There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump's newly minted secretary of Health and Human Services.
But a particularly concrete example might be that he lobbied against vaccination in the Polynesian island nation of Samoa — prior to a deadly uptick in measles that killed dozens of children there.
Kennedy claimed in the 2023 documentary Shot in the Arm that he "had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa" while visiting the Polynesian islands in 2019. However, Mother Jones reported that Kennedy and the anti-vaccination nonprofit he founded, Children's Health Defense, actually encouraged misinformation around vaccinations during a 2019 trip, just months before the ravaging outbreak and which helped influence the decrease in measles vaccinations that precipitated it.
Ultimately, the 83 deaths that measles caused in Samoa is an unfixable tragedy, and — to say the least — it doesn't bode particularly well for Kennedy's influence on health policy here in the US. But RFK seems undisturbed by the fact that he helped induce a public health crisis.
In some ways, that disastrous résumé puts the Kennedy scion squarely in line with Trump's public health legacy. After all, Trump ruled over the devastating COVID-19 pandemic about as thoughtfully as a cat dropping a beheaded mouse on a pillow.
Trump publicly railed against the level-headed former White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, dismissing him as "a disaster." And instead of upholding Fauci's science-backed advice, Trump preferred to baselessly promote the anti-parasitic hydroxychloroquine, which is now associated with higher death rates among COVID-19 patients, and publicly muse about injecting patients with bleach.
There's a strange side note, but it's worth mentioning: one of Trump's smarter moves during the early pandemic was to pour funding into developing a COVID vaccine, in an initiative known as Operation Warp Speed that's been broadly hailed as a success.
The only problem? Trump quickly realized that his base hates the idea of vaccines, so he stopped talking about it on the campaign trail and regressed back into his more traditional fearmongering on the topic.
In other words, Kennedy — who once proudly proclaimed that a worm had eaten chunks of his brain, and that's without getting into the weird animal stuff — should feel protected by Trump's conspiracy-soaked White House. Whether Americans should feel the same is a different matter entirely.
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