RFK Jr.’s notoriously false, conspiracy-ridden anti-vaccination campaigns, including against school vaccination mandates, threaten efforts to keep all Americans healthy.
Kennedy’s confirmation hearing January 29 didn’t ease those concerns. Confronted with the wilder conspiracy theories he’s embraced—like the claim that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to attack certain groups—he mostly soft-peddled or danced around them, rarely giving direct answers. He dodged questions about the Trump administration’s freeze on federal health funding and seemed to have no idea what Federally Qualified Health Centers are (they’re community health centers that provide care to underserved populations, regardless of ability to pay). He made vaguely reassuring statements like, “I am supportive of vaccines,” but waffled when, for example, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) confronted him with a child’s onesie sold by Children’s Health Defense, the group Kennedy founded, that reads, “No Vax, No Problem.”
RFK Jr.’s opposition to profiteering companies is highly selective. In his own words, he’s rooting for “psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals, and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.” His statement, however, ignores the myriad companies and investors aggressively trying to cash in on this list—which includes products repeatedly shown to be either harmful or ineffective, like ivermectin. The key study advocating its use was retracted in December. RFK Jr. also has invited the U.S.’ largest producer of raw milk to be in charge of raw milk policy, despite multiple recalls of this company’s products, most recently because of contamination by bird flu virus. For RFK Jr., opportunistic profiting off of unsafe products is apparently fine, as is having plutocrat supporters keen to slash environmental protections, the social safety net, and of course their own income tax.
RFK Jr.’s notoriously false, conspiracy-ridden anti-vaccination campaigns, including against school vaccination mandates, threaten efforts to keep all Americans healthy. One rare success in reducing unfair differences in rates of disease across social groups—by income, by race or ethnicity, by rural or urban location—has been for vaccine-preventable childhood illness thanks to school vaccination mandates plus such federal programs as Vaccines for Children. Weakening these programs won’t “Make America Healthy Again.”
RFK Jr. falsely pits “infectious” disease against “chronic” diseases without understanding many diseases are both infectious and chronic, including numerous types of cancer (e.g., cervical cancer, liver cancer) and ulcers—and many infectious diseases lead to chronic disease (e.g., HIV/AIDS, long Covid). Yet, Kennedy famously declared that the National Institutes of Health should “take a break” from “infectious diseases,” and pivot to “chronic diseases.” He apparently is unaware that 85% of the current NIH budget already goes to research on cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, drug addiction, mental health, aging, child health, and the like.
RFK Jr. should never be given power to implement his fallacious health-harming agendas.
