Shortly before winning reelection, President-elect Donald Trump offered onetime campaign rival Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “control of the public health agencies.” The possibility of a Kennedy led Health Administration, which is now more of an inevitability, immediately raised concern amongst public health professionals, scientists and activists.
There are countless reasons to be concerned about Kennedy’s appointment to a prominent role in health agencies — his decidedly unsanitary roadkill disposal practices come to mind — but his statements on AIDS and vaccines strike me as the most misguided and most alarming.
According to LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD, Kennedy has regularly platformed misinformation about HIV and AIDS, attributing AIDS infection to “gay lifestyles.” In reality, HIV/AIDS has no inherent relationship with homosexuality and can be spread and contracted by anyone, regardless of sexual orientation.
In the same statement, Kennedy claimed that AIDS was not caused by the HIV virus, but instead by exposure to poppers, a drug used most commonly by LGBTQ+ people. This is, of course, completely false — it is well-established that AIDS is the most severe, advanced stage of HIV.
In a political climate that is becoming ever more hostile to the LGBTQ+ community — the ACLU lists 532 anti-LGBTQ+ bills proposed during the 2024 legislative session — homophobic rhetoric like that expressed by Kennedy is extremely troubling.
His dubious beliefs don’t stop with AIDS, either. Kennedy has railed against vaccines and vaccination mandates many times, espousing anti-vaccination rhetoric, including the belief that vaccines cause autism.
The idea that vaccines cause autism dates back to disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 study “Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.” The study, published in and later retracted by The Lancet, purported to establish a link between vaccinations and an autism coincident variant of ulcerative colitis.
The study is, of course, complete nonsense. There is absolutely no evidence that autism and vaccines are linked — Wakefield’s findings have not been replicated by a single subsequent study, and 10 of his 12 co-authors withdrew their endorsement of the paper’s findings in 2004, in advance of The Lancet’s 2010 retraction.
Wakefield’s paper nonetheless proved hugely impactful. According to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, “the controversy surrounding vaccines has caused attention and resources to focus away from” productive autism research.
In a 2021 study, Matthew Motta and Dominik Stecula found that the Wakefield paper resulted in “a large, robust, and statistically significant uptick in public concern” about vaccines. In the United Kingdom, vaccination rates drastically decreased after Wakefield’s paper was published, leading to an uptick in measles outbreaks that persists to this day.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. himself has been linked to exacerbating a measles outbreak in Samoa. His anti-vaccination charity, Children’s Health Defense, promoted misinformation that the measles vaccine was responsible for the deaths of two Samoan children. In reality, the vaccines had been contaminated by the nurses administering them, a fact ignored by the Children’s Health Defense.
Following the panic about vaccine safety, during which Kennedy met with multiple antivaccination activists and spoke with Samoan Prime Minister Tuilapea Sailele about vaccines, 83 people died as a result of a measles outbreak. The victims were mostly children.
Kennedy’s antivaccine rhetoric unsurprisingly reached a fever pitch during the COVID-19 pandemic. He described the Covid vaccine as the “deadliest vaccine ever made,” which is completely false.
He also referred to Covid vaccinations as “crimes against humanity” and compared vaccine mandates to the Nuremberg Laws, the Nazi legal codes that oppressed Jewish people, statements that are both hugely offensive and entirely inaccurate.
Kennedy’s health policy is only one of many concerns I have about Trump’s impending second term, but I think it’s one of the least-documented and most potentially harmful consequences of his reelection.
I urge anyone who voted for Trump to read more about Kennedy’s history of homophobic and anti-vaccine rhetoric and to think long and hard about who you’ve chosen to elevate to a position of authority.
Thomas Merzlak is a sophomore world cinema major from Florence, South Carolina. Thomas can be reached at [email protected]
