Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was once known for his work in environmental law, but these days he’s more famous for his fringe medical views. – Credit: Bryan Dozier/Variety/Getty Images
Right now, the only thing standing between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and being the head of the Department of Health and Human Services is a confirmation hearing with a soon-to-be Republican-dominated Senate. But given Kennedy’s long history of making misleading and misguided statements about health, we can expect to see at least some of his outlandish claims and conspiracy theories come under scrutiny during the hearing. This is especially likely when it comes to things like accusing the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of having “an interest” in “mass poisoning the American public,” as Kennedy told Fox News in August. Senators may also question the public health stances of the man who, in 2022, suggested that Jews like Anne Frank had more freedom during the Holocaust than unvaccinated people had at that point in the Covid-19 pandemic. And there’s plenty more where that came from. Here are 10 of Kennedy’s other controversial statements and positions related to health.
MMR vaccines
Back in 2005, Kennedy wrote a since-retracted and disproven article published by Rolling Stone and Salon, arguing that there was a potential link between vaccines and the rise of autism, and that there was a massive coverup to hide this risk from the public. Numerous empirical studies in peer-reviewed journals have since proven the claims to be false, and the 1998 study in The Lancet that first alleged a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism was retracted by the journal and found to be fraudulent.
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Yet, despite this evidence, Kennedy and his anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defence (CHD) have carried on trying to convince parents that vaccines may cause autism — a belief he reiterated in a July 2023 interview with Jesse Watters on Fox News. In 2019, four months after Kennedy visited Samoa and met with anti-vaxxer activists, there was a serious measles outbreak on the small Pacific island, resulting in more than 5,700 people being infected (out of a total population of 200,000), and 83 deaths — many of them children. Here in the U.S., the number of measles outbreaks and cases is up from last year, as is the number of pediatric influenza deaths.
Fluoride
A few days before the election, Kennedy took to X to announce that “on January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.” His reason for this? “Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease,” he claimed in the same tweet.
There are a small number of studies indicating that excessive amounts of fluoride in drinking water may lead to conditions like arthritis, osteoporosis, and muscular damage, as well as lower IQ in children. However, fluoride is currently added to drinking water at a concentration that’s high enough to strengthen teeth and help prevent tooth decay, but low enough to minimize potential health risks, per the recommendation of the U.S. Public Health Service. Plus, as data from cities like Calgary, Alberta, and Juneau, Alaska demonstrate, dental problems increase when fluoride is removed from the community water supply.
Antidepressants
While conservatives — including Trump — are quick to blame the country’s mass shooting epidemic on the mental health of perpetrators, Kennedy takes a related but different approach: blaming antidepressants. “Prior to the introduction of Prozac we had almost none of these events in our country,” he said during a June 2023 Twitter Spaces conversation hosted by Elon Musk, referring to mass shootings.
Along the same lines, in an interview with Turkish state-owned news channel TRT World in January, Kennedy called on the NIH to research potential connections between mass shootings and “some of the SSRI and psychiatric drugs people are taking.” However, there is no credible evidence establishing a link between mass shootings and antidepressants.
Atrazine and other chemicals
Between March 2022 and June 2023, Kennedy made a number of comments claiming that man-made chemicals “raining down on our children” cause “very profound sexual changes in them,” including “sexual confusion” and “gender confusion.” He is especially concerned about atrazine, a herbicide commonly used in the U.S. — a view he expressed in a June 2023 episode of The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, which was removed from YouTube later that month because it spread misinformation.
“If you, in a lab, put atrazine in a tank full of frogs, it will chemically castrate and forcibly feminize every frog in there,” Kennedy said on the podcast, referring to a 2010 study from the University of California, Berkeley. “If it’s doing that to frogs, there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well,” he claimed, also noting that “a lot of the sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing” is probably “coming from chemical exposures.” Kennedy, however, didn’t provide any of this supposed evidence. That’s probably because according to experts, there’s absolutely no indication that atrazine has the same effect on humans as it does on frogs.
Raw milk
As the debate over unpasteurized milk raged this summer, Kennedy told an audience at an event that he “only drink[s] raw milk.” He elaborated on his stance a few weeks later, tweeting, “Ag departments cracking down on small farmers selling raw milk. Meanwhile, USDA and FDA allow big corporations to pour toxic chemicals into our food and soil. I will reverse those priorities.”
In another statement posted on Twitter on Oct. 25, he warned that the “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” including its “aggressive suppression” of raw milk along with “anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma,” like hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, and nutraceuticals.
While Kennedy’s promotion of raw milk is potentially dangerous, he was right about one thing: the FDA is indeed trying to aggressively suppress the consumption of raw milk, because, as the agency explains in a March 2024 advisory, “raw milk can contain a variety of disease-causing pathogens, as demonstrated by numerous scientific studies.”
WiFi
Kennedy has also made some big claims about the dangers of WiFi. In a June 2024 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, he said that “WiFi radiation does all kinds of bad things, including causing cancer.” He went on to clarify that “WiFi radiation opens up your blood-brain barrier and so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.” When Rogan asked Kennedy to explain how that happens, RFK Jr. replied,” now you’re going beyond my expertise,” though he later said that “it degrades your mitochondria.”
While Kennedy claimed that “there are tens of thousands of studies that show the horrendous danger of WiFi radiation,” researchers at the Poynter Institute were unable to confirm that figure. They did find more than 50 studies on radio frequency energy’s possible effects on the blood-brain barrier, but many involved levels far higher than people receive from WiFi. And according to Kenneth Foster, an emeritus bioengineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania, those studies “have not provided clear evidence” that exposure to levels of radio frequency energy below accepted limits — including WiFi — disrupts the blood-brain barrier.
HIV and AIDS
At this point, it is an established scientific fact that, if left untreated, HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) can lead to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). Yet, in a June 2023 interview, Kennedy told New York Magazine that nobody knows whether HIV is solely responsible for AIDS, and that “there are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS.” Like what, you ask?
Well, in his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy refers to a theory from the early 1980s that “heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts was the real cause of immune deficiency” and that “the initial signs of AIDS” were “strongly linked to amyl nitrate — ‘poppers’ — a popular drug among promiscuous gays,” citing the long-debunked work of Peter Duesberg, a prominent AIDS denialist.
More recently, Kennedy can be seen promoting this position in a video that the right-wing watchdog group PatriotTakes posted in June 2023, falsely claiming that “100% of the people who died — the first thousand who had AIDS — were people who were addicted to poppers” who he describes as “people who were part of a gay lifestyle.” In addition to being baseless, this stance stigmatizes LGBTQIA+ individuals, placing blame for the AIDS epidemic on an already marginalized population.
Covid-19
During a July 2023 press event in New York City, Kennedy told attendees that “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while “the people who are most immune [to the virus] are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” according to a video published by the New York Post. He chalked this up to “genetic differentials among different races of the ACE2 receptor,” but didn’t provide any further details on the science.
“The claim that Covid-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and Black people is deeply offensive and feeds into sinophobic and anti-semitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years,” the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement following Kennedy’s remarks.
Three years earlier, in an August 2020 speech, Kennedy said that he thought it was possible that the U.S. government planned and orchestrated the Covid-19 pandemic. “A lot of it feels very planned to me,” Kennedy said in a video published by The Bulwark. These comments are even less surprising coming from him following his announcement on Wednesday that CHD funded the viral Covid conspiracy film Plandemic.
Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine
In a July 2023 interview with Watters, Kennedy blamed Fauci for causing “a lot of injury” during the Covid-19 pandemic “by withholding early treatment from Americans.” More specifically, he believes that the U.S. ended up having more Covid deaths than any other country because ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were not provided as treatments. In October, Kennedy included the two drugs on a list of things he believes are being kept from the American public because of the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” (along with raw milk).
But that’s not entirely true: ivermectin is FDA-approved for treating certain parasitic infections, head lice, and skin conditions, while hydroxychloroquine is FDA-approved to treat malaria and autoimmune conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. However, neither were found to be effective treatments for Covid-19.
Seed oils and beef tallow
In an Oct. 21 tweet, Kennedy said that Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils, claiming that they’re “one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic.” Instead of canola, corn, sunflower, and peanut oils, for example, he suggests that cooking with beef tallow would be healthier. But experts like Megan Hollendonner, RD, a licensed dietitian at University Hospitals in Cleveland, say that “eating healthy is all about balance and your overall diet, not labeling one particular ingredient as bad or toxic.”
And when finding that balance, seed oils — which, thanks to omega-6 fatty acids, can help improve cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of heart disease — are considered healthier than butter, lard, or tallow, which are high in saturated fat. If you’re as passionate about rendered animal fat as Kennedy, you’re in luck: “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again” merch is available on his website.
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