Although brain worms, bear carcasses, and whale heads are weird topics that have brought Robert Kennedy Jr into our headlines, there are some serious issues that should come up in any Senate confirmation hearings, where he will need 50 votes to be approved as Health and Human Services Secretary.
Here are five whoppers:
Vaccines and Autism
- Kennedy says he is not anti-vaccine, but founded and led the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD) before entering the presidential campaign in 2023. He believes the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal in vaccines causes childhood neurological disorders, autism in particular.
- In 2017, during Trump’s first term, Kennedy said he had been asked to chair a commission investigating the link between autism and vaccines. By 2018, the plan had apparently been abandoned, and never materialized.
- The majority of today’s childhood vaccines no longer contain thimerosal and the CDC has said there is no research linking the small amounts of the preservative used in vaccines to autism.
Covid-19
- Kennedy’s CHD organization doubled its revenue in 2020 by opposing the Covid-19 vaccine, and a 2021 study showed he was among the top 12 superspreaders online of anti-vaccine content.
- Kennedy compared the unvaccinated to Jewish diarist Anne Frank, saying the former had less freedom than Jews hiding from persecution during the Holocaust.
- The CHD released a 2021 film pronouncing that Blacks have strong immune systems that became overstimulated by vaccines, and that the virus was a bioengineered weapon “ethnically targeted” to avoid Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
HIV/AIDS denialism
- Kennedy cast doubt on whether HIV caused AIDS, and the effectiveness of the AIDS drug AZT.
- Kennedy took a stand against Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was credited for his response to the epidemic in the 1980s, claiming the doctor sabotaged effective treatments for the disease, in order to profit off the effective drug.
- He claimed that Fauci used “a number of fraudulent tricks” to get AZT approved.
Fluoride in Water Systems
- While the CDC considers water fluoridation one of the 10 most important public health measures of the 20th century, Kennedy has called it a “toxic pollutant” and “industrial waste.” Since 1945, nearly 75% of all community water systems have adopted water fluoridation.
- Some studies have suggested a link between fluoridation and low IQ levels, but the observations are admittedly anecdotal.
Raw Milk
- Kennedy wants to boost access to raw unpasteurized milk.
- Some think it tastes better, and others falsely claim it can somehow cure lactose intolerance and allergies and improve gut health.
- Raw milk can host numerous pathogens including E. coli, salmonella, and both Streptococcus and Staphylococcus bacteria.
- It also has been recently shown in some samples to contain remnants of the H5N1 bird flu.
