Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s improbable nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, actually such a crank? Short answer: yes. But two opinion pieces published in just the past few days argue that although Kennedy is often taken as unhinged, some of his ideas may very well be sound. Take the call for removal of fluoride from the nation’s drinking water. “It’s not an entirely crazy idea,” wrote Leana Wen, the former Baltimore health commissioner, in The Washington Post. Her piece concludes: “Not every proposal from Trump and Kennedy is a five-alarm fire.”
The medical-evidence expert (and Atlantic contributor) Emily Oster made a similar argument about fluoride in The New York Times, adding that Kennedy’s dedication to raw milk is also not totally unreasonable. Instead of yelling that he’s wrong, she said, public-health authorities could start “acknowledging that reasonable people may make different choices on a given issue.”
Let’s be clear: Many scientists consider Kennedy to be a fool, and a ludicrous pick to run HHS, because the evidence supports that assessment. Wen nods to this in passing—Kennedy has a “long history of antiscience propagandism,” she writes—but otherwise she’s focused on the nitty-gritty of one particular public-health debate. So allow me to fill in some gaps: According to his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, RFK Jr. believes that Fauci and Gates are members of a “vaccine cartel” trying to kill patients by denying them hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. He argues that this cartel secretly funded doctors to produce fraudulent studies showing that the drugs were ineffective against COVID—and that it did so in order to orchestrate global lockdowns and accelerate the construction of 5G cellular networks, which, in Kennedy’s understanding, are very, very bad.
I read The Real Anthony Fauci in what may have been a misguided attempt to “do my own research.” It’s hard to summarize the extent of this book’s bizarre claims. Every group imaginable is said to be in on a plot to bring about worldwide totalitarianism and population control: governments, pharmaceutical companies, nonprofits, scientists, and, of course, the CIA. Kennedy devotes many pages to casting doubt on HIV as the cause of AIDS, although he finally says he takes “no position” on this theory. The book also repeats threadbare allegations that a vaccine scientist at the CDC destroyed data revealing that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot caused a 340 percent increase in autism among Black men, thus continuing a major theme in its author’s activism: Before the pandemic, Kennedy was best known for relentlessly misleading the public about vaccinations. “Pharma and its media shills are working at turning us into ‘Land of the Cowed, Home of the Slave,’” he wrote about the MMR shot in 2019.
Physicians like myself should have no trouble dismissing Kennedy. But some of my colleagues are asking Americans to withhold judgment. Last week, former CDC Director Robert Redfield, an infectious-disease doctor, announced, “For sure, I know that Bob Kennedy is not an anti-vaxxer,” after commending Kennedy’s crusade against chronic disease. Other doctors with a public platform—Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, for example—have congratulated Kennedy on his support of free speech and his critique of the medical-industrial complex. And Vinay Prasad, an oncologist at UC San Francisco (and occasional Atlantic contributor), has written paeans to Kennedy’s views on the evils of pandemic restrictions and government censorship of social media. “Some have expressed concern about past statements by Mr. Kennedy,” Prasad acknowledged in a recent post. But “instead of attacking him,” another post explained, “we should acknowledge what he is right about and give guidance.” (Neither Makary nor Prasad responded to requests for comment for this story. Bhattacharya wrote back to say that “politically minded doctors” such as myself “have done much damage to public confidence in public health.”)
There’s a name for this phenomenon: “sanewashing.” The concept rose to prominence during the presidential campaign, when liberals accused journalists of smoothing and sanding Trump’s often-rambling and confused statements into a more coherent, palatable form. They would sometimes treat his policy proposals as provocative asides rather than the chaotic assaults on government institutions they actually represented. Through curated clips and paraphrases, the argument goes, news outlets obscured the true extent of Trump’s aberrancy. This is what some public-health commentators are now doing for Kennedy.
Certain medical professionals may be offering their support out of self-interest: Bhattacharya and Makary are reportedly being considered for roles in the Trump administration. Yet they may also see some valid reasons to give Kennedy a chance. Yes, he gets important details wrong from time to time, but maybe—like Trump himself—it’s best to take him seriously, not literally. I’m ready to acknowledge the merit of Kennedy’s frequent claim that medical regulators are beset by conflicts of interest. Researchers and watchdogs have criticized the FDA, CDC, and other health agencies for operating a “revolving door” between government and industry. Vinay Prasad has long been an advocate on this very issue, and now, through Kennedy, he sees an opportunity to eliminate those conflicts once and for all. Kennedy isn’t a policy wonk, though; he’s a fabulist. Health agencies and the pharmaceutical industry want nothing less than to “rob us of our sovereignty,” he said this month. “This is an organized, systematic, devious, nefarious project by these elites to turn the world into a technocracy.” When the problem is framed this way, Kennedy sounds less like a reformer and more like someone trapped in a web of conspiracy.
I once had more sympathy for these pundits and their way of thinking: In 2016, I wrote an op-ed suggesting that doctors and their patients should band together in opposition to the conflicts of interests posed by the pharmaceutical industry, and that proponents of conventional and alternative medicine could unite behind a truly populist critique of corporate health care. I believed that more collaboration would moderate our discourse. But instead I’ve watched doctors distort or downplay their prior views in an attempt to find some common ground. Before Prasad was boosting Kennedy’s proposals, for instance, he wondered publicly whether the CDC’s questionable pandemic policies might lower rates of routine childhood vaccinations. Now he finds himself defending America’s leading anti-vaxxer.
The sanewashers seem to understand that, if medical experts want any say in public health over the next few years, they will have to engage with the incoming Trump administration’s many eccentrics. But RFK Jr. is indeed a grade-A crank. Why should he have input on anything? This nation has no shortage of public-health and medical experts with thoughts on raw milk or fluoridated water. Some experts will surely agree with aspects of Kennedy’s platform, but they will also bring the credibility, experience, rigor, and honesty he lacks. Let’s not pretend that Kennedy’s views have any value whatsoever.