RFK Jr. Isn’t Just an Anti-Vaxxer. His Conspiracy Theories Go Way Further.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. loves conspiracy theories and dabbles in a lot of them.

Kennedy, the son of one of the most famous Democratic politicians in American history, was for years an enthusiastic and powerful environmentalist and rising star in the party. But today, Kennedy’s most enduring legacy is not his legal work advocating for renewable energy or protecting Indigenous rights or cleaning up the Hudson River, but his anti-vaccine campaign—a huge disappointment for many in his family, who watched him abandon his career in mainstream progressive causes to become the country’s leading anti-vax propagandist. Other Kennedys, including his sister, have openly called him dangerous. And it’s not just the Kennedy name that makes this shift dangerous; some early polls have shown him carrying around 20 percent of the Democratic presidential vote. At a time when many Democratic voters are looking for basically anyone younger than Joe Biden to represent them in the 2024 election, Kennedy has been able to charge into the race and create a surprising amount of commotion. He has capitalized on the attention, appearing in conversations with Elon Musk and Glenn Greenwald and on Fox News to boost his pet—and wildly untrue—theories about the evil forces at play in the country.

On his radio program, in his books The Real Anthony Fauci and A Letter to Liberals, and through his organization Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy has peddled a number of interlinking conspiracy theories that involve a cabal of billionaires and dangerous institutions seeking to take control of the population and enrich themselves, all at the expense of public health, with no concern for how many people die. These theories are not based on fact. But Kennedy’s rhetoric targets the most vulnerable: According to an Associated Press report from 2021, his organization targets its medical misinformation at mothers and Black Americans, emphasizing past prejudices and sins by the medical research world.

Kennedy has rallied against COVID restrictions in Berlin. He has lobbied against a pro-vaccine bill in California. He uses his name, wealth, and connections to amplify his beliefs; his Instagram page alone has 860,000 followers. (The account was removed for spreading misinformation about COVID in February 2021. After Kennedy’s campaign complained it would be “undemocratic” to have a presidential campaign account blocked, Instagram restored his account in early June.)

Most worryingly, his misinformation-spreading group, Children’s Health Defense, has grown increasingly powerful, opening branches around the world and taking in millions in donations each year. According to the AP report, during the pandemic, the group’s website received 4.7 million visitors a month. In some periods, its vaccine publications were shared on Twitter more often than those from the New York Times and the Washington Post combined.

So if we’re going to take Kennedy seriously as a candidate—which polls suggest we must—it’s worth looking at his beliefs, beyond just his general anti-vaccine stance. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but here are six of Kennedy’s most extreme conspiracy theories. These claims are not supported by any shred of evidence.

Vaccines 

If you can distill Kennedy’s most basic, harmful impulses into one theory, it’s that vaccines cause autism. This is his legacy theory, the one that he has spearheaded since 2005, when he first published an article in Rolling Stone and Salon that asserted there was a government conspiracy to cover up the connection between vaccines and childhood autism.

For autism specifically, the problem, he inaccurately claims, is thimerosal, a mercury compound used as a preservative in some vaccines. This is a scientifically baseless idea, rooted in the false notion that autism is a result of mercury poisoning. Countless studies have proved that thimerosal, which contains a different kind of mercury than the one Kennedy seems to be focusing on, does not lead to mercury poisoning and certainly does not lead to autism. But public fear became potent enough to lead vaccine manufacturers to remove the compound from most childhood vaccines. It remains in multidose vials of the annual flu vaccine.*

But this was only the beginning for Kennedy; once you start to think the entire medical industry is covering up something this big with such a unified voice, it becomes easy to point to lies and cover-ups elsewhere. In 2019, a study found that the majority of all anti-vaccine ads on Facebook were funded by just two groups; one was Kennedy’s “The World Mercury Project.” According to RFK Jr., vaccines are also linked to allergies. (No.) He’s warned of false dangers of aluminum, acetaminophen, and fluoride. His organization has launched a campaign against Gardasil, the vaccine for preventing HPV. He claims that psychiatric drugs are responsible for the rise of mass shootings in the U.S. And more recently, he has asserted that Wi-Fi causes cancer—or, more specifically, “Wi-Fi radiation” from cellphones causes “cellphone tumors.” It also, he said, “opens up your blood-brain barrier,” causing “leaky brain,” in which “all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain.”

He hit another level of influence with his misinformation about COVID-19 and its vaccines, though none of his theories were particularly original. Kennedy touted ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as COVID-fighting medications and suggested that social media companies are working with public health leaders to suppress effective treatments. He echoed gain-of-function conspiracy theories. He claimed the country had spent an absurd $16 trillion on COVID lockdowns. He grouched about the dystopian totalitarianism of “vaccine passports”—vaccine records that during the height of the pandemic were required for entry into certain countries. His organization falsely claimed that hundreds had died from the vaccine. He erroneously claimed that the death toll from the mental health damages of quarantine outnumbered the death toll of COVID itself. He claimed, baselessly, that the baseball player Hank Aaron and others died because of the vaccine. But his most absurd pronouncements have dealt with the people and institutions behind the war against COVID.

Anthony Fauci

It’s hard to quantify just how much harm Kennedy has caused with his anti-vaccine campaigns, but his most deadly work, arguably, came about in response to the pandemic. As a leading voice of the scientifically baseless opposition to the vaccine, Kennedy helped supercharge the spread of COVID misinformation. Just recently, during a June 15 conversation on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Kennedy’s false medical claims stirred up so much anti-vaccine fervor that a well-known vaccine scientist was reportedly “stalked” by Rogan listeners demanding he debate Kennedy.

Kennedy embraced every element of COVID paranoia, including its politics, and more than any other scientist or politician, Anthony Fauci became RFK Jr.’s Big Bad. He authored a bestselling book, The Real Anthony Fauci, on the former chief medical adviser to the president, that accuses Fauci of masterminding “a historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” In Kennedy’s understanding of the government’s pandemic response, financial interests caused the country to embrace a “vaccine-only” strategy that overlooked other cures that weren’t as profitable, causing millions of people to die needlessly. And Fauci, to Kennedy’s mind, was the villain pulling the strings, organizing a takeover of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, allowing him to churn out “profitable, patentable drugs for the pharma cartel.” With Fauci’s help, Big Pharma infiltrated the entire public health sector, and we all paid for it, Kennedy asserts, both financially (he argues it caused the middle class to erode to the benefit of the ultrarich) and with our health.

But in Kennedy’s world, that’s not the most sinister thing about Fauci. In a 2021 interview, Kennedy asserted without evidence that the Pentagon urged Fauci to make bioweapons under the guise of vaccine research, handing him $1.7 billion to quietly do the military’s bidding. Because of this, according to Kennedy, Fauci funneled money to China, and taught scientists in a lab there how to make dangerous coronaviruses and cover their tracks.

(It’s not the only time Kennedy has floated, um, stories about bioweapons. In a recent discussion with Elon Musk, he claimed there were bioweapons labs “all over the world” that have already developed “ethnic bioweapons that kill people from certain races.” He asserted again that “COVID was clearly a bioweapons problem.”)

Money isn’t Fauci’s only motivation, Kennedy claims. According to the candidate, the doctor is also part of something bigger and even more evil: “the orchestrated, planned use of pandemics to clamp down totalitarian control.” As he said in the 2021 interview, “intelligence agencies, pharmaceutical companies, social media titans, medical bureaucracies, mainstream media and the military … are using a health crisis to impose totalitarian control worldwide.” “Anthony Fauci isn’t acting alone, but he’s become a prominent face of the medical cartel and medical technocracy that is wrapped up in obliterating constitutional rights globally.”

Bill Gates

In Kennedy’s network of connected conspiracy theories, the primary villains are pharmaceutical companies and Fauci—but also Bill Gates, who Kennedy alleges has leveled up from leading Microsoft to leading a diabolical cabal. In his book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy argues that Gates and Fauci, together with the pharmaceutical industry, plotted to push a dangerous vaccine for profit. (Gates became a target because of the funding he put toward developing a vaccine.)

And in one of Kennedy’s strangest social media moments, in August 2020 his Instagram account posted a photo of Gates with text that echoes QAnon-style ravings: “The digitalized economy? We get rid of cash and coins. We give you a chip. We put all your money in your chip. If you refuse a vaccine, we turn off the chip and you starve!”

It’s not an RFK Jr.–original idea that Gates is implanting tracking devices into humans through microchips in the vaccine. This absurd (and physically and logistically impossible) theory blanketed Facebook and other online forums during the pandemic. But Kennedy stood alone among prominent Democrats in promoting this misinformation.

Global Surveillance

Closely related to his COVID theories are Kennedy’s beliefs that 5G—a high-speed communications network that powers many cellphone services—is both medically dangerous and part of a plan to control the population. He has said that 5G “damages human DNA” and causes cancer. He has also said it is part of a government ploy to “harvest our data and control our behavior.”

As part of his mapping out of Bill Gates’ evil ambitions, Kennedy speculated that the government was using not just 5G, but also low-orbit satellites to track human movements, for greater control of the population. (The real basis of this belief comes from Gates’ help in funding companies that aimed to use low-orbit satellites to provide global internet signal.)

This, again, is an off-the-deep-end conspiracy theory. And while it is not Kennedy’s most harmful idea, it did get him into his worst PR disaster.

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he said during a 2022 anti-vaccine rally in D.C.

In reference to 5G, vaccine passports, and COVID-related public health measures, he added that “the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide.”

He apologized, but the Holocaust comparison caused many of his family members to speak out against him. His own wife called the comments “reprehensible and insensitive.” The comments were in character, though; Kennedy has a history of comparing public health officials to Nazis and Fauci to Hitler. In his book about Fauci, Kennedy has a section titled “Final Solution: Vaccines or Bust.”

Oddly, for someone opposed to technological tracking, Kennedy is a huge booster of Bitcoin. (Another reason this is odd: Bitcoin mining is terrible for the environment.) His first appearance since announcing his 2024 campaign was as the keynote speaker at the Miami conference Bitcoin 2023, where he vowed, as president, to protect crypto. He has hailed it as a way to “ensure freedom” against the government. “It’s not outlandish to imagine that even here in America, your bank account could one day be frozen because of your politics, or comments you’ve made on social media,” he wrote on Twitter. He added: “Monetary freedom is as important as freedom of speech. Without it, we are slaves.”

AIDS

In The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy’s HIV/AIDS denialism helps establish Fauci’s disregard for human life. According to the author, Fauci’s promotion of the antiretroviral drug AZT during the AIDS epidemic led to countless deaths because it “killed faster than the natural progression of AIDS left untreated.” Fauci, in Kennedy’s telling, instead sabotaged effective and safer treatments that were not as financially valuable. None of this is true.

RFK Jr. also asserted that Fauci allowed pharmaceutical companies to experiment on Black and Hispanic foster children with dangerous AIDS and cancer therapies, sometimes forcibly, leading to the deaths of 80 children, some of whom were buried in a mass grave in New York. The actual report this conspiracy theory is based on deals with clinical trials for extremely ill HIV-positive children. According to the report, 80 out of 532 children who participated in clinical trials or observational studies between 1985 and 2005 died while in foster care—but none because of the clinical trials. Twenty-five of those children died while enrolled in a medication trial, and those children died from complications from AIDS.

The Kennedy Assassinations

RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theories aren’t limited to medical issues. He has conspiracy theories about his own family. Specifically, he counts himself among those who think the CIA was involved in the assassination of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963.

“There is overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder,” Kennedy said in an interview in May. “I think it’s beyond a reasonable doubt at this point … When my uncle was president, he was surrounded by a military-industrial complex and intelligence apparatus that was constantly trying to get him to go to war in Laos, Vietnam, etc. He refused. He said that the job of the American presidency is to keep the nation out of war.”

In that same interview, he said it was possible that the CIA had been involved in the killing of his father, as well. It’s not the first time the younger Kennedy has indicated he believed something was off about the official story of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination by Sirhan Sirhan. For some time, RFK Jr. has thrown his weight behind the “second shooter” theory, insisting that Sirhan had been framed for his father’s death. The assassination has for years been a matter for speculation, based on competing testimonies from various experts over the number of bullets fired and the angle at which the elder Kennedy was shot.

Asked in his recent Joe Rogan interview how he would feel about his own safety were he elected president, RFK Jr. admitted he thought the CIA might come after him, as well. “Well, I’ve got to be careful,” he said. “You know, I’m aware of that danger, and I don’t live in fear of it at all. But I’m not stupid about it, and I take precautions.”

Of the conspiracy theories that Kennedy has supported, this is certainly the least harmful. And it’s not exactly the wildest of his ideas, either; plenty of people have gotten sucked into debates about these assassinations. Paul Schrade, who was shot in the head during the attack on RFK, has taken up the cause of the second-shooter theory, claiming that while he was shot by Sirhan, Kennedy must have been shot by someone else. And with a deeply personal connection, it’s hard to blame Kennedy Jr. for fixating on the event.

But with RFK Jr.’s particular determination, he has turned his belief into a crusade, conducting months of research into the assassination and leading a campaign to have Sirhan released from prison. And for his family, most of whom disagree with him vehemently on the matter of Sirhan’s guilt, this campaign has been a source of distress. When Sirhan was recommended for parole in 2021, six of RFK Jr.’s siblings wrote that they were pained by the decision. (California Gov. Gavin Newsom overturned the recommendation.)

All of these conspiracy theories have earned Kennedy allies on the right. He now often appears on Fox News and with right-wing conspiracy theorists, including on Michael Flynn’s “ReAwaken America” tour. RFK Jr. may be running as a Democrat, but at his core, Kennedy is a conspiracy theorist beyond any other ideology, and that gives him power. His playing on the fears of a pandemic-weary public’s distrust of institutions has given him bipartisan appeal.