A running list of RFK Jr.'s controversies

Though Kennedy insists he is not anti-vaccine, his record suggests otherwise

(Image credit: Illustration by Julia Wytrazek / Getty Images)

By Rafi Schwartz, The Week US, Brigid Kennedy

published 23 April 2025

From his beginnings as an acclaimed environmentalist to his transformation into a purveyor of vaccine denial and conspiracy theories, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent a lifetime in the public eye. Throughout it all, the scion of the fabled Kennedy political dynasty has courted controversy; enough to prompt his own family to publicly denounce his more extreme positions as spreading "dangerous misinformation" that leads to "heartbreaking consequences" in an essay for Politico. Nevertheless, those familial red flags did nothing to dissuade President Donald Trump from naming Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, placing a man whose positions on firmly-established science are in direct odds with the overwhelming majority of the medical community atop one of the largest, most consequential federal bodies of its type.

Having wasted little time since his narrow Senate confirmation in putting his science-skeptical imprimatur on the department he now leads, Kennedy — under the banner of his iterative "Make America Healthy Again" movement —continues to court controversy amidst multiple national health crises including a measles outbreak and the threat of a wide-scale bird flu epidemic. Now fully entrenched in the Department of Health and Human Services' bureaucracy, once-theoretical questions of how his past comments might shed light on his future decisions have become decidedly more pointed and more urgent in equal measure.

Speaking at his first official press briefing as the Health and Human Services Secretary, Kennedy in mid-April 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."

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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."

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.

This past summer, 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.