Why Bad Kennedy should not be the boss of Health and Human Services, by former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey S. Flier.

RFK Jr. was nominated precisely because of his stated positions on a wide range of health and scientific matters: vaccines, AIDS, the reputed harms of electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi and cell phones, and many other topics. So these views are central to assessing his suitability for the role. 

The scientific process requires skepticism about prevailing consensus. Some Kennedy supporters see his skepticism on a wide variety of scientific and medical issues, including policies during the Covid epidemic, as a positive that will enable him to disrupt the medical and research establishment.

But there’s informed skepticism and there’s crank skepticism. Bad Ken is crank rather than informed.

Our task is to evaluate his qualifications as a potential leader of HHS. I argue that by repeatedly making claims about important issues that are known to be false or that are devoid of evidence, RFK Jr. has disqualified himself from this position. 

Well, yes. That seems like a pretty good rule.

For decades, RFK Jr. has been a vocal advocate of the anti-vaccine movement. He was founder and chair of Children’s Health Defense, an organization that campaigns against childhood vaccinations whose beneficial effects on children’s health are firmly established. 

Most remarkable among his repeated claims is that childhood vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella has caused the increase in autism. Just last year he said on Fox News: “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.” This is long after the 1998 paper that advanced the idea was retracted as fraudulent in 2010. The author of the paper has been stripped of his medical license. Kennedy’s willful ignorance of this evidence should disqualify him from leadership in the health and research ecosystem. He has promoted a fear of vaccines that has—and will—lead to the return of diseases like measles and polio.

Aka diseases that can kill.

RFK Jr. repeatedly challenged the now well-established fact that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, a discovery that led to a Nobel Prize and highly effective treatments that save millions of lives. 

In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy repeated his concerns about this discovery, saying he takes “no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS. Then, in a 2023 interview with New York magazine, he said that research into the causal connection between HIV and AIDS was “phony” and “crooked.” This is scientific ignorance, not the healthy skepticism that some supporters allege. No one who asserts such nonsense should be at the helm of Health and Human Services. 

Which is why Trum appointed him.