A running list of RFK Jr.'s controversies

By Rafi Schwartz, The Week US, Brigid Kennedy

last updated 17 July 2025

Perhaps never in the history of the United States has there been a public figure more consequential to the physical well-being of the nation than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scion of the famed Kennedy political dynasty and current Health and Human Services secretary under President Donald Trump. Neither a physician nor a researcher himself, Kennedy has instead drawn upon a lifetime's worth of vaccine skepticism and rejection of established science to lead the Trump administration's ongoing disruption of America's medical and scientific research.

Now, under the banner of his derivative "Make America Healthy Again" movement, Kennedy has withdrawn the United States from crucial institutions like The World Health Organization and Gavi, a leading youth immunization project that Kennedy accused of having "ignored the science" on vaccinations. At the same time, Kennedy has significantly rearranged America's domestic health care structures; in June, he dismissed the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices before handpicking the body's new membership. They subsequently chose not to endorse certain flu vaccinations that contain a chemical anti-vaccination groups have "falsely tied to autism," The Associated Press said.

While Kennedy has been surprisingly candid about both his past challenges and his vision for a radically different America moving forward, his own family's 2019 claims that their relative's "dangerous misinformation" will lead to "heartbreaking consequences" seem particularly prescient as his agenda at HHS begins to gain traction. Here are Robert F. Kennedy's biggest controversies and strangest scandals.

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Speaking at his first official press briefing as the Health and Human Services Secretary, Kennedy in April 2025 claimed without evidence or further explanation that autistic children "will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date, many of them will never use a toilet unassisted." The remarks were "plainly untrue," said Jessica Grose at The New York Times. By implying that "those who are not able to be gainfully employed are somehow lesser citizens," Kennedy has shown he is "not fit to be in charge of the health of the country," Grose said. The "backlash" over Kennedy's "anti-scientific, offensive and belittling remarks" comes as the secretary plans to launch a federal database of Americans with autism, said MSNBC. Not only do those plans raise a "host of data security concerns," but they also have alarmed advocates who worried about how Kennedy might use the data "to advance his conspiratorial and harmful health agenda."

Moreover, he has repeatedly questioned the safety of the Covid-19 vaccine, made numerous misleading claims about the way vaccines are tested, and even falsely alleged that HIV, the virus that later leads to AIDS if left untreated, originated from a vaccine program, CNN fact checker and reporter Daniel Dale said in an appearance on CNN. "So what do you call someone like Mr. Kennedy who devotes their time, energy, public remarks to devoting entirely fake claims about vaccines killing people in all manner of ways?" Dale added."I think 'anti-vax' is a fair descriptor."

Most recently, Kennedy "disregarded a scientific review process that has been in place for decades" when he announced that the government no longer recommends Covid-19 vaccinations for pregnant women and healthy children, said The Associated Press. "There's no new data or information," said Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, to the AP. "Just them flying by the seat of their pants."

Speaking at a rally against mandates in Washington, D.C. in early 2022, Kennedy invoked Hitler and Nazi Germany as he lampooned Covid-19 jab policies in the United States. "Even in Hitler Germany (sic), you could … cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did," Kennedy said. "I visited, in 1962, East Germany with my father and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped, so it was possible. Many died, true, but it was possible." He quickly drew backlash for the comments, which critics saw as a suggestion that things were better for those alive during the Holocaust than they are today, said Politico.

After a measles infection killed an unvaccinated child in Texas in February, 2025, the then-newly confirmed Secretary Kennedy downplayed the seriousness of the ongoing outbreak as "not unusual" during a cabinet meeting. Measles has a "very, very low infection fatality rate," Kennedy said in a lengthy Fox News interview shortly thereafter. Kennedy's measles responses have "strayed far from mainstream science" and relied heavily on "fringe theories about prevention and treatments" such as cod liver oil and vitamin A, The New York Times said. Kennedy's insistence on alternate measles treatments are "concerning some infectious disease doctors," said National Public Radio, as he "didn't strongly encourage people to get their children vaccinated, which is usually a key part of the public health response during an outbreak."

In July 2023, Kennedy claimed that Covid could have been a bioweapon designed to target and disproportionately attack "certain races," like Caucasians and Black people, and spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, who he said are the "most immune" to the virus. "We don't know whether it was deliberately targeted or not," he said during a press dinner captured on video, "but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential and impact." He later insisted that he never "suggested that the Covid-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews" and was instead referring to a study that "serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons," CNN said.

Kennedy has repeatedly alleged that exposure to chemicals — endocrine disruptors, namely — is causing gender dysphoria in children and contributing to a rise in LGBTQ+ youth. Speaking on a June 2022 episode of his podcast, Kennedy said he wants to "pursue just one question on these … endocrine disruptors" because "we're seeing these impacts that people suspect are very different than in ages past about sexual identification among children and sexual confusion, gender confusion."

His comments were based on a study that found that one endocrine disruptor, in particular, can cause a small percentage of male frogs to become female, though experts say there is no evidence that such chemicals cause gender dysphoria in human children. Kennedy's remarks have been "mischaracterized," a spokesperson said to CNN. He was "merely suggesting that, given copious research on the effects on other vertebrates, this possibility deserves further research."

Speaking to comedian Bill Maher on an episode of the podcast "Club Random with Bill Maher," Kennedy linked an increase in school shootings to the increased prescription of antidepressants. "Kids always had access to guns, and there was no time in American history or human history where kids were going to schools and shooting their classmates," Kennedy said, repeating a claim he previously made to Canadian broadcaster Mark Steyn. "It really started happening conterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs." Scientists have found "no biological plausibility" of a link between the use of antidepressants and mass shootings, Ragy Girgis, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, said to The New York Times. Were there a link, "one would expect it to be pronounced, or at least much greater than we are seeing," Dr. James Knoll of SUNY Upstate Medical University said to Politifact in 2019.

During the 2024 presidential election, Kennedy blamed "the little bit of the redneck in me" for his decision to dump a dead bear carcass in Central Park in 2014, admitting to the convoluted scheme in an interview with comedian Rosanne Barr he shared to his X account. "Maybe that's where I got my brain worm," Kennedy later said to The New Yorker, referencing his 2012 admission in a court deposition obtained by The New York Times that he had once contracted a parasite which "got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died."

Shortly after Kennedy fessed up to his ursine adventure, daughter Kick Kennedy said in an interview with Town & Country that when she was six, her father had heard a dead whale had washed ashore near Hyannis Port. The elder Kennedy "ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale's head, and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan," Town & Country said. "Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet," Kick added.

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Brigid Kennedy worked at The Week from 2021 to 2023 as a staff writer, junior editor and then story editor, with an interest in U.S. politics, the economy and the music industry.