Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services, is ringing alarm bells and prompting sharp criticism from Democrats who are calling him everything from “dangerous, unqualified, and unserious” to “f*****g insane.”
Critics say the 70-year-old environmental lawyer and former presidential candidate, who has been accused of making numerous false and misleading claims about health and science, should be disqualified from the top health post. That’s because the secretary of HHS oversees a number of agencies that regulate much of what he’s been railing against or ranting about, including vaccines, medical drugs, the health system, and our nation’s food.
RFK Jr. also has no medical degree, which breaks with long-standing tradition for the health secretary post. The nomination is just the latest in a long line of controversial picks by Trump for his incoming administration.
RFK Jr., the son of former U.S. Attorney General and Senator Robert F. Kennedy and a member of the prominent Kennedy family, ran against Trump as an independent candidate in the 2024 presidential election, and ended up endorsing Trump after dropping out of the race. The rest of the Kennedy family, longtime Democrats, have been quick to denounce RFK Jr.’s alliance with Trump, calling it a “betrayal” and distancing themselves from both politicians’ public stances.
Here’s a look at some of RFK Jr.’s controversial claims on some key health issues:
COVID-19
Kennedy falsely claimed that some race groups have immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. “COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Virologist Angela Rasmussen of the University of Saskatchewan has debunked this claim, arguing that “Jewish or Chinese protease consensus sequences are not a thing in biochemistry, but they are in racism and antisemitism,” as reported by The New York Times.
The remarks have also been denounced by activist groups. The American Jewish Committee told CNN that RFK Jr.’s “assertion that COVID was genetically engineered to spare Jewish and Chinese people is deeply offensive and incredibly dangerous,” and the Anti-Defamation League told the same outlet that Kennedy’s claim “feeds into sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”
Vaccines and autism
Kennedy, an anti-vax activist, has called the COVID-19 vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Health officials have countered that the COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective and has saved million of lives.
RFK Jr. has further asserted that vaccines administered in childhood, including the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, are linked to the development of autism in children. “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” Kennedy told Fox News.
RFK Jr. blamed the preservative thimerosal, which was taken out of the MMR vaccine in 2001, but is still used in some flu vaccines, according to The Washington Post. In 2018, he helped launch the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which criticizes the number of shots kids are given today. (Kennedy has argued he’s not anti-vaccine, just “pro-vaccine safety.”)
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told CNN that Kennedy is “a science denialist who makes misleading or false statements about the safety of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.”
A 2004 report from the Institute of Medicine concluded there is no link between autism and vaccination, and dozens of studies in peer-reviewed journals also disproved the notion that the MMR vaccine causes autism.
Experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics agree that the MMR vaccine is not responsible for recent increases in the number of children diagnosed with autism. The MMR vaccine is administered at around the typical age of onset for autism, so some parents mistakenly link the two events, The Washington Post noted.
Vaccines have eradicated many dangerous diseases throughout history, including deadly smallpox.
Raw milk and unprocessed foods
RFK Jr. said he will remove processed food from school lunches “immediately,” but nutritionists who remember how Trump fought against stricter school lunch standards in his first term, and how Republicans attempted to derail former first lady Michelle Obama’s healthy lunch agenda, are skeptical that he will have support inside the administration.
But where RFK Jr. gets more controversial isn’t with his plan to crack down on unhealthy school lunches or remove food dyes from cereal, but with his threat to fire nutritionists and other staff at the Food and Drug Administration and promote unregulated and unsafe food alternatives like unprocessed raw milk, which can cause death if contaminated.
Drinking raw milk has always been somewhat risky because it is not pasteurized, a process that kills harmful bacteria, and consuming it is associated with outbreaks of pathogens such as E. coli, which can cause kidney failure and death.
In a post on X, RFK Jr. made clear he would either limit or stop the FDA from regulating raw milk, vitamins, psychedelics, and much more. He has also trafficked in extreme conspiracy theories that blame the U.S. government for “mass poisoning” Americans.
“FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” RFK Jr. wrote just days before the presidential election. “This includes its aggressive suppression of 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.”
Current FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said Tuesday that “not having experts, I think historically, in every society, has been a case for demise of that society,” and noted to The New York Times that while the current HHS rarely interferes with scientific decisions at the FDA, “it’s totally within the law for the president or the HHS secretary to overrule the entire FDA.”