The second most dangerous man in America is not Elon Musk

Days before the “Big Mac chow down”, Kennedy had told the podcaster Joe Rogan that the food on Trump’s private jet was “poison”.  Had Kennedy, a self-confessed “intermittent faster” with a predilection for fish and wild game, become an overnight convert to the MAGA movement’s favourite snack? Or was the lawyer and environmental activist, who had once been hailed by Time as a “hero for the planet”, playing the political long game?

According to Mar-a-Lago insiders, Kennedy’s decision to join Trump’s inner circle for lunch was the equivalent of a “false flag” operation, and behind the scenes he and Melania were conspiring to wean Trump off his junk-food habit. But Kennedy, who Trump has nominated for health secretary, has a long history of switching positions on key issues and, say his critics on the left, is little more than a “political opportunist”.

This is nowhere truer than in his shifting stance on vaccines. While Kennedy has been at pains recently to present himself as someone who is “just asking questions” about vaccines, he has a long history of promoting vaccine misinformation, including the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism. 

Worse, in 2018 he contributed to a precipitous fall in vaccination rates in Samoa by blaming the deaths of two children there on the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine (in fact, their deaths were the result of nurses having accidentally mixed the vaccine with a muscle relaxant). And during the Covid pandemic he suggested that the coronavirus could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people – a claim that is both antisemitic and untrue (according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China suffered 1.41 million deaths following the suspension of lockdown restrictions in December 2022; and in Hungary, Belgium and England, excess mortality from Covid among the Jewish population exceeded that of non-Jewish populations).

“I think Bobby’s views on vaccines are dangerous,” his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, told the National Press Club of Australia last year.

So what exactly are Kennedy’s views on vaccines? And how much damage could he do when and if the Trump-friendly Senate confirms him as the new head of the Department of Health and Human Services – a position that would give him oversight of everything from food to medicines to programmes such as Medicare and Medicaid that millions of Americans rely on for their drugs and hospital treatments?

Kennedy has long held fringe views on health issues. In 2023, he questioned whether HIV was the cause of Aids (it is). He has also questioned the effectiveness of azidothymidine (AZT), which allows people with HIV to survive the infection and lead normal lives.

However, his embrace of vaccine conspiracy theories dates from 2005, when he was approached by a woman who claimed her son’s autism was due to thimerosal, a mercury-containing organic compound that until 2001 had been used as a preservative in several childhood vaccines. As a longstanding campaigner against mercury levels in fish, the theory immediately appealed to Kennedy, and in 2005 he published a story in Salon called “Deadly Immunity”, alleging a massive conspiracy regarding thimerosal.

To make his case, Kennedy mined the transcript of a vaccine safety meeting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), selectively quoting from it to make it look as if CDC scientists were engaged in a cover-up. Salon subsequently removed the article, saying it was riddled with errors. However, that did not stop Kennedy from claiming that the MMR vaccine, which has never contained thimerosal, was responsible for higher levels of autism in African-American boys.

This wasn’t true either: Kennedy had distorted the words of a middle-ranking CDC researcher who had misgivings about a badly designed study from which data from a Black subgroup had been held back as implausible. But by now Kennedy had joined forces with Dr Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced British gastroenterologist who had been struck off the medical register in the UK for promoting the debunked theory that measles particles in the MMR vaccine were responsible for an increase in cases of autism generally.

Since then, the pair have done more than any other individuals to promote fears about vaccine safety. Indeed, they enjoy a symbiotic relationship, with Kennedy serving as executive producer on Wakefield’s anti-vaccination documentary, Vaxxed II: The People’s Truth, and appearing alongside Wakefield at autism conferences.

In 2016, after meeting Wakefield at a presidential fundraiser in Florida, Trump invited Kennedy to chair a “vaccine safety task force”. However, following his victory in the presidential election that year, Trump distanced himself from Kennedy and the task force never materialised. 

If Trump gets his wish for Kennedy to be health secretary, however, it is feared he will be given free reign. As Trump told his supporters at his Madison Square Garden rally last October: “I’m going to let him [Kennedy] go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on the medicines.”

Kennedy’s probable first move will be to publish all the vaccine safety data held by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). “If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you,” he tweeted in October. “1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags”.

Kennedy is also expected to target a 1986 federal statute that indemnifies vaccine manufacturers from paying compensation on the rare occasion that a vaccine causes an adverse reaction. He has also said he would like to do away with mandatory vaccine schedules, making MMR and other childhood vaccines a matter of individual parental choice. That could deal a fatal blow to community immunisation levels and the supply of vaccines.

As Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team and now Trump’s pick to be commerce secretary, told CNN in October: “He says, if you give me the data…  I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off of the market.”

In retrospect, it was Covid-19 that pushed Kennedy to the wilder fringes of the anti-vax movement. During the pandemic, he likened government efforts to contain the coronavirus to the Holocaust and compared vaccine refuseniks to Anne Frank, the Dutch girl who hid from the Nazis during the second world war, only to be captured and sent to Auschwitz at the war’s end. He also pushed unproven Covid treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. 

Although Kennedy, under pressure from his wife, the Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, subsequently apologised for his comments, revenues to his Children’s Health Defense (CHD) non-profit surged during the pandemic, from $3m in 2019 to $16m in 2021. 

One should not underestimate the influence of Kennedy’s anti-vaccination network on the outcome of the election. CHD has its own closed TV channel that pumps out vaccine disinformation to moms across America, and during the campaign he toured swing states in a bus emblazoned with the slogan “Vax-Unvax”. According to a 2021 study of verified Twitter accounts, Kennedy was responsible for 13% of all reshares of misinformation, more than three times the second most-retweeted account, making him a “superspreader” of vaccine misinformation.

The irony is that many of his positions align with those of medical reformers and longstanding critics of corporate interests. As part of his campaign to “Make America Healthy Again”, Kennedy has pledged to invest more money in chronic disease research, address Americans’ addiction to ultra-processed foods, and free regulatory agencies from the “smothering cloud of corporate culture”. 

The Senate may yet have a say on his nomination of course. Certainly, Kennedy’s support for reproductive rights is unlikely to play well with Republicans charged with confirming his appointment (he has said that mothers are better equipped than judges to decide when to terminate a pregnancy). His distinctly chequered past is a problem for moderate Republicans, too.

However, now he’s been admitted to Trump’s inner circle, it will take a brave senator to block his nomination. And many of Kennedy’s policy proposals, such as removing fluoride from water, lifting restrictions on raw milk and making it easier to conduct research into psychedelics play well with tech bros like Elon Musk and people into alternative therapies.

What makes Trump’s embrace of Kennedy so odd is that as the scion of a storied Democratic family and lifelong environmental campaigner (in the 1980s Kennedy set new standards for clean water by suing corporations that were polluting the Hudson River), the Democratic Party should be his natural home. Indeed, as recently as April Trump described Kennedy as a “radical left lunatic”.

But make no mistake, Kennedy’s views are now more closely aligned with those of the alt-right and his appointment would be no joke. Under a Kennedy-run health administration, many people will skip their vaccinations and fall sick from diseases that are entirely preventable. It is also likely that many will die. That would make Kennedy the second most dangerous man in America after Trump.

But don’t take my word for it. In May 2023, when Kennedy was challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination, he met with the editorial board of the New York Post. After the meeting, the Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and is pro-Trump, concluded that Kennedy was an “independent thinker” with “real conviction and charisma”.  

It also concluded that when it came to medical issues, “his views were a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines”. Now we wait for that spaghetti to be served.
Mark Honigsbaum is a historian and journalist who specialises in the history and science of infectious disease.