Lessons From a Year of RFK Jr. Disinformation

If you think having accurate information about your health matters, then the U.S. has a problem. I know, because I’ve spent the last year working with a team to track Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s distortions, deceptions, and flat-out falsehoods, and analyze what we found. The results were shocking.

Large media outlets are often reluctant to say that a public figure has lied, arguing — not unreasonably — that they can’t read the person’s mind or know their intent. But sometimes the patterns become so obvious they cannot be ignored. That’s exactly what happened in our first year of tracking and debunking Kennedy.

Kennedy is consistently, relentlessly dishonest. Now into our second year of tracking his falsehoods, we have no chance of running out of material. Maybe more importantly, his statements consistently follow well-established disinformation techniques, the kind used by people whose job is to spread misleading propaganda.

For example, he regularly makes claims that appear designed to frighten people, especially parents. Propagandists know that strong emotions like fear and anger often override facts and logic in the human psyche, and Kennedy regularly spins scary but demonstrably false stories. He has suggested that:

As we’ve documented weekly, these claims have no scientific basis. But they create doubt and uncertainty about medicine and science that have real consequences, including declining vaccination rates and states and cities ending drinking water fluoridation.

Kennedy also likes to persuade using stories instead of data. Skilled propagandists know that gripping stories can be powerfully persuasive, and Kennedy tells them with relish.

One of his favorite tall tales involves Americans having been healthier when his uncle, John F. Kennedy, was president. “I was raised in a time where we did not have a chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy testified during his confirmation hearing, suggesting that since his uncle’s presidency, the percentage of children with chronic illnesses had surged from 2% to 66%. At times he’s given different figures, but the message stays the same.

His claims are nonsense. A 1960 National Health Survey, released during the Kennedy presidency, reported that 41% of the country had one or more chronic conditions. The numbers have indeed gone up a bit since then but, given that the U.S. population has gotten older (and people live with now-treatable conditions that would have killed their grandparents), those changes aren’t a big surprise.

More importantly, U.S. life expectancy jumped from 69.7 years in 1960 to 79 years in 2024. Children are five times less likely to die in infancy or early childhood than when Kennedy was president, largely due to vaccines. Americans were not healthier then than today.

But the key thing is that stories — even true stories — aren’t data. If my uncle drank Dr. Pepper every day and lived to be 105, that doesn’t prove that drinking Dr. Pepper daily leads to long life. Kennedy uses stories because they persuade and because the actual facts nearly always undercut his case. When he does cite data, Kennedy carefully cherry-picks the few snippets that support his preconceived views and ignores or dismisses the rest, often claiming, as conspiracy theorists regularly do, that any information contradicting him is corrupt or tainted.

A close look at Kennedy’s deceptions also provides a window into his warped and punitive attitudes toward health. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Kennedy vowed “to make people more accountable for their own health.” And individual responsibility is one of his recurring themes. But he ignores the many factors that are beyond a person’s control. How do you “eat real food” if you can’t afford it? Or if you live in a food desert? Or you work 60 hours a week for minimum wage just to pay the rent?

There’s a term for those factors that Kennedy obscures: “social determinants of health.” Everything in your life — your job, your income, your neighborhood, and more — affects your ability to stay healthy. We know that poverty and unsafe housing, for example, have a huge impact, no matter how much a person wants to stay healthy. And we know that race, gender, immigration status, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other factors play a huge role, because discrimination and stereotyping still exist. Kennedy not only disregards all this, he’s cut off research that would help us understand it better — terminating hundreds of NIH research grants for the sin of daring to mention subjects like “equity,” “racial disparities,” “minority health,” “LGBTQ populations,” and “COVID-19.”

Kennedy uses personal responsibility as a smokescreen obscuring all his actions against public health. He is destroying the government programs that help our communities create safer environments, help people make healthier choices for their families, and improve access to healthcare. Kennedy’s lies matter because they hide an ugly political agenda that the public needs to understand.

We don’t have to put up with this. Soon, Americans will vote to elect a new Congress, as well as a variety of state and local offices. Voters need to make clear to candidates of every party that we cannot allow federal health leaders charged with protecting our lives to be gushers of disinformation. We must ask every candidate what they will do to protect public health and to bring honest leadership back to the Department of Health and Human Services.