“There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe andeffective.” —RFK Jr., July 6, 2023
“Since 1974, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children younger than 5 years of whom 101 million were infants younger than 1 year.”
— The Lancet, May 25, 2024
Much like Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. loves saying things without any concern for the truth. If it feels good, in the moment, he’ll say it. And so, when he went on a popular podcast with Lex Fridman in July 2023 and was asked if he could name any good vaccines, he said the following:
I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.
He said this even though vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives. In addition to smallpox, in the U.S., diphtheria, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps and rubella have almost entirely been eliminated, where a million cases a year were once the collective average. We live in a miracle health bubble that vaccines have created, taking it entirely for granted.
Fast forward to a PBS Newshour interview with Amna Nawaz in November 2023, with a very different audience, and he sang a very different tune:
Nawaz: You have said previously that no vaccine is safe or effective, which is…
(Crosstalk)
Kennedy: I have never said that.
Nawaz: You did say that in a podcast interview in July.
Kennedy: No, I never said that.
Nawaz: You did say that. There are quotes, and that recording is there.
Kennedy: You are wrong. And you’re making something up.
What RFK is doing here isn’t just generically lying, he’s using a specific gaslighting technique called “countering,” where an abuser vehemently questions a victim’s memory in spite of the victim remembering things correctly. Trump engages in countering all the time — most insistently in rewriting the violent Jan. 6 coup attempt as a day of “love,” so it makes perfect sense for him to appoint RFK Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services or DHHS, where he will be free to do all manner of mischief harming the nation’s health.
The RFK nomination was hardly the only dangerous one. There were accused sex criminals, like nominees Matt Gaetz (attorney general) and Pete Hegseth (secretary of defense), security risks like Tulsi Gabbard (director of national intelligence, known for promoting Russian disinformation), and billionaires out the wazoo, alongside Fox News personalities.
They’re all dangerous in different ways, but RFK is particularly so. Dangerous enough that 77 Nobel laureates — 31 in medicine — wrote a letter to senators urging them to reject him, saying RFK Jr.’s appointment “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences.”
If anything, the letter was reserved and understated, making no mention of his complete rejection of vaccine safety, much less his unstable personal life (heroin addiction, sexual assault, etc). Instead, it calmly listed his lack of experience, opposition to vaccines “such as those that prevent measles and polio” (instead of his oppositon to all vaccines) and fluoridation of drinking water, his promotion of conspiracy theories about AIDS and other diseases, and being “a belligerent critic of respected agencies,” which is a vast understatement.
In fact, RFK has accused at least one agency, the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, of being fascist, of being engaged in a cover-up similar to the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sexual abuse, and being staffed by people who should be imprisoned or worse, as described in a November article by NBC disinformation reporter Brandy Zadrozny, drawing on speeches he’d given at the parent-run AutismOne conference, dating back to 2013. The false idea that vaccines cause autism derives from since-retracted research from the 1990s whose author, Andrew Wakefield, later lost his medical license. But much of RFK’s anti-vax crusading hinges on it, equating autistic children with victims of sexual abuse. “The institution, CDC, and the vaccine program is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect,” he said in a 2019 speech. “It’s the same reason we had a pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church.”
Earlier comments “include claims that the CDC is a ‘cesspool of corruption,’ filled with profiteers, harming children in a way he also likened to ‘Nazi death camps,’” Zadrozny reported. In a 2013 speech he “vilified a nebulous group, including vaccine scientists,” allegedly involved in the coverup conspiracy. “Is it hyperbole when I say these people should be in jail? They should be in jail and the key should be thrown away,” she quotes RFK saying. But then he goes farther:
“What Jesus Christ says is that anybody who harms a hair of these little children, that it would be better if a millstone was tied around their neck and they were thrown in the deepest part of the ocean and it would be better yet if they had never been born.”
But in reality, it’s RFK who’s harming children. In Samoa, there were over 5,700 cases of measles and 83 deaths in 2019, in an outbreak that occurred a few months after RFK visited, promoting anti-vaxx resistance to the measles vaccine, in the wake of a temporary pause that gave anti-vaxx activists an opening. “When the government did restart its vaccination programme, people were reluctant: when the epidemic was declared on 16 October, the rate had dropped to 31%, down from 84% four years previously, according to WHO data,” the Guardian reported, looking back in November. It’s impossible to quantify how many children died or “merely” got gravely ill due to RFK’s influence. We can’t tell precisely how much blood is on his hands. But we know it’s there.
And there could be so much more.
As an anti-vaxx completist, he spreads lies about new vaccines such the HPV cancer-prevention vaccine (25 false claims by one critic’s count) as well as golden oldies about AIDS: no need for a vaccine at all, since it’s not caused by a virus, but by “heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, RFK became a booster of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, two antiparasitic drugs with no demonstrable value in combating COVID. He also promoted a baseless racist and antisemitic theory that COVID “ethnically targeted” white and Black people but not Ashkenazi Jews or Chinese people. He’s a promoter of raw milk, a potential vector for the spread of bird flu. The list of dangerous beliefs he holds goes on and on and on.
While it’s hard to correlate such beliefs with specific quantifiable harms, there’s no doubt that harms would occur — and not just harms. People will die.
But there’s another way in which the harm can be very concretely understood.
In November 2023, while still running for president as an independent, RFK Jr. told an anti-vax conference that if elected “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, God bless you all. Thank you for your public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.” He says he wants to focus on chronic disease instead.
There’s so much wrong here, that one hardly knows where to begin. However, Dr. Andrea Love does a detailed analysis in her Immunologic newsletter. The big picture message is that you can’t just address chronic diseases while ignoring pathogens, because they’re intimately connected. Many chronic diseases are caused by infectious diseases, which are always going to be a big deal — always evolving (no eight-year pause for them!) — and will inevitably impact us in the U.S., even if the greatest impacts are elsewhere. Chronic diseases like cancer are a greater concern for us, precisely because vaccination and other public health measures mean we’re living longer, to the age when those diseases become much bigger health threats. The good news is that research focused on fighting infectious diseases has applications to chronic disease as well.
And, finally, she underscores the not-so-hidden role of privilege involved:
Affluent people in developed nations aren’t the only people on the planet.
While RFK Jr. and the MAGA crowd fixate on chronic diseases in their bubbles of affluence, their rhetoric reeks of privilege: the privilege they have growing up in a country that has benefited from infectious disease research and vaccines. Ironic, eh? People who are anti-vaccine are those who have benefited the most from vaccines.
But billions of other people are still contending with acute infectious agents as leading causes of death. In low- and middle-income countries, tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS are leading causes of death – because these countries don’t have the privilege we have.
In recent weeks, the “both sides” media and a few Democrats have begun to talk about finding “common ground” with RFK. There are criticisms he’s raised that they share. But the number one problem with the “common ground” approach is that it’s based on an assumption of good faith that’s simply not justified in dealing with a gaslighter — a point succinctly driven home on Bluesky by Canadian writer, Dr. Jen Gunter.
“I am enraged by the media, doctors, and politicians who are sane-washing RFK Jr and claiming some common ground. Common ground only exists when there are genuinely good intentions, but anti-science grifters are not presenting good-faith arguments. There is no common ground, only a slippery slope,” she wrote, and then gave the following example:
RFK Jr wants to end pharma ads. A good idea, except he doesn’t extend it to supplements. If he cared about negative effects of advertising he would want to target both. So there is no common ground here, bc his goal is not to improve health, rather to help his buddies sell supplements.
One politician who gets it is Sen. Chris Murphy.
“Why are we giving RFK Jr. a pass?” he asked on MSNBC. “Okay, he wants to ban pharmaceutical advertising. That’s nice. He also wants to kill our kids by withdrawing vaccines from our schools and taking fluoride out of our drinking water.”
And it’s not just RFK: “Democrats have to fight these nominees. And not just like once a week. Every day. Because the only way that Republicans even consider voting against them is if the temperature has been turned up all across the country. and I’m just worried that we are not working the way we need to work against a nominee slate that is just absolutely bonkers and out of the American mainstream by a million miles.”
This is not primarily about changing people’s minds. It’s about reminding them what they already believe. Only a handful of sickos really want to see a resurgence of childhood diseases. Samoa took RFK’s advice so we don’t have to. All we have to do is learn from their tragic mistake before we make one of our own.
