RFK Jr. Grilled by Senate: An Anti-Vaxxer Squirms
RFK Jr. is an anti-vaccine activist and should not be the director of HHS.
An anti-vaxxer might be the new director of HHS. Earlier this Wednesday, notorious anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced a grilling Senate hearing over his past comments on vaccination. Throughout the three-hour hearing, Kennedy tip-toed around his past statements, actively downplaying the nature of his anti-vaccine views. It is yet another sign that he should not be confirmed.
RFK’s Anti-vaccine Advocacy
While RFK Jr. has repeatedly claimed that he isn’t an anti-vaxxer and promoted that line during his hearing, he is exactly that. In an article I wrote in November of last year, I warned explicitly about the danger of giving RFK Jr. the benefit of the doubt. As I explained then:
Far from merely spreading misinformation and spreading a bigoted panic against autistic people, RFK Jr. has explicitly called for parents not to vaccinate their kids. In a 2021 episode of the “Health Freedom for Humanity” podcast, RFK Jr. stated that his objective was to stop parents from vaccinating their children.6
“We – our job is to resist and to talk about it to everybody. If you’re walking down the street – and I do this now myself, which is, you know, I don’t want to do – I’m not a busybody. I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.” -RFK Jr. on the “Health Freedom for Humanity,” 2021.
This direct advocacy, is not just meant to resist the use of the MMR vaccine, which reduces the risk of infection for measles, but also complete and total opposition to childhood vaccination. When RFK Jr. is with his allies, he says the quiet part out loud. When is before Congress, he lies through his teeth and claims he has never advocated for people not to vaccinate their children.7
In the simplest of terms, he is an anti-vaxxer. There is no denying it. No excusing it or any other form of obfuscation. RFK opposes vaccination. Period.
RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine advocacy has also contributed to dangerous outbreaks. In 2019, an outbreak of measles broke out due to a horrific accident where two children died after they received the MMR vaccine. The vaccine was incorrectly mixed with a muscle relaxant, which killed those two children. During that time, RFK Jr. worked with a litany of anti-vaccine advocates to falsely claim that the vaccine could have caused the deaths of those two children despite an investigation determining that the muscle relaxant was responsible. After the outbreak, 83 people died.
In a 2021 post, RFK Jr. refused to acknowledge that the muscle relaxant killed those two children and insisted that vaccines caused autism, citing the Samoan Prime Minister’s son as an example. This intellectual dishonesty from Kennedy should be disqualifying, and Democrats have rightly pointed that out.
The Hearing
Throughout the hearing, RFK Jr. was questioned about his past statements, including video and audio uncovered by NBC News showing Kennedy comparing the CDC to Nazis and sexual predators within the Catholic Church. Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) questioned Kennedy about those statements and statements suggesting vaccine healthcare workers should be in jail.
During questioning, Kennedy denied the statements. However, Senator Warnock reminded Kennedy that he had a transcript of his statements and read them to him. Kennedy then proceeded to back peddle his position, claiming that he supports the CDC. At one point, Senator Michael Bennett (D-CO) clashed with RFK Jr. over his past statements claiming that COVID-19 targets White and Black people but spares Ashkenazi Jewish and Chinese people.
Rather than explain why he believed that to be the case, Kennedy claimed that he cited a report from NIH. As Forward’s Jacob Kornbluh explained, RFK Jr.’s claims are part of a larger antisemitic narrative about Jewish people and disease. Indeed, Kennedy has a long-standing history of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Kornbluh explains:
A vaccine skeptic who referenced Anne Frank at an anti-vaccine rally, Kennedy made several troubling comments in recent years. He compared vaccine and mask mandates to the Holocaust. He met with Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan in 2015 about measles vaccines. During his 2024 presidential run, when RFK Jr. was condemned by major Jewish groups for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19, he defended his remarks that the pandemic was an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon that spared Ashkenazi Jews, and claimed he has “literally never said an antisemitic word in my life.”
In 2020, Kennedy spoke at a rally organized and attended by antisemitic and neo-Nazi groups. And in 2023, after criticism, he retracted his praise of former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, who faced backlash for using Holocaust imagery in his concerts.
Conclusion
In his simplest form, RFK Jr. is a conspiratorial propagandist who is more than willing to use antisemitic imagery and references when it suits him, only stepping back from those statements when they hurt him. Senator Wyden best explained this reality, noting that RFK Jr. is an opportunist and asking Kennedy, “Are you lying to Congress today when you say you're pro-vaccine, or did you lie on all those podcasts?"
Whatever the answer to this question, the fact remains that RFK Jr. is a dangerous anti-vaxxer who needs to be kept far away from power. He is a threat to the public health of the American people. In a decent world, RFK Jr. would be getting sued into oblivion for his lies about vaccines, and every organization he touched would be ground into dust. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a just world; we live in a world that Trump will alter for the next four years.
One can only hope Democrats can take the House and Senate in 2026.