Putting a conspiracy theorist in charge: what could go wrong?

My mom was 49 years old when she found out she had cancer. In six months, that thief stole one piece of her after another, until it finally took her life. My husband’s family has suffered for generations from early-onset Alzheimer’s, and he now participates in groundbreaking research that is helping provide treatments proven to delay the disease. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t lost someone they knew to COVID-19. 

I’m only one of tens of millions of Americans whose lives have been affected by these diseases and others. Americans overwhelmingly want ongoing research and real advancements in treatments. That’s why we all need to know what is happening at the highest levels in public health right now. 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is the current Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). This department is massive, overseeing multiple crucial agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Kennedy was nominated by President Trump and confirmed by the Senate along partisan lines—Mitch McConnell was the only Republican to vote against him, along with every Democrat. 

I learned a lot about Kennedy during the days leading up to his confirmation hearing: mainly that he is a deeply weird dude. His daughter says he once chainsawed the head off a beached whale carcass, strapped it to the roof of their minivan, and drove it 5 hours back to their home, while “whale juice would pour into the windows.” (Kennedy has declined to either confirm or deny this.) Kennedy himself has told the story of the time he pulled over to retrieve the carcass of a bear from the road, intending to skin and eat it, but later decided to leave the dead bear in Central Park as a prank. And Kennedy has also publicly admitted to suffering from cognitive difficulties, which doctors first suspected were caused by a tumor, but later discovered were the result of a pork tapeworm larva in his brain, which, in his own words, “ate a portion of it [his brain] and then died.” (Infections of this type can best be prevented by proper handwashing and cooking meat to safe temperatures.)

He has blithely recounted how he “did very, very poorly in school, until I started doing narcotics.” Regarding heroin, he said, “It worked for me. And if it still worked, I’d still be doing it.”

More revealing of his character were the audio recordings he secretly taped of conversations with his second wife during their acrimonious divorce, including one in which he told her it was her fault he had cheated on her dozens of times. (She had previously found the diary in which he recorded 37 instances of his adultery with various women.)

Kennedy’s nomination came as a shock to many; the fact that he is an attorney with no medical training whatsoever is not unprecedented; several former HHS heads have been lawyers. And the Kennedy name helps to overshadow a lot of personal shortcomings and eccentricities. But no other HHS Secretary has ever been an antivaccine activist. 

RFK Jr. has made a name for himself over the years with his antivax rhetoric and activism. He is a personal friend of Andrew Wakefield, the former doctor whose false claims started the conspiracy theory that vaccines cause autism, and whose “research” was so fraudulent and unethical that he was drummed out of medicine in Britain. But Kennedy says, “In any just society, we would be building statues to Andy Wakefield.” 

The Prime Minister of Samoa holds Kennedy responsible for exacerbating the damage of a measles outbreak in 2019. Infant MMR vaccination rates had dropped to 31% after the tragic deaths of two babies when nurses erroneously mixed the vaccine with expired muscle relaxant. Kennedy visited the country and helped spread misinformation and fear among parents, and later, during the outbreak, sent a letter to the prime minister, absurdly suggesting that the vaccine itself may have caused the outbreak. Ultimately, 5,700 people were sickened, and at least 83 died—mostly small children and babies. The small nation ran out of child-sized coffins.

Putting an antivaxxer in charge of the department that oversees vaccinations was unthinkable before 2025, and is why McConnell and Democrats voted against him. “I’m a survivor of childhood polio,” the Republican Senator writes. “In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures…” He goes on to say Kennedy has “a record of trafficking in dangerous conspiracy theories.”

As one example among hundreds, in 2020, RFK Jr. ranted that government efforts to combat COVID-19 were “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.” 

More than 15,000 doctors, along with the nation’s largest nurses’ union, urged the Senate to reject RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary. 

But all of this was before his confirmation. Perhaps Kennedy would grow into the role? Learn from the world-class experts at the agencies he would lead? After all, during his confirmation hearing, he told concerned Senators, “I am not anti-vaccine,” and “my job is to empower the scientists, if I am privileged to be confirmed.”

So, how has that been going? 

He mass-fired 10,000 employees across HHS agencies. 

He affirmed the long-debunked chemtrail conspiracy theory and said, “I’m going to do everything in my power to stop it.”

We’ve had the worst measles outbreak in 33 years, and have suffered our first death from measles in a decade—that of an unvaccinated child in Texas—thanks to dropping vaccination rates spurred by antivax rhetoric from people like RFK Jr. The CDC’s new leadership buried a report by its own scientists, which found (unsurprisingly) that the risk of measles infection is high in outbreak areas with low vaccination rates.

During his confirmation hearing, Kennedy promised “radical transparency.” But in May, he said he may bar HHS scientists from publishing in top medical journals. And in April, he fired the entire FOIA office at CDC: the office that handles Freedom of Information Act requests—which government agencies are required by law to fulfill. He fired two-thirds of the FOIA department at the FDA. 

Massive cuts are threatening huge repositories of critical research data gleaned over years of study, now marked for deletion—including cancer and Alzheimer’s data—and this research will likely be lost forever if no one (Congress) stops it. 

PRAMS, a decades-old program dedicated to monitoring infant and maternal health from pregnancy through postpartum, apparently didn’t seem worthwhile to this allegedly pro-life administration. Every single employee was fired in April.  

Dr. Peter Marks, HHS’s top vaccine regulator, was told to “turn over data on cases of brain swelling and deaths caused by the measles vaccine.” He was unable to comply because no such data exists. He was given the option of resigning or being fired. He resigned. 

During his confirmation hearing, RFK Jr. promised a concerned Republican Senator that he would not make any changes to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the committee. 

In April, Kennedy announced that “by September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic,” a promise no scientist would ever dream of making. He has hired David Geier to investigate the supposed link between vaccines and autism, which has already been disproven countless times. Geier has pushed these debunked claims for many years. He’s also been charged and fined by the State of Maryland for practicing medicine without a license—he administered Lupron, a puberty-blocking drug, as an autism treatment to children despite having no medical training.

RFK Jr. canceled $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine development, claiming these therapies “fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.” (The Secretary seems unaware that from 2020-2022, these vaccines saved 3.2 million American lives and prevented 18.5 million hospitalizations, saving the country $1.15 trillion.) He said his team “reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted.” But the recently resigned CDC head of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases says Kennedy has never been briefed by anyone from his department on any of these topics, despite their repeated offers. “He’s getting information from somewhere,” Dr. Daskalakis says, but it’s not from the experts. 

His war on mRNA vaccine research threatens some of our most promising cancer studies as well. Recent mRNA studies treating two of the most feared cancers—prostate and glioblastoma—have seen unprecedented success. Kennedy’s bias against this therapy may cost untold lives if these studies are shut down or delayed. 

The National Cancer Institute, the world’s premier cancer research center, has been thrown into chaos by budget cuts and firings. Things are so bad that one lab director who’s worked there for three decades says, “If we survive, I will be somewhat surprised.”

Kennedy fired the director of the CDC, Dr. Susan Monarez, less than a month into her tenure. Almost immediately afterward, we saw a dramatic exodus of CDC leadership as four other top officials publicly resigned. Monarez says she was fired because she would not comply with “unscientific, reckless directives.” Dr. Demetre Daskalakis says in his resignation letter, “I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end…” Of the people now in charge of vaccine policy, he says, “Their desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults.”

Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who also resigned, says he had been asked to “review and change studies that have been settled in the past,” which have shaped vaccination guidelines. 

A lunatic angry about the COVID-19 vaccines—doubtless thanks to the sort of false claims spread about it by people like RFK Jr., who absurdly and recklessly called them “the deadliest vaccines in history”—fired 500 rounds from one or more of 5 guns at CDC headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month, killing a police officer. 

More than 750 current and former employees of HHS signed a letter they sent to both RFK Jr. and Congress after the shooting, accusing him of “dismantling America’s public health infrastructure,” “repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information,” “wasting taxpayer money,” and “misusing data,” among other charges.  

Nine former directors and acting directors of the CDC, who have served under every president dating back to the Carter administration, have written an op-ed for the New York Times, saying what Kennedy has done is “unlike anything our country has ever experienced,” and calling it “unacceptable.” Kennedy’s demands of the recently-fired director, Dr. Susan Monarez, were “not typical requests from a health secretary to a CDC director. Not even close. None of us would have agreed to the secretary’s demands…”

Despite his repeated promises of “gold-standard” science, Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) report in May, which cast doubt on current vaccine recommendations, cited three studies whose findings are not what MAHA claims they are, and at least four different studies that do not exist. These AI “hallucinations” are a well-known phenomenon in which AI models will make something up if they can’t find what they’re asked to, “especially if prompted to support a specific point.” In other words, at Kennedy’s behest, the geniuses on his team told an AI to find evidence that vaccine recommendations are suspect; it couldn’t find any good studies that said what they wanted, so it made some up. And they published them as fact and used them in official government guidance. 

That scandal alone should have been enough to prompt Kennedy to resign in shame. Alas, this administration seems unfamiliar with the concept. It would have resulted in an undergrad being disciplined or expelled, but it hasn’t earned the Secretary of Health and Human Services so much as a reprimand from the President. 

The full scale of the damage to our public health institutions, medical research, and inevitably, our own health, is difficult to calculate—but we shouldn’t let that overwhelm us to the point of inaction. As Dr. Daskalakis warns us, “The CDC you knew is over. Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.”

What we can do: Cabinet Secretaries can be impeached. We should all—especially those with Republican representatives—be telling our Congressional reps we want Kennedy gone before he can do any more damage. (Don’t bother contacting your Senator yet; impeachment proceedings must begin in the House.) Democrats should at least try to force a vote, then if Republicans choose to keep him in power, they will even more obviously own the devastating effects of his tenure.