Who is RFK Jr? The Psycho at HHS

He’s a menace who is more like Trump than you know

It was the fieriest Capitol Hill hearing of the year, with senators confronting Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as the menace he is, and the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services loudly defending the indefensible. “This is crazy talk; you’re making things up!” Kennedy cried as he was confronted with his own words.

At issue was RFK Jr’s dismantling of the HHS in general and, more specifically, his attacks on the Centers of Disease Control, whose director, Susan Monarez, was recently dismissed by President Trump. Her sin? Supporting safe and effective vaccination against COVID-19, the flu, and other diseases. In this, she was aligned with every reputable expert in the world. Kennedy, on the other hand, has spent more than twenty years as an anti-vaccine crackpot.

After Kennedy said the American government’s response to the COVID epidemic was a failure -- “…we were lied to about everything” -- Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, tested him on the basic facts:

“Do you accept the fact that a million Americans died from COVID?” the senator asked.

“I don’t know how many died,” Kennedy said. “I don’t think anybody knows.”

Then Warner asked if Kennedy believed that vaccines, developed with remarkable speed by the first Trump administration, saved people who took them.

“I would like to see the data and talk about the data,” said Kennedy.

“How can you be that ignorant?” the senator replied.

In fact, the CDC has confirmed that more than 1.2 million Americans were killed by COVID and that millions of deaths were prevented by the vaccinations. It must be remembered that the U.S. led the world in vaccine development. Of the three produced, two were made with new “mRNA” technology. In typical fashion, Kennedy has ordered a $500 million cut in grants for research on this kind of vaccine. Meanwhile, he is gutting the department he heads, firing 10,000 scientists, technicians, and others. Another 10,000 have taken inducements to leave. This leads to an obvious question. Who is this man taking all these risks with our health?

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A scion of perhaps the most famous family in American politics, the 71-year-old RFK Jr. is named after his long-beloved father Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles at age 43 during his campaign for president in 1968. Handsome, youthful, and an inspiring speaker, RFK was killed just five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas.

As the son and nephew of men regarded as political martyrs, RFK, Jr. grew up under enormous scrutiny and pressure. While millions of Americans, and people around the world, hung their portraits in their homes, young Kennedy couldn’t go anywhere without knowing that others were aware of the tragedies that hung over him. In 1969, as his uncle Senator Edward Kennedy was nearly ruined by a scandal when a young woman died in a car he accidentally drove off of a bridge, people began talking about a Kennedy “curse.”

RFK Jr. was raised in wealth at the famous Kennedy compound on Cape Cod and its estate in Virginia. He was educated at (and twice expelled by) elite boarding schools and then graduated from both Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School. (At Harvard and UVA he followed in his iconic father’s footsteps.) As the press has reported, RFK, Jr. developed a drive to fulfill the family myth by becoming an influential, if not historic, public figure. As one of his friends told The New York Times, he had “the need for adulation, the need for recognition, the need for followers.”

But by then, he was already addicted to heroin and cocaine. He went into rehab in 1984 after airport authorities found drugs in his luggage. Although Kennedy has said he has been sober ever since his rehab stint, that wasn’t the end of his addictive behavior. For much of his life, he was a compulsive philanderer who kept a log of his sexual encounters that included ratings for the many women he was involved with. His diary was revealed in 2013 by the New York Post, which had received a copy. The Post reported that on days when he resisted his sexual compulsion, Kennedy wrote the word “Victory.” He called this behavior his biggest defect.

In his public life, Kennedy won praise and widespread support as an environmental activist. He helped lead a successful campaign to clean up the Hudson River. This earned him recognition in Time magazine as a Hero for the Planet. Along the way, he developed a two-pronged career. On one side, he earned hundreds of thousands per year from non-profit organizations that he either led or served as an attorney. On the other, he took in greater sums from working with private companies and even wealthy friends who wanted to borrow his famous name. All this allowed him to enjoy a glamorous lifestyle despite the fact that his share of the family’s wealth was quite small when compared with others in the clan. In fact, for many years, the house he occupied on the Cape was owned by benefactors who charged him minimal rent.

While his finances were kept private, Kennedy sought more public attention when he first took a stand against vaccines in an article he wrote, which was published by Rolling Stone and Salon. (Who wouldn’t publish an article authored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? The name alone would attract readers.) Titled “Deadly Immunity” the piece said that people had been injured and killed by vaccines with the ingredient thimerosal. Since children received most vaccines, the piece, which drew on RFK Jr.’s book of the same title, implied that public health officials were harming kids. He also alleged that government agencies were colluding with “BigPharma,” helping the companies reap huge profits from vaccines, administered to children, under mandatory public health programs.

There was so much distortion and misinformation in Kennedy’s piece that Salon corrected it five times in a matter of days. And eventually, both publications removed it from their websites. This happened after scientists and physicians raised a ruckus. They explained that numerous studies had shown no danger in thimerosal and that Kennedy had exaggerated the dose children received. Besides, the chemical was being phased out of use, anyway. Salon editors cited “flaws and even fraud” in the “evidence” Kennedy had presented.

The main source of the fraud was Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor who had been stripped of his license after publishing a fraudulent “study” linking vaccines to autism. In response to his article, measles outbreaks occurred around the world as some people abandoned the vaccine. The prestigious journal that published Wakefield’s article withdrew it, as most of his co-authors denounced it. But corrections never gain the attention of an original report. Thus, Wakefield’s pseudoscience took on a life of its own, riling parents of children with autism and inspiring activism. When then-businessman Donald Trump spoke with parents who believed their child had been a vaccine victim, he joined the skeptics.

As Kennedy regurgitated Wakefield’s false claims, his book became a big seller among people who feared the health establishment, especially those who, like Kennedy, were attracted to conspiracy theories. An American physician named Richard Moskowitz rose as a critic of vaccines and came to influence Kennedy’s thinking as organizations were formed to fight a supposed enemy that didn’t exist. Millions of dollars were donated to this cause as a small industry of activist organizations grew with Kennedy serving as a cheerleader and magnet for donations.

Having risen to a leadership role in a subculture of anti-vaxxers, Kennedy enjoyed attention, adulation, and wealth, and occupied a platform that resembled a politician’s voter base. Scattered across the country, these early supporters, who were mainly liberal Democrats, were reliably awestruck whenever he appeared. Yes, members of his famous family publicly criticized his vaccine views and the movement he led. But for the most part, Kennedy lived as a hero to environmentalists and vaccine skeptics, many of whom were driven by truly altruistic causes: Saving the planet and saving children.

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If you can corner the people who lead advocacy campaigns, whether they are politicians or activists, some will confess that they cherry-pick facts and arguments and understand that the opposition has legitimate points to make. Some will even soften their views when they sense they’ve gone too far. I saw this happen when I served in Congress in a time when incumbents felt forced to adopt more radical views to stay in office. RFK Jr. has done this himself. In one of his books, he admitted that all of his children had been vaccinated. In 2017 he told reporters that he was “pro-vaccine.” He did this as one of the organizations he led was conducting an aggressive online effort to build an anti-vaccine mass movement, especially in the black community.

Kennedy rarely expressed caveats, and it was his well-known skepticism that attracted Donald Trump’s attention as he was preparing to take office in his first term. As the press reported at the time, Trump met with Kennedy and offered him the opportunity to chair a government panel that would investigate “vaccine safety and scientific integrity.” (In adding the part about integrity, Trump followed his usual playbook, adding an inflammatory element to an issue.) After the meeting, Kennedy made the offer public. A Trump spokesperson, who no doubt smelled a controversy, downplayed the idea. The group was never formed, but apparently a bond between the two men was.

Fast forward to 2023 and Trump, smarting from his defeat in the previous election was putting together the campaign that would return him to office in 2025. In that same time, Kennedy was considering his own bid to run for president on the Democratic side. As he announced his primary campaign, against President Joe Biden, Kennedy matched Trump’s in his long-winded style with a speech that lasted for two hours. He attacked Trump’s COVID-19 policies and Biden’s actions on behalf of Ukraine in its war with Russia. He also matched Trump in his grievances, with included a long complaint against social media platforms and the mainstream press, which had limited his efforts to spread anti-vaccine rhetoric

“This is what happens when you censor somebody for 18 years,” he said. “I got a lot to talk about. They shouldn’t have shut me up for that long because now I’m really going to let loose on them for the next 18 months. They’re going to hear a lot from me.”

In reality, Kennedy had always been able to reach the public. Two years before his announcement he published a book titled The Real Anthony Fauci -- Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War Against Democracy and Public Health, which became a major bestseller. As the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Fauci had been the point man for Trump’s response to COVID-19, including, ironically, the crash effort that produced a life-saving vaccine. Fauci was a bogeyman in the world of anti-vaccine and COVID skeptics. He was such a lightning rod that he received countless death threats and was given a security detail. In targeting him, Kennedy signaled to millions of people that he was with them.

RFK’s campaign was a vanity project that raised his profile but attracted few votes. However, it did capture the Trump camp’s attention, and in January 2024, Kennedy confirmed they had spoken with him about becoming their man’s running mate. He said he turned them down, but then, in August, announced both the end of his own campaign and his endorsement of Trump. Of course, he said yes when President-elect Trump then named him to be Secretary of HSS. He won Senate confirmation by denying or reinterpreting previous statements about vaccines and other public health issues.

In office, Kennedy immediately threw the medical research community into turmoil by canceling, suspending, and reducing grants. He focused special attention on the Centers for Disease Control and its role in preventing epidemics. When he chose Susan Monarez to lead the agency, he praised her as a brilliant scientist and “tech wizard” who would ensure the CDC would adhere to a scientific “gold standard.” Meanwhile, he undermined its work by firing thousands.

As a brilliant scientist, Monarez opposed Kennedy and Trump on the matter of vaccines, refusing to “rubberstamp” policy directives issued from above -- including reversing course on vaccines -- and resisting demands that she dismiss members of her staff. As she was fired, she was replaced by one of JFK Jr.’s deputies, Jim O’Neill. He has no scientific or medical qualifications. However, like Vice President J.D. Vance, he did work for the famous, powerful, and hugely influential tech giant Peter Thiel. In the meantime, Kennedy has continued replacing highly credentialed members of his vaccine advisory panel with a motley crew that includes vocal critics of vaccines and the government’s response to the COVID epidemic. One, Vicky Pebsworth, sits on the board of a stridently anti-vaccine organization.

In his attacks on HHS and the CDC, Kennedy is acting in a way that is true to his identity. He is also matching Donald Trump in his determination to place his feelings over the facts, to set aside the welfare of Americans, and to value loyalty above all else. They are both members of elite, privileged families. They are both egotists driven by their desire for attention, wealth, and power. And they both possess an uncanny willingness to shape and shade their positions only to return to their original opinions. Like Trump, Kennedy is a man whose opinions often defy logic. He resists those who would steer him toward the truth and mistrusts those people are demonstrably expert.

In the end, we should not be surprised. Like Trump, Kennedy has long shown us that he is an inflated, grasping, narcissist who will go further than others to get what he wants. Today, that means dismantling the agency that protects our health and responds to crises like the COVID pandemic. This leaves us with the hope that another pandemic doesn’t hit. Given their most recent actions, including a sweeping effort to reduce vaccinations, I advise you to pray, as well.