RFK Jr. Is a One-Man Plague
It’s not just that he’s misinformed. It’s the way his mind works that’s dangerous.
AT A NEW YORK RALLY IN OCTOBER, Donald Trump promised the crowd that if elected, he would let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” on health, food, and medicines. It delighted the crowd, who imagined they were cheering for better health and better medicine. They’re in for a bitter surprise.
Some, like former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, have correctly responded to the Kennedy selection with alarm (“beyond dangerous”), but others who should know better are offering cautious approval.
“Well, he has a point about fluoride in the water,” a Washington Post columnist conceded. American healthcare has “become too reliant on treating every matter of discomfort with a pill instead of tackling questions about environment, culture, and behavior,” mused a New York Times contributor.
They seem to think we can take what we like from the Kennedy buffet and leave the rest. Not so. If he is confirmed, we won’t get only the 3 percent of Kennedy ideas that are sane, we will be saddled with the 97 percent that are deranged. It isn’t that Kennedy is merely misinformed—though he is. It’s that he’s an active agent of misinformation. That’s a character problem. Hiring him to run health policy for this country is like hiring an arsonist to head the fire department.
In November 2019, only a few unfortunate patients in Wuhan were aware of a dangerous new pathogen that was soon to upend life around the globe. But at that very moment, mostly unnoticed by the international press, another, older virus was killing children on the island of Samoa. It was measles.
Measles is one of the most contagious diseases to which human beings are susceptible. In the pre-vaccine era, in the United States alone, it would typically cause 500 yearly deaths, 48,000 hospitalizations, 1,000 cases of encephalitis, and—in 5 to 10 percent of cases—profound hearing loss. Its cousin, rubella, while milder, can cause severe abnormalities and death in unborn babies if contracted by pregnant women.
In 2019, Samoa was experiencing a spike in measles cases due to a mistake and a lie. The mistake was made in 2018 by two nurses who mixed ingredients for a measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine incorrectly, causing the deaths of two infants. (They pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter.) The lies came soon after, encouraged by RFK Jr., who has consistently propagated the myth that the MMR vaccine causes autism, peanut allergies, and other ailments. Though he now denies that he was ever “anti-vaccine,” Kennedy declared as recently as July that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective,” and, in another interview: “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.”
Many Samoans had seen the film Vaxxed, produced by two of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine allies, which alleged that the MMR vaccine was harmful and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had committed fraud. (Samoa, as distinct from the territory of American Samoa, is a sovereign state with its own health ministry that can and does regulate vaccines. In the United States, the FDA has that responsibility, not the CDC.)
The film and social media rumors led to an uptick in parents refusing to get their kids vaccinated. After the deaths of the two infants, RFK Jr. threw gasoline on the fire with a visit to the island in 2019, meeting with local vaccine opponents and voicing suspicions that the MMR vaccine had contained a mutant strain and had caused the then-burgeoning epidemic. Eventually, more than 3 percent of the whole population of the island was infected. For babies aged six to eleven months, that figure was closer to 20 percent. More than 150 of them died.
Dr. Paul Offit, pediatrician and author of Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All, told the Guardian that “the Samoan incident showed us how disinformation can kill. [RFK Jr.] sowed further distrust, he jumped all over it—he met with anti-vaxxers in Samoa to promote the notion that ‘it’s not measles, it’s the vaccine,’ and immunization rates dropped.”
When you think of RFK Jr., think of rows of tiny coffins.
ANTI-VACCINE ACTIVISM has been the hallmark of Kennedy’s career and featured prominently in his 2024 campaign for president, but it by no means exhausts his appetite for crackpottery. He has sworn to end the FDA’s “war” on raw milk. Listen, if Kennedy wants to drink the stuff himself, it’s a free country and he can afford as many cows as he wants. But how did we reach a point in our history when it became necessary to argue that pasteurizing milk is a sound health measure? Louis Pasteur must be spinning in his grave. Cows’ udders can touch feces and other dirt that causes illness. Unpasteurized milk and cheese has been implicated in many recent outbreaks of salmonella, E. coli, and other foodborne illnesses. It can also transmit bird flu.
RFK Jr. has speculated that wifi causes cancer and “leaky brain,” that antidepressants are responsible for school shootings, that chemicals in the water can cause children to become transgender (an echo of Alex Jones), and that AIDS is not caused by HIV. He posted a video on YouTube accusing Bill Gates of inventing an injectable chip that would permit big tech to track people’s movements. Everyone has a crazy uncle who regales people with anti-scientific rubbish. But to put one in charge of public health? That’s a hostile act.
Nor is it just Kennedy’s attraction to doltish ideas that should set off alarms. It’s his tendency to imagine sinister forces controlling things. He believes the CIA killed his uncle, John F. Kennedy, as well as his father, Robert F. Kennedy. Though any bereaved person deserves sympathy, losing a parent is not an explanation for such paranoia. Other members of the Kennedy clan have repudiated him. This kind of conspiracy thinking is not new. In 2004, he alleged that Republicans stole the election.
It wasn’t enough for him to claim that the COVID-19 vaccine (the pride of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, let’s not forget) was “the deadliest vaccine ever made”; he also suggested that the virus itself was somehow “targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” He is on record supporting the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin instead of vaccines. Elsewhere he indulged the fantasy that COVID was actually a “plandemic.” As The Bulwark reported, Kennedy told a group in 2020 that:
Many people argue that this pandemic was a ‘plandemic,’ that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme. I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me. I don’t know. I will tell you this: If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.
Later in the same speech, he decried public health efforts to combat the epidemic as “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.” Wise, measured words right?
As secretary of health and human services, RFK Jr. would have supervisory authority over the FDA, CDC, NIH, the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, and the Indian Health Service, among other agencies. He has suggested that 600 employees of the NIH, which oversees vaccine development, should be fired immediately and replaced by his own choices.
Some Pollyannas, noting that our medical system is too focused on illness treatment and not enough on illness prevention, imagine that Kennedy’s leadership might mean healthier eating habits and more exercise. That would be desirable (if unlikely), but it substitutes hope for analysis. Kennedy goes on jags about healthy eating at times. He has inveighed against ultraprocessed foods (which isn’t crazy), but then lurches into jeremiads about seed oils “poisoning” our bodies. For the record, canola, sunflower, and soybean oils are safe (though fat, like anything else, is best in moderation). If Kennedy wants to fry his potatoes in beef tallow and wash it down with raw milk, more power to him, but under no circumstances should any sane person take his health advice. Nor should any senator consent to give him authority over government agencies that regulate our food and medicines.
The truth about health is that most of us could cut our risk of heart disease, cancer, and dementia if we simply ate and drank less, slept better, quit smoking, exercised more, and kept up our social circles. But Kennedy prefers to conjure evil pharmaceutical companies fouling our minds and bodies and conniving agricultural concerns forcing us to eat chemically altered foods. Some of the food on offer in American supermarkets is not healthy, it’s true. If Kennedy were keen to improve our health, he could encourage people to consume more fresh fruit and vegetables. But that’s not the way his mind works. For him, this isn’t really even about health. It’s a battle of good versus evil. He sees himself as a knight errant, but unfortunately, his “cures” involve reversing some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in history: pasteurization, vaccines, and the scientific method of determining truth.
For Trump to nominate such a dangerous man for such a key position is a mockery of leadership. It’s possible that neither knows how to distinguish fact from fiction, but to the degree that Trump knows Kennedy is a kook and nominated him as part of a larger project to destroy trust in everything, it’s depraved.