Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will undergo intense scrutiny over his history of controversial and inflammatory comments at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday to become President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary.
Kennedy is expected to face tough questions from Democrats regarding his false claims that vaccines cause autism and his conspiratorial rhetoric on federal agencies and other health policies, while Republicans are poised to seek commitments from him over his positions on abortion rights and agriculture.
Other more incendiary comments he’s made in the past, such as comparing Covid-19 pandemic mandates to Nazi Germany and apartheid laws in South Africa, have also faced backlash from both ends of the political spectrum.
Kennedy has also baselessly suggested that human-made chemicals in water systems could turn children gay or transgender. He has long peddled AIDS denialism conspiracy theories, alleging that HIV does not cause AIDS and questioning the “theology that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS.”
Most famously, Kennedy has in the past promoted the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism in children and that they are widely unsafe.
Routine childhood vaccinations are projected to prevent hundreds of millions of illnesses, tens of millions of hospitalizations, and more than 1 million deaths among people born between 1994 and 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Vaccines are thoroughly tested before their release, and their safety is monitored on an ongoing basis.
As a member of the famed Kennedy political dynasty, Robert Kennedy Jr. built his career as a progressive lawyer taking on pharmaceutical companies and environmental safety causes. He later founded the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, known for spreading anti-vaccine misinformation. After he ran for president as a Democrat-turned-independent last year, Kennedy rebranded himself as a MAGA acolyte seeking to “Make America Healthy Again” and quickly endorsed Trump.
Trump rewarded Kennedy by nominating him to become the nation’s top health official controlling more than a dozen federal agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the CDC.
If confirmed, Kennedy would command a budget of more than $1 trillion to regulate food and drugs, approve and recommend vaccines, and manage the health insurance programs that provide coverage to millions of Americans.
A Kennedy spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Here’s a look at some of Kennedy’s most controversial comments:
Vaccines
Kennedy is perhaps most widely known for being an anti-vaccine activist and vaccine skeptic. Over the past 20 years in radio and media appearances, he made unsubstantiated claims that vaccines are inadequately tested and claimed flu and polio vaccines increase susceptibility to future flu strains and polio cases. He argued vaccines make people “lose IQ” and said the vaccine “dominant narrative” has “little proof.”
“Nobody can tell you what the risk profile for any vaccine is,” Kennedy said in 2019. “So anybody who says they’re safe and effective is not telling the truth because they can’t tell you that based on science.”
Kennedy claimed vaccinologists add toxins to vaccines to amplify immune response. “They literally went on a search throughout the world looking for the most toxic things that they could find in order to add them to the vaccine,” he said.
In vaccine safety, Kennedy frequently alleged routine disregard for vaccine injuries and a lack of understanding of vaccine injury among vaccinologists. In a debate with lawyer Alan Dershowitz in July 2020, Kennedy claimed that nobody knows the risk for any currently scheduled vaccines and that “nobody can say with any scientific certainty that [the polio] vaccine is averting more injuries than death than it’s causing.”
He also added that public health regulators use “fake studies” to lie about the risk of vaccines, claiming regulators get together in “secret meetings in San Juan at Simpson Wood and, and at headquarters destroying data, you know, data actively lying to the American public.”
Nevertheless, during a 2023 House Judiciary Committee hearing on the supposed “weaponization” of the federal government, Kennedy testified he has “never been anti-vax” but merely an advocate for vaccine safety. He also said he was up to date on his vaccinations except for his refusal to take Covid-19 shots, adding that he had “never told the public, ‘avoid vaccination.’”
This was false. Two years earlier, speaking on “Health Freedom for Humanity,” a podcast run by a nonprofit advocating for medical freedom, Kennedy encouraged people to join him in telling strangers not to vaccinate their babies.
In July 2023, the same month he testified at the House hearing, Kennedy said in a podcast interview that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.”
Despite this rhetoric, Kennedy has continued to insist that he is not anti-vaccine.
Covid-19
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine profile rose during the Covid-19 pandemic as he made conspiratorial, and sometimes racist, accusations against the Covid vaccines and public health officials.
In 2023, Kennedy drew sharp criticism after falsely claiming that Covid-19 was “ethnically targeted” to disproportionately attack Caucasian and Black people while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. Kennedy responded to the backlash in a video statement saying he doesn’t believe the coronavirus was deliberately engineered but instead calling it “proof of concept that you can develop bioweapons that will attack certain ethnicities.”
Kennedy also pushed vitamin D as an effective remedy to Covid, stating that it “really obliterates Covid” and that “we’ve known the effectiveness of vitamin D against coronavirus for decades.” Kennedy cited that 78% of the people who died from Covid were vitamin D deficient and criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for not creating a national stockpile of the vitamin and zinc.
He also accused Fauci of destroying repurposed medications like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin that also “would’ve obliterated Covid.”
Kennedy’s stance on abortion has received less attention than other subjects, but it is likely to be the subject of Republican scrutiny.
Flip-flopping on abortion rights
Prior to switching his Democratic presidential bid to run as an independent, Kennedy argued abortion decisions should remain solely with women during the first trimester and rejected government interference in personal medical choices.
“There’s nobody that’s fought harder in this country than I have for bodily autonomy,” Kennedy said in a May 2023 interview on “Breaking Points.” “There is no good option, but the only option we have is to let the woman make that choice. … Government should not be interfering.”
In other comments from his presidential campaign, Kennedy said in August 2023 that he would support a 15-week national abortion ban before saying he misunderstood the question from a reporter at the Iowa State Fair.
But Kennedy later backtracked that stance, writing in a social media post in May 2024, “I support the emerging consensus that abortion should be unrestricted up until a certain point. I believe that point should be when the baby is viable outside the womb. Therefore, I would allow appropriate restrictions on abortion in the final months of pregnancy, just as Roe v. Wade did.”
Kennedy’s opinions on mifepristone, one of the two drugs involved in a medication abortion, are not widely known, but GOP Sen. Josh Hawley claimed last month that Kennedy was “open” to restricting access to the abortion pill.
Peddled AIDS denialism conspiracies
Kennedy also has a long history of peddling AIDS denialism conspiracy theories, which falsely claim that HIV does not cause AIDS.
He lamented that “any questioning of the orthodoxy that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS remains an unforgivable — even dangerous — heresy among our reigning medical cartel and its media allies” in his 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.”
In the book, Kennedy baselessly alleges that Fauci, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the AIDS epidemic, “spent the next half-century crafting public responses to a series of real and concocted viral outbreaks,” citing HIV/AIDS, SARS, MERS, bird flu, swine flu, dengue, Ebola, Zika and Covid-19, over decades to create public fear to covet more power and control scientific research and the pharmaceutical industry.
Kennedy’s book frequently cites discredited work of Peter Duesberg, a prominent AIDS denialist. “I haven’t found any evidence that HIV ever actually kills a T-cell.”