Maybe it’s the brain worms, but Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims he can look at a child and diagnose them with cellular difficulties.
The 71-year-old wellness conspiracist warned reporters Wednesday that America’s children are suffering from “mitochondrial challenges,” an unclinical term that suggests Kennedy is capable of peering into a person’s cellular health at a glance.
“I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like,” Kennedy said. “I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their body movements and from their lack of social connection.”
“I know that’s not how our children are supposed to look,” he added.
RFK JR: I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today…and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, inflammation—you can tell from their faces, movements, and lack of social connection pic.twitter.com/svfdIqAntK
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 27, 2025
Kennedy then went on to lament the prevalence of autism, which he got wrong. The health secretary told the Austin crowd that one in 25 Texans have autism—a baseless overexaggeration. In reality, one in 31 people are estimated to have autism, according to data based on national averages that was released by the Autism Society of Texas.
Kennedy has waged an unscientific war on America’s public health policy since he took the reins of the Department of Health and Human Services in February.
So far, he has replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with vaccine skeptics. He also warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamins. And he founded his new directive for America’s health policy—the “Make America Healthy Again” report—on studies generated by AI that never existed in the real world.
His anxieties surrounding autism are particularly alarming. Kennedy is a part of a growing movement of anti-vaxx parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, linked autism to the jab.
The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.
Regardless, Kennedy’s ideologies—and his firm grip on HHS—has already eaten away at America’s vaccine access.
Just this month, he has deauthorized Covid-19 vaccinations for children and adults under 65, and divested $500 million from mRNA research, effectively axing 22 mRNA studies since,according to Kennedy, they “fail to protect” against “upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”
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