campaign on the order of the problem. We have no coordinated care pathway for patients living with post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome the people Secretary Kennedy was speaking about when he described families watching their children suffer. We have no parity between the scale of the problem and the scale of the state’s response.
I am an advocate with Dignity Alliance Massachusetts and have spent more than four decades working in healthcare in this commonwealth. I know the difference between a policy problem and a policy failure. Lyme disease in Massachusetts is a policy failure.
The federal government under this administration is funding the fight. Massachusetts should not be waiting for Washington to lead on a disease that is most concentrated in our own backyards, literally and figuratively.
We need the Department of Public Health to develop a comprehensive, equity-centered Lyme disease response strategy for the commonwealth, one that addresses surveillance gaps, reduces racial and geographic diagnostic disparities, and treats this disease with the structural seriousness it deserves. A state that prides itself on health policy leadership cannot afford to be outrun by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
James Lomastro lives in Conway.