In June 2019, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited Samoa with his anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, meeting with local anti-vaxxers and government officials at a time when the country’s measles vaccine was under attack. Prominent anti-vax voices, including CHD, blamed the vaccine for two infant deaths the prior year, even after the true reason was discovered. Amid the swirling misinformation, vaccine rates plummeted from 60–70 percent to 31 percent.
A few months after RFK Jr.’s visit, measles swept through the freshly vulnerable Pacific island nation, killing 83 Samoans—mostly children. Kennedy doubled down, writing to the Samoan prime minister to question whether a “defective vaccine” was responsible for the outbreak. Even two years later, in 2021, Kennedy called a Samoan anti-vaxxer who had reportedly discouraged people from getting vaccinated during the 2019 crisis a “medical freedom hero.” Kennedy has also insisted for years, against all available scientific evidence, that vaccines cause autism, blaming them for a “holocaust” in the United States.
This week, Kennedy told supporters that if Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wins, he has promised Kennedy “control of the public health agencies,” including the Department of Health and Human Services. Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnik later denied that Kennedy would have a job with HHS—although, at the same time, he said Kennedy had convinced him to pull vaccines from the market. Trump himself, at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, seemed to lend credence to the idea of Kennedy leading on health: “I’m gonna let him go wild on health. I’m gonna let him go wild on the food. I’m gonna let him go wild on medicines,” Trump said. Trump also said on a three-hour podcast episode with Joe Rogan last week that he’s told Kennedy, “Focus on health, focus—you can do whatever you want.” It’s not clear whether such a promise would have been made in exchange for Kennedy’s political endorsement, which would be illegal. But if Kennedy were to be put in charge of HHS, he would be leading the executive department that oversees the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health, among others. In the meantime, Kennedy is an honorary co-chair on the Trump transition team, and claims to be “deeply involved in helping to choose the people who can run FDA, NIH, and CDC.”
In his own speech at Madison Square Garden, Kennedy took aim at Democrats, saying they were once “the party that wanted to protect public health, and women’s sports”—a bizarre pairing that highlights his recent pivot to attacking trans athletes and gender-affirming care. Kennedy, who ran as a Democratic and then independent presidential candidate before throwing his support behind Trump, is also spreading misinformation on chronic health issues such as obesity, diabetes, drug overdoses, and autism; on Tuesday, for example, he said diabetes could be “cured with good food.” In his Sunday speech, Kennedy characterized Trump as a president who would “protect our children … and women’s sports,” as well as “end the corruption at the federal agencies—at FDA, at NIH, at CDC, and at the CIA”—a constellation of bodies rarely joined together, which he implied are conducting surveillance upon and acting against the interests of the American people.
“This unbridled assault on science and scientists, it’s highly destabilizing for the country,” Baylor College of Medicine dean Peter Hotez, author of The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science, told me earlier this year, a few months after Kennedy announced his run. But it’s not just Kennedy—Trump and other Republicans in Congress are also leading the charge to undermine expertise and further erode public trust in the government, he said. “This is what authoritarianism is all about,” Hotez said, lamenting “the collateral damage that it’s going to do to our democracy” and pointing to the ways Stalin portrayed scientists as public enemies during the Great Purge.
Hotez sees the false claims about vaccines causing autism, which first started gaining momentum in the late 1990s, as phase one of the assault on science. When that was thoroughly debunked, anti-science activists began aligning themselves “around the banner of health freedom, medical freedom,” getting a major boost with the Covid-19 pandemic, Hotez said. “Now we’re seeing the next phase, which is not only targeting the science but targeting the scientists and portraying them as public enemies. That is both scary and worrisome.”
The past five years have seen a “substantial” drop of trust in public health and scientists, especially among Republicans, Robert Blendon, Harvard University professor emeritus of political analysis and health policy, told me. At the same time, the anti-vaccine movement—which previously was not tied to politics—swung wildly to the right. “Republicans have become incredibly distrustful of vaccines,” Blendon said. “The Republican Party after the [start of] Covid has become very anti–public health.” They lashed out against what they perceived to be government overreach, which made them receptive to questions about the safety and effectiveness of the Covid vaccines—and, soon, other vaccines as well, Blendon said. “This led to a tipping point with this enormous resentment among particularly Republican audiences that the government went way too far.”
Trump’s own short-lived support for vaccines during the measles outbreak in 2019 and Covid in 2020 seems to have been a blip; he has spouted anti-vax views since at least 2007. Although Operation Warp Speed produced highly effective Covid vaccines in record time, one of the Trump administration’s only accomplishments of the pandemic, “the Republicans don’t want to claim it,” Trump said in September. At least 17 times, Trump has pledged to defund schools mandating vaccines. While his campaign says this vow applies to Covid vaccines only, Trump doesn’t make any distinctions in his speeches, opening up the possibility of all childhood vaccines being banned—though it’s not clear how he would carry out this plan. (No states require Covid vaccines for school attendance.)
“If we have another epidemic, and this doesn’t change, I’m afraid of disaster,” Blendon said. “I’d see large groups of people not taking vaccines in the next wave, not taking the treatments because they don’t trust the FDA recommendations. So I’m absolutely really worried about how many people could actually die because they will not take advice of experts and scientists.”
But it wouldn’t take another novel pathogen to set tragedy in play. There are already diseases out there—Covid included—that can cause significant loss. “I’m worried that you’re going to start seeing declines in immunization rates in pockets across the country,” Hotez said. And declines like these might not be immediately recognizable, especially in states that have overall high levels of vaccination but communities with low rates where an outbreak could take hold. “The problem is, the CDC is not set up to look for it, because they don’t look at county level; they only look at the state level.” The other worry, he said, is that the anti-vaccine movement is globalizing—in high-, middle-, and low-income countries, where decades of hard-won progress against deadly childhood diseases could be swiftly undone.
The risks are not just about vaccines, however. As Kennedy’s pivot to new controversies indicates, the anti-science crowd is after the erosion of expertise itself, which could further damage trust in anyone in a position of authority. “I feel like we’re just so much on the edge of fascism right now,” Hotez said. “We’re just so close to this thing really falling apart.”
The best rebuttal to misinformation, at least in theory, is the truth—but it has to come from the right person, and it has to be presented carefully. “If people have a trusted source of information, it’s likely to protect substantially against misinformation,” Blendon said. In addition to improving trust in government agencies, he recommended having local medical figures step forward to provide accurate, understandable information to their communities, he said. “If the scientist is standing in Washington, or it seems like they’re standing in Washington, people in parts of the country just dismiss whatever they say.… We have to find some way to rebuild who the trusted people are.”
While reporting this story, I came across RFK Jr.’s 2022 book, A Letter to Liberals, published by Children’s Health Defense. It deliberately mischaracterized the astonishingly high rates of deaths among working-age people during the early years of the pandemic as “non-Covid deaths,” inaccurately blaming vaccines instead of the virus and the massive health disruption it brought. I know it was a mischaracterization—an outright flip of the truth—because the article it cited was written by me.
While I’ve reported on public health misinformation for years, seeing my own work twisted like this gave me fresh appreciation of just how half-baked these anti-science campaigns can be. Anti-science influencers love to tell their followers to “do your own research.” Yet they seem to expect their followers will do the exact opposite. Kennedy doesn’t seem to think his readers will follow a link to see that the actual evidence weighs against his thesis. Of course he doesn’t: If they did, they wouldn’t keep buying his books. His and others’ claims have been debunked over and over again.
