President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday announced his intention to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer and former independent presidential candidate, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy has a long history of promoting outlandish and unproven ideas related to public health—here’s a look at some of his recent policy proposals and statements that are sending shockwaves through the medical world.
Say sayonara to your fluoride
Shortly before Election Day, Kennedy announced that one of his first priorities serving in a potential Trump administration would be to remove fluoride from the nation’s drinking water—a public health policy to prevent tooth decay and cavities that began in some parts of the country as early as the 1940s, according to the CDC.
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Days later, NPR asked Kennedy about this proposal directly. “Yes. That’s something that the administration will do,” he replied.
When pressed on this radical shift in policy, Kennedy said “you know, fluoride made sense in the 1940s when they put it in, but now we have fluoride in toothpaste. And countries like Austria and Germany that have removed fluoride from their water supplies have either the same or lower cavity issues than Americans. We don’t need fluoride in our water, and it’s a very bad way to deliver it because it’s delivered through the blood system.”
COVID conspiracies
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, became a vocal critic of the COVID-19 jabs and government’s policies during the pandemic. An Associated Press investigation in 2021 found that Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit he chairs, played a pivotal role in spreading vaccine misinformation to millions of people.
Speaking at an anti-COVID vaccine rally in 2022, he compared vaccine mandates to fascism. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy told the crowd. He quickly apologized for the remarks after widespread condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League and the Auschwitz Memorial.
Kennedy continued to promote conspiracy theories after the pandemic. In one example, while he was still running for the Democratic presidential nomination, the New York Post published a video of Kennedy speaking at a closed-door donor event in Manhattan, where he brought up COVID-19 while discussing the development of bioweapons in the United States and China.
“COVID-19—there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said, noting this was due to the “genetic differentials” in different races or ethnicities.
“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” he continued. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential and the impact of that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons and we are developing ethnic bioweapons.”
Kennedy defended his comments in a post on X, where he slammed the newspaper for publishing an “off-the-record conversation.”
“I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews,” Kennedy wrote, but linked to research into how the virus disproportionately affects certain races due to genetic structure. “In that sense, it serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”
Vaccine skepticism
Kennedy is a notorious vaccine skeptic, and serves as the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, one of the leading anti-vaccine nonprofit groups in the country.
He notably led the charge to remove the mercury-based preservative thimerosal from vaccines. The CDC and multiple studies have found no link between the compound and the development of autism.
“There is no evidence of harm caused by the low doses of thimerosal in vaccines, except for minor reactions like redness and swelling at the injection site,” the CDC states. The preservative was already removed from childhood vaccines by 2001, and was never present in the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, according to the agency.
In the same NPR interview where he discussed water fluoridation, Kennedy insisted he wasn’t planning to ban vaccines.
“Of course, we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody,” Kennedy said. “We are going to make sure that Americans have good information right now. The science on vaccine safety particularly has huge deficits, and we’re going to make sure those scientific studies are done and that people can make informed choices about their vaccinations and their children’s vaccinations.”
There is no known link between vaccines and autism, according to the scientific consensus. The original paper published in The Lancet in 1998 that attempted to establish the link between autism and the MMR vaccine was retracted by the medical journal in 2010.
Plans to fund ‘alternative approaches to health’
In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal weeks after his endorsement of Donald Trump, Kennedy outlined several policy proposals for his ‘Make America Healthy Again’ agenda. Among those was a proposal to “devote half of research budgets from the NIH toward preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health.”
“In the current system, researchers don’t have enough incentive to study generic drugs and root-cause therapies that look at things like diet,” Kennedy wrote in the op-ed. The incoming HHS secretary has offered few details about this proposed funding windfall.
Big changes for the FDA
Kennedy has repeatedly suggested he would reform the agency under HHS responsible for enforcing food and drug safety standards.
In a post on X, Kennedy promised to end the “aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”
Turning the frogs gay
In recent years, Kennedy has raised alarms about chemicals in drinking water leading to higher levels of “gender confusion” among children.
On multiple podcasts, Kennedy brought up a study on the pesticide atrazine—which was found to chemically castrate some male frogs and turn roughly 10 percent from male to female. The former independent candidate questioned how exposure to the pesticide and other endocrine disruptors could harm humans—specifically towards developing children.
Researchers contacted by CNN in 2023 said that frogs and humans develop differently—human sex is determined at the moment of conception, while frog sex can be altered by environmental factors.
In a statement sent to CNN, Kennedy’s then-ongoing presidential campaign said he was being “mischaracterized” and that he was only calling for further research into the topic. “He is not claiming that endocrine disruptors are the only or main cause of gender dysphoria,” a campaign spokesperson told the network.
Antidepressants and Mass Shootings
Kennedy has associated the increase in mass shootings with the rise in prescriptions for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), some of the most commonly prescribed antidepressant medications in the U.S.
He repeated these claims in an episode of Club Random, the podcast hosted by comedian Bill Maher, in June 2023. “There’s a study out there that shows that 23 percent of mass shooters were on SSRIs. You know, it doesn’t—correlation, doesn’t prove causation, no. It’s not proof, but it’s something that we should be looking at,” Kennedy said.
A 2020 study found that about 13.2 percent of American adults took antidepressants daily. Multiple researchers told USA Today that the small percentage found in the study indicated there was no known link between the medication and school shooters. One study looking into this topic found that 97 percent of SSRI users will not commit violent crimes.
