11 Questions Senators Should Ask RFK Jr. This Week
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., the left-wing environmental lawyer and “health” crusader (scare quotes used advisedly) who embraced Donald Trump and the MAGA cause during last year’s presidential campaign after Kamala Harris rebuffed his overtures, is facing two Senate committee hearings this week on his nomination for secretary of health and human services. He may be Trump’s most controversial cabinet pick, with opposition not only from Democrats but from a group led by Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence. While Pence’s group, Advancing American Freedom, has stressed Kennedy’s pro-choice stance on abortion, it has also drawn attention to his history of vaccine skepticism and support for psychedelics: “Any one of these controversies should be disqualifying for a potential HHS leader.” No kidding. And that’s even without getting into his various personal scandals, which arguably speak to his unfitness to lead an important government department. Or the time he opined, post-9/11, that American hog farmers were a bigger threats to liberty and democracy than Osama bin Laden. Or his peddling of a stolen-election hoax. (No, not that one: he still insists John Kerry was robbed in 2004.)
RFK Jr.’s baggage is truly an embarrassment of riches. But let’s narrow it down to eleven questions senators should be sure to ask him this week in his confirmation hearings.
1. You have promoted vaccine skepticism for the past twenty years, starting with a 2005 article you wrote about the supposed connection between vaccines and autism. The article was published in Rolling Stone and Salon, and both outlets subsequently corrected and apologized for it. (Likewise, the articles in scientific journals that originally claimed there exists a link between vaccines and autism have been retracted.) Do you reject the 2004 report by the Institute of Medicine that found no link between autism and vaccination, as well as more recent peer-reviewed studies confirming that conclusion? Do you stand by your statements in the past two years that you “believe that autism does come from vaccines,” that “there is no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective,” and that the polio vaccine has killed more people than it saved?
2. You have claimed that you want Americans to make “informed choices” about vaccines. Do you think that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a major HHS component, should withdraw its recommendation for vaccination for children and adolescents? Do you oppose state laws that require childhood vaccination as a condition of school or day-care attendance? Would you use the clout of HHS—in the form of block grants to states, for example—to pressure states to repeal or modify such laws?
3. Are you concerned about the recent spike in cases of pertussis (whooping cough), the quadrupling of measles outbreaks reported by the CDC from 2023 to 2024, and the detection of polio in New York in 2022? How should HHS and the CDC respond to this apparent surge in infectious disease?
4. It has been widely reported that your advocacy caused thousands of illnesses and some eighty deaths in Samoa, where you boosted an anti-vaccination movement that arose after two infant deaths related to nursing error in administering measles shots. After a catastrophic measles outbreak, you and nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, worked to sabotage the Samoan government’s mandatory vaccination effort. Do you stand by your activism in Samoa?
5. You recently disclosed that your group Children’s Health Defense financed the 2020 propaganda “documentary” Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind COVID-19, which claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic was artificially engineered, that vaccination programs were insidious for-profit schemes, and that mask-wearing activates the virus. Children’s Health Defense also promoted the book Plandemic: Fear Is the Virus. Truth Is the Cure by the maker the film. In a 2020 speech, you suggested that you yourself found the “plandemic” conspiracy theory persuasive. Is that still your view? (Also: What’s that you said about the virus being designed to spare Chinese people and Jews while “targeted to attack Caucasians and black people”?)
6. In December 2021, you stated that the COVID-19 vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” a claim that has been solidly debunked. Do you still reject the overwhelming international consensus that the COVID vaccine has saved countless lives in the United States and around the globe? As HHS secretary, would you push to have the vaccine and boosters withdrawn from the market?
7. You have repeatedly pushed the claim that HIV may not be the cause of AIDS. In a 2023 interview, you referred to the antiviral drug AZT as “a cure that killed people,” developed by means of “phony, crooked studies.” As secretary, would you take steps to encourage the Food and Drug Administration (part of HHS) to reconsider its approval of AZT, or push to have Medicaid coverage of AZT treatments discontinued or to end U.S. support for AZT-based AIDS programs in Africa?
8. You have repeatedly expressed the view that 5G wireless networks are not only used for mass surveillance but that they disrupt human DNA and cause cancer. What evidence is there for these claims? Would you direct the National Institutes of Health to reconsider the prevalent view that claims about 5G health risks have no validity and are based on shoddy and activism-driven “research,” or use the clout of federal health institutions to lobby for restrictions on 5G?
9. You have described the “suppression” of raw milk as part of the “FDA’s war on public health.” In fact, bans or restrictions on unpasteurized milk sales exist only the state level; the FDA simply warns about its health risks while the CDC tracks outbreaks of disease caused by its consumption. One such recent outbreak in California sickened 171 people and caused 22 to be hospitalized. Would you advise the FDA to discontinue raw milk warnings and the CDC to discontinue the monitoring of outbreaks? And do you think your failure to accurately describe FDA’s actions says anything about your qualification to oversee its parent department?
10. During your presidential campaign last year, you said that if elected, you would direct the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to “give drug development and infectious disease a break . . . for about eight years” and focus on chronic disease. Do you intend to pursue such a policy as head of HHS, which oversees the NIH? Do you believe that infectious diseases are no longer a danger? Do you think that the study of chronic diseases should become the sole focus of the NIH to the exclusion of, for instance, the development of cancer drugs?
11. You have repeatedly claimed to champion free speech and accused the Biden administration of colluding to suppress political expression on social media platforms. Yet ten years ago you argued for laws that would punish climate change skeptics as criminal offenders and suggested that conservative/libertarian megadonors Charles and David Koch should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity because of their promotion of such skepticism. You refused to disavow that position in a 2023 interview, claiming that the First Amendment does not protect “fraudulent speech.” Do you still stand by it? Could your own vaccine skepticism be criminalized as “fraudulent” under such an approach? What medical opinions not your own do you believe could be appropriately criminalized?
Bonus questions: Okay, so what was the deal with that dead bear cub? And that sawed-off whale head you took home?
