“Efforts to undermine confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed, they’re dangerous,” Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a polio survivor, declared earlier this month. “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts,” McConnell added, in what was clearly a reference to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy insists he has “never told the public to avoid vaccination.” Here is why an accurate response to that claim might reprise the lyrics of a song from the 1920s: “Your lips tell me no, no, but there’s yes, yes in your eyes.”
In 2018, when two infants in the nation of Samoa died following an injection to prevent measles, the government suspended its vaccination program for children. Vaccination rates plummeted from 74 percent to 31 percent and herd immunity was lost. In September 2019, a measles outbreak began, eventually infecting 5,700 people, 83 of whom died.
Kennedy sent a four-page letter to the prime minister of Samoa suggesting that vaccines for pregnant mothers may have stimulated “more virulent measles strains.” In a visit Kennedy made to Samoa paid for by Children’s Health Defense — an anti-vax organization he founded and where he served as chairman and chief legal counsel — he celebrated a Samoan activist who called the vaccine “the greatest crime against our own people” as a “medical freedom hero.”
The World Health Organization subsequently confirmed that the infants’ deaths were caused by a muscle relaxant two nurses has accidentally added to their vaccines. Although Kennedy did not accept this conclusion, he maintained he had “nothing to do with the people not vaccinating in Samoa. I never told anybody not to vaccinate.”
Asked about childhood vaccines in 2021, Kennedy said, “We — our job — is to resist and to talk about it to everybody… I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child… Don’t keep your mouth shut anymore. Confront everybody on it.”
Two years later, Kennedy declared “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” Relying on a discredited 1998 study, he claims that “autism comes from vaccines.” According to him, polio vaccines do more harm than good.
Kennedy has claimed that both the 1918 influenza epidemic and HIV originated in vaccine research labs. He has alleged that COVID-19 was a bioweapon, designed “to attack Caucasians and black people” and that the people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,. He thinks that giving COVID vaccines to children is “criminal medical malpractice”; Operation Warp Speed was a plot engineered by intelligence agencies, the U.S. military and a vaccine cartel led by Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci; and the death of baseball icon Hank Aaron at the age of 86 was “part of a wave of suspicious deaths” connected to the vaccine.
Kennedy implied that restrictions on American citizens during the height of the pandemic were worse than persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, when “you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did.”
Convinced that fluoride causes arthritis, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders and thyroid disease, Kennedy supports removal of the substance from America’s water systems. He believes the use of antidepressants helps explain the spike in school shootings, saying that “prior to the introduction of Prozac we had almost none of these events in our country.”
Exposure to chemical “endocrine disrupters” in tap water, Kennedy asserts, contributes to “gender confusion.” They can “chemically castrate and forcibly feminize frogs and there’s a lot of evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well.” He maintains that 5G high-speed networks are designed to “control our behavior.”
In 2022, Aaron Siri, who is currently helping Kennedy vet candidates for positions in HHS and may become the agency’s general counsel, petitioned the FDA to rescind approval of vaccines for polio and 13 other diseases. “I love Aaron Siri,” Kennedy said. “There’s nobody who’s been a greater asset to the medical freedom movement than him.”
It’s worth noting that a recent study demonstrates that vaccines are “one of humanity’s greatest achievements.” During the last 50 years, vaccines have saved an estimated 154 million lives worldwide. Compulsory immunization programs have reduced infant mortality by 40 percent, almost completely eradicated smallpox, reduced polio cases by 99 percent, rescued 98 million people from the measles and prevented almost 20 million deaths from COVID.
Kennedy’s claims about the 1918 pandemic, HIV, COVID immunity, the origins of Operation Warp Speed, autism, antidepressants, fluoridated water, 5G networks and gender dysphoria have all been debunked.
As head of HHS, Kennedy could change the process for determining the eligibility of vaccines for insurance coverage. He could order childhood vaccines, which have already passed clinical trials, to undergo double-blind trials, which would deprive children receiving placebos of protection before confirming what is already known — that they are safe and effective — and delay returning vaccines to general use. And he could continue to spread spurious claims about vaccines, prevent herd immunity among children and reduce public confidence in other measures that promote and protect our health.
During the campaign, Trump promised to let Kennedy “go wild.” Last week, the president-elect predicted that RFK is “going to be much less radical than you would think.” Meanwhile, 75 Nobel Laureates — in medicine, chemistry, physics and economics — called on the Senate to reject Kennedy because he poses a substantial threat to public health. Caveat emptor.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
