A running list of RFK Jr.'s controversies

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 have not stopped President-elect Donald Trump from naming Kennedy as his nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services — a role for which RFK Jr.'s past scandals would have, in a previous era of politics, likely make him a non-starter.

Now, as lawmakers in Washington prepare to assess Kennedy's fitness for a cabinet position, they will likely be forced to grapple with his long and well-documented history of scandal. With his future in the forthcoming Trump administration in question, here are some of the controversies likely to affect whether RFK Jr. becomes the latest Kennedy to assume high federal office.

Promoted anti-vaccine rhetoric

Though Kennedy vehemently insists he is not anti-vaccine, his record on the matter certainly suggests otherwise. Most notably, he has promoted the "scientifically discredited belief that childhood vaccines cause autism," The New York Times said, a notion that has "been rejected by more than a dozen peer-reviewed scientific studies across multiple countries."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

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."

Invoked Hitler when speaking out against vaccine mandates

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.

Suggested Covid was designed to spare Jews and Chinese people

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.

Blamed gender dysphoria on chemicals in the environment

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."

Believed the 2004 presidential election was stolen

Years before former President Donald Trump cried voter fraud, RFK Jr. alleged the 2004 presidential election had been stolen from Democrat John Kerry for the very same reason. And though there had been a "breakdown of the election system in Ohio" at the time, Forbes said, the Democratic Party found no evidence of widespread fraud in a post-election analysis. Kennedy "still believes" in his 2004 election conspiracy theory as of this past summer, The Washington Post said, "echoing the kind of false claims made by Trump and his supporters about the 2020 election."

Spread conspiracies about JFK's death

As recently as 2023, RFK Jr. continued to promote the unfounded theory that the CIA killed his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy. In May of that year, Kennedy alleged during an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity that former CIA director Allen W. Dulles helped create a "60-year cover-up" of the agency's involvement in JFK's assassination while simultaneously serving on the commission helmed to investigate it. That same probe, known as the Warren Commission, ultimately determined that while some sort of conspiracy likely played a part in Kennedy's death, the CIA was not involved.

Linked school shootings with antidepressants

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.

Mistreated animal corpses

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.

Earlier that summer, Kennedy emphatically denied a Vanity Fair report that he'd eaten dog while on vacation in Korea in 2010. "The article is a lot of garbage," Kennedy said on the "Breaking Points" podcast. "The picture that they said is of me eating a dog, it's actually me eating a goat in Patagonia on a whitewater trip many years ago on the Futaleufu River."