Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced a crucial nomination hearing on Wednesday where a panel of skeptical senators probed his past, often contentious remarks.Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who covers health policy for The Times, explains how someone who’s considered on the fringe in a lot of his beliefs came to be picked for health secretary to begin with.Guests: Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a correspondent based in Washington covering health policy for The New York Times.Background reading: How addiction and trauma shaped Mr. Kennedy’s turbulent life.In the hearing, Mr. Kennedy defended his shifting views on vaccines and abortion.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: Who is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and why is he controversial?
From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. Of all President Trump's cabinet picks, perhaps none is more familiar to more Americans than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Chapter 2: What happened during RFK Jr.'s nomination hearing?
In my advocacy, I've often disturbed the status quo by asking uncomfortable questions.
On Wednesday, he faced a crucial nomination hearing, where a panel of skeptical senators probed his past, often controversial, remarks.
In a podcast in 2020, you said, and I quote, you would do anything, pay anything to go back in time and not vaccinate your kids.
Do you think that people who take antidepressants are dangerous?
Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?
I probably did say that. Today. My colleague Cheryl Gay Stolberg on how Kennedy became the face of a movement that has railed against the very system he could soon oversee. It's Thursday, January 30th. So Cheryl, I'm so glad you're here today because you are the perfect person for this.
You cover both health and politics, which yesterday and today have come together in a very interesting way with this confirmation hearing of RFK Jr., If he gets confirmed, and that's a big if, he would be leading this vast government agency that's responsible in many ways for the health of Americans. It's called the Department of Health and Human Services.
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Chapter 3: How did RFK Jr. become a symbol for medical freedom?
And I think the first thing I really want to understand is how RFK Jr., who's someone who is widely understood to be pretty fringe in a lot of his beliefs and really almost, you know, a conspiracy theorist, how he came to be up for that nomination to begin with.
So he's had a remarkable journey, Sabrina. You know, he comes from this storied American family, the Kennedy political dynasty, but he's also a black sheep kind of within his own family. He's had a lot of disagreements with his relatives, most recently his cousin Caroline Kennedy. And he holds these extremely anti-establishment views that you talked about. He's anti-pharma.
He wouldn't say he's anti-vaccine. He's a vaccine skeptic. And he's skeptical of a lot of things, everything from vaccines to ultra-processed foods. And it might be surprising that these views could be held by the future health secretary of the United States. But they're kind of seeping into the mainstream and they've coalesced around this movement, MAHA, Make America Healthy Again.
Chapter 4: What historical roots does medical freedom have in the U.S.?
Which obviously is a play on MAGA, right? Make America Great Again. So is this just really a subset of the MAGA movement, a subset of the Trump movement?
No. I think it's its own movement. It's a movement that really Kennedy himself embodies and brought to the fore. This is where the crunchy granola left meets the libertarian right. It's a very broad coalition. It includes wellness influencers and New Age environmentalists and also right-wing podcasters and...
They come together in this skepticism and antipathy toward the pharmaceutical industry and the scientific establishment. And they embrace everything from like raw milk to don't vaccinate your kids. And they've amassed a considerable amount of political capital. Tell me how that happened. How'd they get to the point of having so much power?
Well, the concept that Kennedy espouses, he calls it medical freedom, that concept has very deep roots in the United States as far back as the 1700s during a smallpox outbreak in Boston when the Reverend Cotton Mather was promoting inoculation, which was the precursor to vaccination. And someone literally in 1721 threw a bomb through his window. Oh, my God. Cotton mather, you dog. Damn you.
I'll inoculate you with this. Wow. And in the early 19th and 20th centuries, there were these health freedom advocates. They were homeopaths and naturalists, and they wanted recognition for their way of doing things. So there's always been this kind of deep sort of fringe suspicion of medical practitioners in this country. But there's one place that we often see this, and that's around vaccines.
I started getting calls from parents who said my child was developing perfectly normally, and then they had their MMR vaccine in many cases, and then they just disappeared.
So most people would date the modern anti-vaccine movement to 1998 and a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield.
Our duty was not only to investigate those children to see if we could get to the root of their symptoms, but also to report their history.
Who published a paper that later got retracted and was debunked many times that asserted the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine caused autism.
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Chapter 5: How did the anti-vaccine movement gain momentum?
Well, it was debunked, but it took some time to do studies. And The Lancet, which published the original Wakefield study, didn't retract it for 12 years. Oh, wow. That's a long time. A long time. And so the movement, the anti-vaccine movement, starts to gain steam around the late 1990s and the early 2000s. 2000s.
And over time, we see parents starting to apply for exemptions to vaccination, religious exemptions. In California, they had a philosophical exemption. It was pretty loose. Pretty much anybody could apply. And as more and more parents applied for exemptions for their children, fewer kids got vaccinated. It's still pretty small numbers.
though it tended to happen in pockets in small communities, maybe in New York or California. And because of that, those pockets began to be vulnerable.
Eye fever, aching eyes, hacking cough, and after a week, every square inch of you covered by red dots. Measles. Tonight, the CDC warns it's back and it's spreading.
We started seeing, predictably, measles. Tonight, we're tracking a surge of cases, outbreaks now in 13 states. The number of cases growing at a pace not seen in nearly 20 years, so how...
Any public health expert or vaccine expert will tell you that when vaccination rates go down, the first disease to come back is measles.
Disneyland has been ground zero for a measles outbreak that started in December and has since spread to numerous states.
The big moment was an outbreak that happened in Disneyland in California in late 2014 and 2015.
More than half of those who have contracted the disease were not vaccinated.
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Chapter 6: What role did the pandemic play in vaccine skepticism?
All of this was brewing in this kind of stew, this anti-establishment environment. Anti-public health, kind of anti-science, anti-pharma soup.
The criminal gang leaders, Pfizer head, Fauci, all of them, they all need to go to prison for the rest of their lives.
I remember the Biden administration asking or telling the tech companies to take down some of this stuff, that there was this profusion of misinformation.
Right, Biden was really worried about it. He thought this misinformation was costing Americans their lives.
This protest at Michigan State House is protected by the First Amendment, but posts encouraging people to participate were silenced by Facebook.
But people start feeling like they're being censored.
Well, it's official. YouTube has just now banned anything related to health that doesn't align with the general medical consensus.
And that breeds further suspicion.
So we're now, we're in 1984 Orwell territory. So that's sort of mal-information. Mal-information is what they called it. True information that's inconvenient. Exactly.
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Chapter 7: How has misinformation influenced public perception of vaccines?
And suddenly this mistrust started to spill over into other topics beyond vaccines.
We have a massive health crisis in this country. The obesity crisis is really legitimate, and it's terrifying.
People worrying about obesity, fueled by ultra-processed foods.
God forbid, no wonder why cancer and all the things are running rampant nowadays, because a lot of people don't know. 90% of what you're finding in the grocery store is pure poison.
People promoting clean living and holistic health and vitamins.
I think every single person should be at a minimum on a methylated multivitamin.
Not that vitamins are bad, but, you know, it's this whole kind of return to nature, natural, holistic feeling and the whole kind of I did my own research crowd.
Big Pharma made a whopping $1.7 trillion profit last year. Not a penny went towards making anybody understand how to live a healthier life.
Merged with a conservative anger at the liberal elites telling people what to do.
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Chapter 8: What is the impact of social media on health discussions?
We want a healthy country. The good news is that we can change all this. America can get healthy again.
And there's one person who is a natural fit to lead this movement. He's been making these claims for years and he's a big name.
To do that, we need to do three things. First, we need to root out the corruption in our health agencies. Second, we need to change incentives in our health care system. And third, We need to inspire Americans to get healthy again.
We'll be right back.
So Cheryl, you said that RFK was in a lot of ways a natural leader for this movement because he'd been saying a lot of these things for years. But how did he come to be involved in the anti-vax medical freedom movement to begin with?
So for much of his career, RFK Jr. had a pretty kind of unfringy traditional existence. He was a district attorney in Manhattan, and then he really made a name for himself as an environmental lawyer. And he worked on a number of cases cleaning up waterways, including mercury in waterways. And
Kennedy talks about how he would be going out and giving speeches, and these moms of kids with autism would say to him, you have to start looking at mercury and vaccines. And he would be like, no, no, no, that's not what I do. I'm an environmental lawyer. And then finally, in the early 2000s, Someone who was a college classmate of a sister-in-law of Kennedy wanted to get in touch with him.
And she showed up at the family compound in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, with a big stack of documents. And Kennedy comes to the door, and she's like, I want you to look at this. And he says, I have house guests, and we're going sailing. Okay. And he left. So she waited him out. And he finally said to her, if I look at these things, will you leave? And she said yes.
So he starts reading the scientific studies and the abstracts. And he says that he was just struck by this kind of delta between what the public health agencies were saying and what he was reading. Now, what exactly this Delta is, it's not really clear, but he starts to use his name to open doors.
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