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Robert Francis Kennedy Junior has recently passed his first hurdle in becoming Secretary of Health and Human Services by advancing out of a committee vote. However, the committee meeting and nomination was anything but simple with Kennedy being surrounded by criticism.
Kennedy was born Jan. 17 1954 to Robert F Kennedy Sr, US Attorney General and Senator, and Ethel Kennedy, a human rights advocate. Kennedy was one of 11 children. After his father’s death, Kennedy, at the age of 14 started to struggle with drug abuse and became a ringleader of a group of kids that would engage in vandalism, theft and drug use. He did eventually graduate from Harvard University with a bachelor’s in American history and literature before studying law at University of Virginia School of Law. Kennedy was sworn in as an assistant district attorney for Manhattan in 1982, but he did not last. After failing the New York bar exam, he resigned in July 1983, which led to him going to Pace University to study.
After some trouble with the law, Kennedy started to work with Hudson River Fisherman’s Association and to advocate for the environment and cleaning up pollution. This caused him to gain a following and respect. He also helped found a private environmental law firm and Waterkeeper Alliance which promoted “swimmable, fishable, drinkable waterways, worldwide.”
Kennedy pushed on a lot of legislation and laws to help protect the environment. This is what he did that for most of his adulthood as well as run for office with the most recent being in 2023 with him running for president . However, this has caused problems for Kennedy. Kennedy ran several times in the early 2000s for Senator and Attorney General of New York but was passed up by other candidates because of his history with drugs. This led him supporting nonconventional candidates like Obama or questioning the loss of his choice one like John Kerry in 2004.
However, this is not what he is most famous for, which is his stance on vaccines. Kennedy started to chair the Children’s Health Defense (formerly known as the World Mercury Project). The group was founded in 2007 and argued that a lot of conditions that start developing in childhood like autism, ADHD and food allergies were because of overexposure to chemicals and radiation in vaccines, fluoride in drinking water and wireless communication. This common fear has been disproved several times and the original study has been debunked since the 1990s. However, the Children’s Health Defense was on the fringe on of political discussion and conversation and still pushed these ideas until Kennedy joined, which led to a massive influx of money and the ability to make misinformation more mainstream. This led to Kennedy attending and talking to people about his “concerns” about vaccines which he shared long before joining the group.
His opinon also varied depending on who he spoke with him, sometimes arguing that vaccines are good, but need to be more spaced out to vaccines are causing “autism epidemic” and that no vaccine is safe. This has caused a lot confusion, especially when all his children are vaccinated, but regardless of him working with and speaking on behalf of this group, this caused a lot of misinformation to be spread, especially when COVID 19 began to spread.
Kennedy was identified as one of the main spreaders of the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates and 5G technology was at fault for the spread of COVID, which led to his Instagram getting flagged. This didn’t stop Kennedy, who published a book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, in which he alleges that Anthony Fauci, a pioneer in HIV/AIDS research, sabotaged treatment for HIV/AIDS and was working with Bill Gates to suppress information about COVID 19 “cures” leaving only vaccines left to fight the disease. This is not true and has been discredited many times, but it still had a negative impact leading many to distrust Fauci and his team or just not get the vaccine. Kennedy did not stop there. In a speech in January 2022, he said the rules in place to help prevent the spread of COVID was like that of Nazi Germany. This pushback to basic safety measures and the willful spreading of misinformation is why professionals working in the field have spoken out about Kenndey’s nomination and the harm it could cause if he is left to run the department when another pandemic comes around.