RFK Jr. spoke to Kansans last year. Now he may lead the DHHS. Have his views changed? | Opinion
This week has been important to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is nominated to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the upcoming Donald Trump administration. Kennedy has been meeting with Republican senators this week to shore up his confirmation.
Some of you might think Kennedy will be an advocate for Kansas and Missouri health. Well, a little over a year ago, he spoke to a group of Kansans at an anti-vaccine conference, and recently I reviewed those remarks. Would he be a good director of HHS?
As I will go into, the short answer is he’d be troubling.
What would Kennedy control? Many of the agencies he currently is at odds with, including: the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Office of the Surgeon General and more.
While the Senate likely won’t confirm Trump’s picks before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, it’s possible they could hold hearings before Trump places his hand on the Bible and again takes the oath of office.
It’s hard to say which Trump nominee will have the toughest battle for confirmation, because most of his choices are staggering. But I can say with confidence that Kennedy could do the most damage if he runs roughshod through the health policies and safeguards our country relies on. For example, CBS News reported that Trump planned to speak with him about ending childhood vaccine programs.
If we look back 20 years ago, I might not be able to make that statement. Time magazine hailed Kennedy as a “Hero of the Planet” in 1999 for his work on cleaning up New York’s Hudson River.
In fact, Politico noted that Kennedy used to be in favor of causes that easily aligned with progressives: “Ending chronic disease. Restoring the nation’s farmland. Protecting the environment. Curbing corporate power. Taking on Big Pharma. These are goals straight out of a progressive policy playbook.”
As he meets with senators, there is no indication that he will back down from polarizing anti-vax statements he has made in interviews and speeches — speeches such as when the nominee visited Kansas to headline the Freedom Revival in the Heartland conference.
Let’s go back to August 2023 and unpack what RFK Jr. had to tell Kansans who attended the conference. Fact-checks are in italics.
Kennedy spent the better part of an hour summing up his fight for “all the warrior moms out there who refuse to be gaslit and who continue to stand up for all of us.”
It began with mercury
Kennedy, an attorney who has litigated mercury poisoning cases, has said he too had suffered mercury poisoning from eating tuna and other fish. He told the Kansas audience that once he began to hold talks on mercury poisoning in freshwater fish, people steered him to look at mercury poisoning in another direction: vaccines.
“These women would show up at the front rows. They would come early, occupy the front row. And then after the talk was over, they would get my attention and kind of button hole me and talk to me in a very respectful, but also kind of vaguely scolding way, saying that, you know, if you’re really interested in mercury exposures to children, you look, need to look at vaccines.”
In 2005, he met Sarah Bridges, the mother who would bring accusations of autism to the forefront, when she approached him at his house on Cape Cod.
FACT-CHECK: Porter and another defendant in vaccine lawsuits against the U.S. government did receive multimillion-dollar payouts from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. However, in a Newsweek interview with Porter in 2021, her perspective is different from Kennedy’s:
“While Kennedy suspects a conspiracy among vaccine regulators at the FDA and other federal agencies, Bridges does not: ‘I have no doubt there are people doing their jobs who are very solid,’ Porter said.”
‘Epidemic’ of autism
Kennedy told the Freedom Revival in the Heartland audience that commitment to people with intellectual disabilities was part of his family’s DNA. He added that he worked as a “hugger” and coach at Camp Shriver, several years before his aunt Eunice Shriver founded the Special Olympics in 1968.
He went on to describe the children he worked with as being less affected with autism compared to children today. “We never saw anybody who had full-blown autism. You know, head banging, biting, nonverbal, non toilet-trained, all of these tactile sensitivities, light sensitivities. We never saw anybody like that.”
He added, “The epidemic is real. … So that’s an effort to normalize something and to gaslight us all. You know, that’s what they’re doing. They’re gaslighting us.”
FACT-CHECK: According to the National Library of Medicine, any connection between autism and vaccines has been discredited by dozens of studies investigating the epidemiology of autism, and while parents have been opting out of childhood vaccinations, autism diagnoses have continued to rise.
Allergic reactions
Kennedy went on to the topic of food allergies, calling the year 1989 a “red line.”
“All of a sudden, you had peanut allergies up here, peanut allergies and food allergies and all this anaphylaxis. You know why? I never knew anybody with a peanut allergy, never. And why do five of my kids, five of my seven kids have allergies? Something happened.”
Kennedy, like any mother or father searching for a cure when their child is sick, heavily leans on emotional narratives. He railed on about the supposed “explosion” of asthma, eczema, autoimmune disease, juvenile diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Crohn’s disease and others.
FACT-CHECK: He’s right when he says the United States has what he called “the highest chronic disease burden on Earth.” The Commonwealth Fund confirms that the U.S. has the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions. However, there is no clear proof that, or if, there is a common cause.
COVID-19
Kennedy announced that the U.S. had the worst COVID-19 outcomes of any nation in the world — not true, unless you compare the U.S. death rate for COVID to other wealthy industrialized countries.
But he’s correct when he cites chronic disease as a huge contributor. He slammed former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci for not getting a handle on chronic diseases in his time at the institute.
“It wasn’t really COVID that was killing them. COVID pushed them over the cliff. What really killed them was the chronic disease. And why aren’t we focusing on that?”
Kennedy’s answer for why we have the worst chronic disease among our peer countries? An environmental toxin, which he says the National Institutes of Health isn’t studying. Rather, the NIH is “just an incubator for new pharmaceutical products so people can cash in on the chronic disease, epidemic and NIH gets 50% of the royalties on some of these like they did with the Moderna vaccine.”
Kennedy cited poisons in the water, the lawsuits against the use of Roundup weed killer, saying, “It’s now in all of our bread. It’s in all of our Cheerios. It’s in everything that you eat.”
Back to vaccines: He railed against the vaccine schedule of children from birth through 18 years old, counting them up into the 70s, but I only counted about 35 jabs, plus yearly flu vaccines. Check for yourself.
“My guess is it’s a conspiracy of all of these, these toxins that our kids are swimming around in a toxic soup, and they, all of them, operate along the same kind of biological pathways. They’re all doing, stressing our immune systems. They’re damaging our microbiomes. They’re hurting our capacity to fend off these diseases,” he told the Kansas audience.
FACT-CHECK: Again, there’s no credible evidence backing up these statements.
Five things RFK vowed to do in office
You have to remember that he was still campaigning for president in August 2023 when he made these promises, but if he gets confirmed, these vows might be even more solid, considering the agencies he would control.
- He’s already taken a strategy from Trump. Kennedy’s slogan is “Make America Healthy Again.”
- He vowed to stop focusing on infectious diseases and work on autoimmune diseases: “If I’m elected, the first thing I’m going to do on week one is I’m going to go to Bethesda, and I’m going to bring everybody who works for NIH into a big room bigger than this, and I’m going to say we’re going to give infectious disease a break for a decade or so.”
- He said he would end pharmaceutical advertising on TV and hold medical journals accountable. “The fun part for me, I’m going to get all of the journal heads. I’m going to get Richard Horton from the Lancet, all of them to come visit the new attorney general in the Justice Department, and ask them if they’ve heard of the racketeering laws.”
- He has said he would work to remove fluoride from drinking water, saying it’s connected to cancer and other diseases.
- While he didn’t tell the Kansas audience he would outlaw vaccines, he has said he would give families the choice to use them or not.
If confirmed, Kennedy said he believes his future agency is working against the American people: “NIH won’t tell us what it is they know, there are data now that show one out of every seven kids has autoimmune disease, as just one category of disease. You know, it’s probably, it’s probably at least 60% of our kids. There’s no other nation or earth that has that.”
FACT-CHECK: The NIH does not conceal these issues, as Kennedy says, and reports that autoimmune diseases are affecting more people. “As many as 50 million people in the U.S. have an autoimmune disease, making it the third most prevalent disease category, surpassed only by cancer and heart disease” its website reports.
Could we be focusing on the wrong areas? Maybe. Should we get a better handle on obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes? Absolutely.
Look, I’m no scientist, and I’m not a mom with a child who has an autoimmune disease. But I’m also not a conspiracy theorist and we don’t need one managing our nation’s health.
If RFK Jr. plans to do what he told a Kansas audience he would do, I hope the senators at his confirmation hearing read these words and ask hard questions.
This story was originally published December 19, 2024 at 5:09 AM.
