The "Wild" Health Theories RFK Jr. So Adores
A top devotee of weird medical theories will control all US health agencies if Trump's pick for HHS chief is OK'd. What's the risk vs. benefit of Kennedy's theories? Buckle up, folks, it ain't pretty.
Wow, talk about sending in the clowns. Donald Trump has now nominated anti-vaxxer, tooth decay champion and junk science devotee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who says a worm ate part of his brain, to head our nation’s health agencies.
He’s not a doctor, nor a scientist and he has no training in the health field. But he does know a thing or two about drugs. RFK Jr. was a heroin addict for 14 years, ending only after he pled guilty to a felony charge of heroin possession and entered a treatment center. If that doesn’t scramble your brains, I don’t know what will.
You know, I promised myself I wouldn’t let Trump’s individual picks upset me; that I would wait until they began self destructing in office before jumping into the fray. But as a journalist who’s covered health & science off-and-on for almost 20 years, Kennedy’s naming hit a nerve. During a rally in NY, Trump promised to let Kennedy "go wild" on public health issues, and now it seems that could well happen.
RFK Jr. has promised to gut the 18,000-employee FDA, which ensures the safety of food, drugs and medical devices, and to replace hundreds of employees at the National Institutes of Health, stripping away years of scientific and medical expertise in the process.
"FDA's war on public health is about to end," he wrote on X, the former Twitter, in late October, adding that this will include its "aggressive suppression" of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, sunshine, and other items.
Psychedelics, huh? Does that bring you back to the late 1960s when Timothy Leary, the so called “High Priest of LSD” was doing his thing? It does me, and apparently it does RFK Jr. as well. That was when he started using heroin at the age of 15 until he pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of heroin possession 14 years later and entered a treatment center.
Raw milk? It can carry harmful bacteria like Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria. Proponents, though, argue raw milk can cure a variety of health issues, but studies don’t back them up. One oft-cited study by its supporters suggesting it may be helpful against childhood asthma states wraps up by saying, “at this stage, consumption of raw farm milk cannot be recommended as a preventive measure." Proponents never mention that.
Go ahead and drink it if you want, there’s no ban on it. But you’re playing a dangerous game with your health by doing so.
Sunshine? Due to its ultraviolet (UV) rays, it can cause skin damage, eye damage and several types of skin cancer. Again, it can be dangerous to expose yourself to sunshine excessively without protection. As a redhead growing up who once suffered burns so severe on the tops of my feet I couldn’t walk for days, I have kind of a built-in opinion on this one.
The FDA’s role with raw milk and sunshine? It warns us to be careful, what a horrible, horrible response, right?
Meanwhile, some in Kennedy’s own family describes him as someone who regularly blends fact and fiction in outlining his views, and has a powerful ability to deny the collateral damage of his own actions, according to recent reporting in the news magazine Vanity Fair.
The source of these pathologies are found in a life story marked by personal trauma and addiction to drugs, sex, and, perhaps most perniciously of all, the search for public adulation as a Kennedy son, family members say in the Vanity Fair article by Joe Hagan.
Sadly, in this case, the Kennedy mystique has turned into the Kennedy mistake, though I expect there will be much sanewashing going on in the mainstream media. Like with Trump, it ain’t easy keeping up with the conspiracy theories Kennedy regularly spits out.
He’s also said he’ll impose more testing on already existing vaccines, potentially slowing vaccinations for kids, that he’ll dismiss NIH scientists who study infectious disease (you know, like Covid), and that he’ll force the FDA to reapprove hydroxychloroquine, because he doesn’t believe the results of studies on Trump’s favorite drug. Those studies have shown it can’t cure Covid and carries deadly side effects.
Basically, RFK Jr. is a man holding tightly to fringe health theories that have been largely disproved as a way to enhance his own self image. This includes his personal favorite, that vaccines cause autism in kids.
The lone study suggesting this involved just 12 children who received MMR vaccinations, and it was retracted by the journal that initially ran it after it was proven to involve cherry-picked data that was improperly manipulated. Since then, of course, dozens and dozens of scientific studies done properly by independent scientists have proven no link exists.
So now let’s take a little deeper look at how Kennedy’s particular brand of pseudoscience, or junk science if you prefer that wording, plays out in the real world.
In Samoa in June 2019, two nurses mistakenly mixed the MMR vaccine with a muscle relaxant, killing two children. Kennedy and other anti-vaxxers in a group he was a member of took advantage of that unfortunate accident by speculating loudly and publicly in Samoa that the MMR vaccine itself was unsafe, causing top politicians there to end its use.
The real world result: A deadly measles outbreak that infected around 5,700 citizens and claimed the lives of 83, most of whom were children. Imagine if the US goes all out in opposing mandatory vaccines for kids in schools. Samoa is a tiny island; How many infected might we see here?
Recently Kennedy added another science fallacy to his repertoire, saying the fluoride we put into public water to fight tooth decay is making our kids dumber. He got that idea from a study that found that large amounts of fluoride — more than twice the level used in the US — might be linked to lower IQs in children. But no study has shown that the levels we do use are dangerous.
"Seventy years of research, thousands of studies and the experience of more than 210 million Americans tell us that water fluoridation is effective in preventing cavities and is safe for children and adults," according to the American Dental Association. The CDC says the use of flouride has reduced tooth decay in children and adults by about 25% vs. areas where it’s not used.
So let’s consider this idea a Trump tax on families who will have to send their kids to dentists more often.
Kennedy has also insisted that Covid-19 was created to target certain races and give others immunity, and that the vaccine against it is “the deadliest ever made.” He’s linked mass shootings to the prescription drug Prozac, and said gun ownership in Switzerland is similar to the US, even as official stats show US civilians own 120.5 firearms per 100 people while the rate in Switzerland is 27.6 per 100.
Wow!
Now, let’s take a look how the brain worm story came to be. In a 2012 court deposition, made during a divorce from his second wife, Kennedy revealed that a worm had eaten a portion of his brain before dying inside there, one of multiple health conditions he said may have caused the "cognitive problems" he was experiencing, according to a New York Times report on the case.
Meanwhile, this is a man who was accused of sexually assaulting a woman in the late 1990s, a man who got his jollies as an adult by dumping a bear carcass in the middle of NY’s Central Park and who, three decades ago, sawed the head off of an endangered whale species and carried it home in possible violation of longstanding federal laws, according to various news reports.
“Long before he entered the 2024 race with a wagon train of conspiracy theories,” the wider Kennedy family was intimately familiar with RFK Jr.’s problematic personality, the reporter Hagan wrote in his Vanity Fair article,
Family members and close friends cited “the outsize confidence masquerading as expertise,” Hagan wrote, “the ‘savior complex’ (as one family member called it) that drives him to take up quixotic causes and cast himself as a lone hero against established powers, and, above all, as one old friend calls it, his ‘pathological need for attention.’”
Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination on April 6, but when it faltered as more and more information came to light about him, he sought a way out. He talked to Harris about joining her campaign and administration. When she balked, he turned to Trump, the guy who slow-walked our nation’s initial reaction to Covid, saying he had it under control when he clearly didn’t.
Maybe there are some things Kennedy espouses that would be helpful to our health. But it’s hard to tell at this point and in measuring the risk vs. the benefit here, the risk really stands out, particularly with him being told by his boss to “go wild.”
As Stephen Sondheim wrote, and Judy Collins sang so beautifully, and sadly: “But where are the clowns. Send in the clowns. Don't bother, they're here.”