RFK Jr. Is an Excellent Conspiracy Theorist

When it comes to distorting science, his qualifications are unparalleled.

RFK Jr. Is an Excellent Conspiracy Theorist

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, is a longtime conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist. He thinks Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates are leaders of a “vaccine cartel” that intentionally prolonged or even started the coronavirus pandemic in order to promote “mischievous inoculations.” Kennedy also blames immunizations for autism and obesity (among other chronic diseases) in children. In the meantime, he isn’t really sure whether HIV causes AIDS, or whether vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles are actually dangerous.

As a doctor, I have spent years following—and fighting—anti-vaccine falsehoods. Along the way, I’ve learned an important lesson: Despite RFK Jr.’s fringe beliefs, he often seems to make sense. Kennedy’s defenders celebrate his fondness for, and facility with, evidence. His real talent, though, is for the clever manipulation of facts. Kennedy is not just a conspiracy theorist; he’s a very good conspiracy theorist. When his confirmation hearing starts on Wednesday, we can expect that he will do what he’s always done, which is to apply a veneer of erudition to nonsense. He may even come off as almost … reasonable.

To witness how this works, read the letter he sent to the prime minister of Samoa on behalf of the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense in November 2019, during that country’s deadly measles outbreak. Kennedy offers his condolences for the tragic deaths of “precious Samoan children,” and then suggests the need to study the outbreak carefully, so as to “thoroughly understand its etiology.” What might have caused thousands of Samoans to get sick? The letter poses two possibilities: “It is critical that the Samoan Health Ministry determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine.”

At first glance, and for nonexperts, this letter may appear well reasoned and well sourced. It weaves in historical elements and biomedical data, and includes a list of peer-reviewed references at the end. The letter’s main request—that Samoan officials do nothing more than perform genetic testing on the circulating virus—sounds prudent. Prior research has indicated that vaccinated individuals may shed the virus and infect others, the letter says. Wouldn’t it be good to know if that produced the outbreak?

[Read: We’re about to find out how much Americans like vaccines]

In reality, of course, the epidemic was caused not by the vaccines but by the lack of them. (A vaccine-administration accident the year before had produced a scare that led vaccination rates to decline dramatically.) Although the letter’s implication that vaccines were to blame seemed wrong on its face, only when I dived into the cited scientific articles could I see the problems with its details. Kennedy incorrectly claims that genetic sequencing of a large measles outbreak in California from about four years prior found that at least one-third of the cases were due to the vaccine. “Alarmed CDC officials documented this emerging phenomenon,” he wrote. The referenced articles show this to be a fundamental misrepresentation. Although they do describe how the vaccine may, in rare cases, produce a dangerous case of measles, they specifically note that there is no risk of its being transmitted to another person. The genetic testing that Kennedy referenced is used, in part, to distinguish among people who have experienced mild vaccine reactions such as rash and fever from those who have true measles infections. This is important during active epidemics when public-health officials are widely immunizing people, while at the same time trying to isolate infectious individuals. (Kennedy’s press team did not respond to emailed questions about his letter to Samoa, or about other issues with his credibility that are raised in this article.)

A complete refutation of the Samoa letter would run many pages. That may be the point. With his ample, erroneous allusions to scholarship and appeals to authority, Kennedy has perfected the art of the Gish Gallop: a debate strategy in which the speaker simply overwhelms the listener with information, not all of it true. Kennedy’s skill at flooding his audiences with specious claims that sound logical or highbrow was on full display during his 2023 interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan. Over the course of three hours, Kennedy regaled the host with stories about vaccine safety, Albert Camus, Wi-Fi radiation, and the sexual health of frogs, among other subjects. He offered up a bounty of scientific arguments: The words study and studies came up 70 times during the conversation. And, as he has done elsewhere, he encouraged the audience to fact-check everything he said. “Nobody should trust my word on this,” he declared. “You know, what I say is irrelevant. What is relevant is the science.”

[Read: The new Rasputins]

Most of Rogan’s listeners—like most U.S. senators—aren’t likely to have the scientific expertise to assess each of his claims, and certainly not in real time. I caught some errors in the Rogan interview only by virtue of my medical training. For example, Kennedy criticized the inclusion of the hepatitis B shot in the childhood vaccine schedule. The virus is primarily a problem for intravenous-drug users, prostitutes, and homosexuals, he suggested. “Why would you give it to a one-day-old baby, you know, or a three-hour-old baby, and then four more times when that baby is not going to be even subject to it for 16 years?” he asked Rogan. Kennedy’s story sounds informed: He is facile with epidemiology and vaccine regulations; he can describe historical machinations that supposedly took place between Merck and the CDC. But the truth is that most chronic hepatitis B infections are contracted during early childhood, or through mother-to-child transmission. That’s why the World Health Organization recommends immunizing babies, and it’s why nearly every country has chosen to do so.

Kennedy does, at times, say true things about vaccines. He was not wrong, for example, when he told the podcaster Lex Fridman that early batches of the polio vaccine were contaminated with a virus called SV40. But he magnifies and distorts such flaws to the point of absurdity. SV40-containing vaccines did not cause an “explosion” of cancers, as he has argued. Kennedy is also right to say the MMR vaccine doesn’t always provide lifelong immunity to the mumps virus. However, his more extreme assertions—that the shot is causing mumps outbreaks in the military or that the disease is harmless in children—are wrong. (Before vaccination, service members routinely suffered from infections, and kids were at a heightened risk of developing brain inflammation and hearing loss.) Kennedy relies on scraps of truth to construct an alternative reality in which vaccines don’t work, their harms outweigh their benefits, and the diseases themselves aren’t so bad.

At his confirmation hearing, senators will ask him to defend that dangerous, alternative reality. He is likely to do so with impressive-sounding falsehoods, delivered with aplomb. Heed his own advice. No one should trust his word on this.

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