RFK Jr.: A new plan for sabotaging vaccines

Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is showing that he's "completely detached from reality"

(Image credit: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

published 13 May 2025

"We are in the hands of the mad men," said Charles P. Pierce in Esquire. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is showing that he's "completely detached from reality," as he finds new ways to impose his anti-science lunacy on the country. In an interview with Dr. Phil last week, he advised Americans to "do your own research" before vaccinating their kids—code for consulting the kind of internet conspiracy sites that reveal the existence of space aliens, and claim without evidence that vaccines are killing millions. Even more alarming, said Lisa Jarvis in Bloomberg, Kennedy announced plans to change federal policy on approving vaccine boosters and updates to require "wildly expensive" and lengthy full trials, including control groups receiving placebos. That might mean there will be no new Covid booster this fall tweaked for currently circulating variants. RFK Jr.'s game is to pretend that the safety of existing vaccines wasn't adequately studied, creating "impossible standards that keep them out of reach." It's "a passive way of killing them."

Kennedy's "blatantly moronic" delusions have escalated into "tinfoil hat" territory, said Ed Cara in Gizmodo. In the Dr. Phil interview, he expressed belief in the "entirely fabricated threat of chemtrails"—the conspiracy theory that the white lines of condensation that jet planes leave in their wake are laced with toxic chemicals to control or poison the population. Kennedy even named the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as the perpetrator of this dastardly conspiracy. "I'm going to do everything in my power to stop it," he said.

It's hard to capture how much damage this crackpot is doing, said Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. When the nation's top health official says, "Do your own research," he's reinforcing the dangerous belief that science is "in the eye of the beholder," and that deciding whether vaccines are safe and effective requires only that you can Google. "Do your own research" is "the most cursed phrase in politics," said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. "Research is a skill," but "the sort of 'research' undertaken by the average American yahoo in 2025 is the opposite," starting with a conclusion and "cherry-picking evidence" to support it. It's not just vaccines: President Trump's "ability to persuade himself that reality is as he wishes it to be is the perfection of the art." Welcome to "the 'do your own research' administration."