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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on Capitol Hill after meeting with Sen. Bernie Sanders on Jan. 8.
/Bloomberg via Getty Images
/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will appear before two Senate committees this week, the next steps in his bid to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
There is a lot for senators to dig into. HHS secretary is a consequential job that oversees all of America’s health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, Medicare, Medicaid and more. HHS employs about 90,000 people and has a budget of $1.7 trillion annually, which is about the size of Australia’s GDP.
Kennedy has been in the public eye his whole life as a member of the Democratic political family that includes President John F. Kennedy. For most of his 71 years, he’s been a government outsider, and he has built his fortune and reputation disparaging the scientists and institutions he’s now in line to lead. He’s also made wild and untrue claims, including that Wi-Fi causes cancer and that antidepressants are to blame for school shootings.
The opposition to Kennedy’s confirmation has been fierce. An advocacy group called Protect Our Care is financing an ad campaign in eight Republican Senators’ states, urging them to reject him.
Kennedy’s allies and supporters remain confident he will be confirmed. “Bobby Kennedy has met with over 60 United States senators” ahead of the confirmation hearings, White House staffer Katie Miller told NPR. “He’s prepared and excited.”
As Congress prepares to grill him this week, here’s a refresher on some of his stated plans, his record and his troublingly counterfactual ideas.
1. For decades, he’s spread misinformation about childhood vaccines
Kennedy has tried to downplay his anti-vaccine views in recent months and years, but he has a record of attacking vaccines, including routine childhood vaccinations. For much of his career, he was chairman of Children’s Health Defense, which advocates against vaccines and spreads misleading and inaccurate claims about their safety, including the thoroughly debunked claim they cause autism.
That work has had real world impact, most strikingly in Samoa, a small island nation in the Pacific. Just before a measles outbreak in 2019 in which 83 people died, Kennedy toured the country and later wrote to the prime minister falsely blaming the vaccine for the deaths instead of measles.
As the head of HHS, there’s a whole host of ways that Kennedy could change the landscape of childhood vaccines in the U.S., which infectious disease experts say could lead to a resurgence of infectious diseases among children, including meningitis and polio.
“It is a fantasy to think we can lower vaccination rates and herd immunity in the U.S. and not suffer recurrence of these diseases,” Gregory Poland, a vaccine researcher at the Mayo Clinic told KFF Health News in December. “One in 3,000 kids who gets measles is going to die. There’s no treatment for it. They are going to die.” (Kennedy has said the treatment for measles is chicken soup.)
Kennedy’s apparent inability to distinguish truth from myth is alarming, says Elizabeth Jacobs, emerita professor of epidemiology from the University of Arizona. “Kennedy has been told repeatedly by experts in the field that his positions on vaccines are wrong and not supported by scientific evidence, and he refuses to listen,” she says. “I think that that is a very dangerous position for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to have.”
2. Scientists worry he won’t prepare the U.S. for the risk of bird flu
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy railed against the federal government’s actions, including vaccine and mask requirements. He frequently said pandemic public health measures were more restrictive than Hitler’s Germany, saying once that at least “you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.”
How would Kennedy use his broad power as secretary if he’s faced with a public health emergency? Kennedy and his allies haven’t publicly addressed the issue. Meanwhile, as there have been several serious cases of bird flu among Americans, including the first death, and there is evidence the virus is spreading widely among poultry and cattle, intensifying concerns about another pandemic crisis.
Kennedy has already begun to discredit public health measures to counter bird flu. In an online post last summer, he claimed there’s “no evidence” the bird flu vaccines in the national stockpile will work and that they “appear dangerous.” He suggested in another post that “someone” might bioengineer a dangerous form of the virus to profit off the vaccine.
The idea is “preposterous,” Dr. Andrew Pekosz, a professor of microbiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health told NPR. The existing bird flu vaccines “have shown a safety record,” he says. “They’re not dangerous.”
Although the threat bird flu poses to humans remains small now, “this is like some brush burning around your house — you better pay attention because it could turn into something else,” Dr. Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease physician at Georgetown University and a former FDA official, told NPR.
3. His financial conflicts are raising eyebrows
Kennedy has made many millions of dollars from anti-vaccine legal actions. New public filings show that, if and when he’s confirmed, he could still financially benefit from lawsuits against Merck’s vaccine that protects against HPV and cervical cancer.
In other words, Kennedy would be in a position to potentially profit from vaccine litigation while regulating drugmakers and overseeing federal vaccine policy as the head of HHS.
“RFK Jr’s ethics agreement is inadequate,” Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, who specializes in government ethics, wrote to NPR. “It doesn’t address the bias created by his continuing financial interest in the litigation against Merck.”
4. He wants a major shakeup in scientific research
The COVID-19 pandemic intensified distrust of federal science research and public health efforts, especially among Republicans. The conservative Heritage Foundation and Republican lawmakers have been floating long to-do lists for changing the NIH, including dramatically reorganizing the centers and institutes that constitute the agency.
Kennedy has said he’d like to “immediately replace” hundreds of federal scientists and reorient their work away from infectious diseases.
During the first weeks of the Trump administration, scientists around the country sounded alarm bells about scientific meetings that were canceled with little notice or explanation. Those cancellations have already disrupted research funding and delayed scheduled updates to infectious disease dashboards.
Health agency spokespeople issued a statement last week explaining that these were temporary interruptions designed to allow the Trump team to get up and running. But many scientists worry it’s a sign that political appointees intend to exert a new level of control on the federal health and research agencies. Kennedy’s stated plans to reshape the health agencies and his lifetime of questioning the integrity of federal scientists could intensify those concerns.
5. His long-held abortion views are polar opposite of GOP
In an interview last spring, Kennedy said on abortion: “My belief is we should leave it to the woman, we shouldn’t have government involved,” he explained. Further, he said abortion should be legal at any point in pregnancy. He later tempered that position, saying on Facebook that an “emerging consensus” was that “abortion should be legal up until a certain number of weeks and restricted thereafter.”
Republicans are eager to curtail abortion access now that they have retaken power in Washington, including by potentially reviving a Victorian-era obscenity law or curtailing access to abortion medication. A health secretary who favors abortion access could interfere with those plans to restrict access. Former Vice President Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom group has launched a six-figure ad campaign opposing Kennedy based on his abortion views, writing on social media, “We need leadership that defends life and protects the most vulnerable—not radical policies that undermine our values.”
Many other anti-abortion rights groups have remained silent on his nomination. And in recent meetings with Kennedy, anti-abortion rights senators say they came away reassured. “He’s gonna align himself, by choice, with President Trump on pro-life policies,” Sen. Ted Budd of North Carolina told NPR recently.
Groups that support abortion rights largely oppose Kennedy. “RFK Jr. is an unfit, unqualified extremist who cannot be trusted to protect the health, safety, and reproductive freedom of American families,” Reproductive Freedom for All wrote soon after he was nominated.
6. He won’t accept the fact that HIV causes AIDS
It is well established science that AIDS is caused by a virus known as HIV, but it’s a fact that Kennedy does not accept. Instead, he has claimed AIDS is caused by recreational drug use and that scientists, including Dr. Anthony Fauci formerly of NIH, conspired to make up an infectious disease responsible for AIDS so they could “take control of it.”
“They were doing phony, crooked studies to develop a cure that killed people without really being able to understand what HIV was, and pumping up fear about it constantly, not really understanding whether it was causing AIDS,” Kennedy told New York Magazine last year.
This is not true, and Kennedy’s insistence on this point has HIV advocates calling his nomination dangerous. The federal government pays for the treatment of nearly half of all HIV-positive Americans through the Ryan White Program. And during President Trump’s first term, the federal government launched an ambitious effort to end the HIV epidemic by 2030. If HHS is led by Kennedy, an HIV denialist, those projects could be in jeopardy, advocates say.
7. He wants focus on lifestyle and chronic disease, but hasn’t detailed how
Kennedy talks a lot about shifting the focus of the federal health agencies towards promotion of a healthy lifestyle and the root causes of chronic diseases. This is the rare area in which his views garner some bipartisan support.
Kennedy has said he’d like to overhaul dietary guidelines, reform federal programs that pay for ultra-processed foods, take on crop subsidies, and other initiatives. It’s unclear how he could accomplish these goals without new regulations on the food and agriculture industries. “A real litmus test about whether or not they’re serious is whether they take on some of the economic interests that are causing our chronic disease epidemic,” former CDC director Tom Frieden told NPR in November.
Jacobs of the University of Arizona bristles at the way Kennedy talks about chronic disease and nutrition as if scientists have been ignoring them. “To pretend like those are his ideas alone is outrageous,” she says. “You can see for yourself just by a cursory search of PubMed,” a public database of medical and scientific research, she points out. “These are not novel ideas. These are not ideas that are exclusive to Mr. Kennedy. They are ideas that have been the result of thousands of hours of scientific research.”
Will Stone contributed to this report.
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