President-elect Donald Trump said this week he’s nominating Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who was running for president himself not too long ago — to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services under his incoming administration.
“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said in a Thursday statement on Truth Social. “Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
Like all the other nominations Trump has rolled out publicly this week, the Thursday announcement came with a lot of questions about whether RFK Jr. is qualified for the job — and if he can even pass a Senate confirmation with his questionable and disqualifying beliefs on several public health-related topics, most notably, his stance on vaccines.
That is, of course, assuming that there will be a confirmation hearing. Trump has floated the idea of recess appointments and is already pressuring Senate leadership to fall in line.
While Democrats have long embraced some of the reforms RFK Jr. endorses when it comes to regulating aspects of the agricultural industry, like factory farming and pesticides, his other outlandish, crank science beliefs have Democrats and Republicans concerned about how he would run the federal public health department.
Here’s a run down of his most problematic public health positions:
He is big on conspiracy theories
The list is long. And I mean long. But here are some of the highlights to give you an idea.
In June 2023, Kennedy baselessly claimed Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain,” during an interview with Joe Rogan. In a bizarre Twitter Spaces conversation with Elon Musk, also in the summer of 2023, Kennedy claimed antidepressants are to blame for mass shootings. On multiple occasions, he suggested that AIDS might not be caused by HIV. He’s also falsely claimed chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender.
There is, of course, no credible evidence for any of these claims.
He is an infamous anti-vaxxer
Despite recently claiming he is not opposed to vaccines, Kennedy is one of the most unapologetic anti-vaccine advocates out there. He has, on multiple occasions, claimed vaccines cause autism and are more harmful than the diseases they’re designed to protect against.
“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” Kennedy said last summer in an interview with Fox News host Jesse Watters.
In 2021, he was named one of the top spreaders of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines on social media by the Center for Countering Digital Hate. His anti-vaccine misinformation was so relentless that he was even kicked off Instagram for repeatedly sharing debunked conspiracy theories.
Kennedy is also the founder of Children’s Health Defense, a non-profit anti-vaccine group considered a hub for health and vaccine misinformation.
He contributed to one of the deadliest measles outbreaks in Samoa in recent history
In 2019, his anti-vax stance and campaign of misinformation and fearmongering took its toll on Samoans.
Kennedy, alongside his non-profit Children’s Health Defense, took advantage of the deaths of two infants, who died after receiving the measles vaccine in Samoa in 2018, to question the safety of the vaccine. It was later revealed that the deaths were caused by nurses mistakenly injecting the infants with muscle relaxant instead of the vaccine, according to Mother Jones, but the deaths reportedly still caused the vaccination rate to plummet from around 60-70 percent to 31 percent.
During a time when there were already many questions around the safety of the vaccine, Kennedy visited the Pacific island nation and met with government officials and other anti-vax advocates while simultaneously flooding the area with vaccine misinformation.
The measles outbreak struck in November 2019 and the Samoan government implemented an emergency, mandatory measles vaccination program to contain the spread. During this concerted effort to fight the misinformation, the same anti-vaxxers Kennedy met up with compared the operation to Nazi Germany and claimed the vaccine itself was the reason for the outbreak.
Kennedy himself also encouraged the claims, calling on the prime minister to “determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine.”
During the outbreak 5,600 people reportedly contracted measles, and 83 children died.
“I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa. I never told anybody not to vaccinate. I didn’t go there with any reason to do with that,” Kennedy later claimed.
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