Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy says he cannot walk down the street without mothers swarming him to thank him for the work he has done in questioning the quality of the food supply and the efficacy of vaccines.
Speaking to Kennedy on her Fox News show on Saturday night, Lara Trump said, “Whether it’s the food supply, whether it’s vaccines, a lot of these spaces have felt like, for so long, we’re not supposed to talk about them, we’re not supposed to address them. You’ve sort of blown the doors off of all of that, and I know hear from parents all the time, you must hear from a lot of parents.”
Kennedy responded, ”If I walk down the street, every block, I have moms coming up and saying ‘thank you.’ There’s been this deliberate information chaos, and we’re gonna change all that.”
He continued, ”We’re going to make it so that people can do studies, do gold standard science, that they can replicate those studies, and we’re going to start doing real science and answer these questions for the moms. We’re going to restore public faith in the public health regulatory agencies.”
Kennedy has been a vocal “vaccine skeptic” since the early 2000s, and has perpetuated multiple conspiracy theories, including AIDS denialism and the many-times-debunked idea that a link exists between vaccines and autism.
His work in spreading this misinformation has been cited as a contributing factor in measles outbreaks in Samoa and Tonga. In 2019, Kennedy visited Samoa and met with government representatives in what health advocates and experts have claimed was part of a disinformation campaign designed to stoke distrust in vaccines just months before a deadly measles outbreak that resulted in the deaths of 83 people.
The U.S. saw its own measles outbreak earlier this year, and the CDC now reports that there have been a total of 1,267 cases across 38 states, including 27 outbreaks. Three deaths have been attributed to measles.
RFK Jr. has previously argued that the best defense against measles is contracting the disease, telling Fox News’ Sean Hannity in March, “It used to be, when I were a kid, that everybody got measles. And the measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection.“ He continued, ”The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but for many people it wanes.”
He also asked the CDC to look into vitamins as a potential treatment for measles. A statement from Health and Human Services issued in May said, “Secretary Kennedy will be enlisting the entire agency to activate a scientific process to treat a host of diseases, including measles, with single or multiple existing drugs in combination with vitamins and other modalities.”
Late last month, Kennedy installed longtime ally Lyn Redwood, who served as president of Children’s Health Defense—the anti-vax group Kennedy chaired from 2015 to 2023—in a top role at the CDC’s vaccine safety office, sparking concerns. Redwood, a nurse, became a vaccine skeptic after her son was diagnosed with autism.
The 1998 paper that claimed to have found a link between the MMR vaccine and autism has since been debunked and its author, Andrew Wakefield, struck off the medical register. Despite this, Kennedy—who during his confirmation hearing refused to state that vaccines do not cause autism—has instructed the CDC to conduct its own research into the relationship between vaccines and autism.
In a statement issued in March, Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon confirmed the research would be conducted, adding, “As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. CDC will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening.”
Medical professionals acknowledge that autism diagnoses are rising. But, as Scientific American reported, scientists believe that “rising rates are mostly attributable to broadened diagnostic categories and more comprehensive screening.”
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