Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings to become Secretary of Health and Human Services could have been a window into Kennedy’s beliefs and how he’d run one of the largest departments in the U.S. government. Instead, Kennedy spent much of the two days he was questioned before two different Senate committees denying his past comments, obfuscating his long record as an anti-vaccine activist, and, in some cases, flatly denying things he’s previously said publicly. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of places where Kennedy reversed his previous positions, denied something he’s previously said, or presented a misleading picture of past actions.
Characterized himself as not anti-vaccine but pro “strong science”
Kennedy’s clear record is that of a man who stokes suspicion and distrust towards vaccines at every turn, and has done so for almost 20 years. Nonetheless, throughout the hearing, Kennedy insisted that he’s not a vaccine opponent, saying that he and his children are vaccinated against some illnesses, and that he simply wants good science and data.
But the fact is that since 2005, with the publication of “Deadly Immunity,” his now-retracted Rolling Stone article, a cornerstone of Kennedy’s public career has been casting doubt on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Kennedy chaired Children’s Health Defense from 2015 to 2023, through which he spent countless hours making misleading claims about vaccines. The original name of the organization, the World Mercury Project, stemmed from the false claim that vaccines contain a harmful form of mercury. In 2016, Kennedy accused Congress of allowing “mercury-contaminated vaccines that other countries have long outlawed.” This statement misrepresented thimerosal, a preservative that’s been demonized by the anti-vaccine movement for decades, and which has, in any case, been removed from most vaccines since 2001.
Kennedy has also expressed unqualified support for Andrew Wakefield, who authored the retracted study suggesting a link between vaccines and autism, an association that has been disproven and debunked many times over. (During his confirmation hearings, Kennedy also suggested that the Institute of Medicine—a non-profit advisory organization now known as the National Academy of Medicine—needed to look into the purported vaccines-autism connection. But the IOM already did in 2011, and issued a report, hundreds of pages long, conclusively finding that vaccines do not cause autism.
“If the science says I’m wrong about what I’ve said in the past,” Kennedy proclaimed at one in the hearing, “as I said, I will apologize.”
This is a common talking point for Kennedy—that he’s not anti-vaccine, but merely pro-science—but that doesn’t make it true.
Offered a misleading picture of why he traveled to Samoa
Kennedy repeatedly distorted his infamous trip to Samoa in the run up to a measles outbreak that killed 83 people, most of them unvaccinated children.
During his visit, he spoke to the prime minister about vaccines and met with two anti-vaccine activists. Kennedy has acknowledged in the past that he went to Samoa at the invitation of one of them, “medical freedom” campaigner Edwin Tamasese; as NBC recently reported, an explicit goal of the trip was for the two men to discuss vaccines.
Kennedy, however, insisted at the hearing that he was there to attend an independence celebration and introduce a “medical informatics” system, adding, “I never thought gave any public statement about vaccines. You cannot find a single Samoan who will say ‘I didn’t get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy.’”
Claimed an apology he gave to a woman who accused him of sexual harassment was for “something else”
In July, Vanity Fair reported allegations from Eliza Conney that Kennedy had groped her during her time working as a caregiver for his children. Cooney told Reuters that Kennedy apologized to her over text after the story came out. According to Reuters, the text read, “I read your description of an episode in which I touched you in an unwanted manner. I have no memory of this incident, but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings. If I hurt you, it was inadvertent. I feel badly for doing so.”
When questioned about the alleged incident during the hearing by Senator Patty Murray of Washington, Kennedy denied sexually harassing or assaulting Cooney. When asked if he’d apologized to her, he said he had not, adding, without elaboration, “I apologized to her for something else.”
Denied claiming Lyme disease is a bioweapon
When Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) suggested on Wednesday that Kennedy had claimed Lyme disease was a “miltary-engineered bioweapon,” Kennedy responded, “I probably did say that.”
Yet on Thursday, when Sen. Susan Collins of (R-Maine) asked him about his statements on Lyme disease as a bioweapon, he changed his story. “I’ve never believed that, Senator,” he said. “What I said is, we should always follow the evidence.”
The idea that Lyme disease is a bioweapon has been thoroughly debunked.
Denied saying Covid-19 was an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon
Kennedy claimed in the summer of 2023 that Covid was a bioweapon, telling an Upper East Side audience, “Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
But in what represented a bit of an emerging pattern, when questioned about these remarks during the hearing, Kennedy claimed he “didn’t say it was deliberately targeted.”
There is also no proof that Covid is an ethnic bioweapon, a theory so fringe that few people besides Kennedy have even promoted it.
Flip-flopped on Ozempic
During Thursday’s hearings, Kennedy told Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), “The GLP-1 drugs—class of drugs—are miracle drugs.” That’s a departure from his previous comments on Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs of its class. In October, he said on a Fox News appearance, “They’re counting on selling [Ozempic] to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.” He also claimed at the time that the European Union “is right now investigating Ozempic for suicidal ideation”—even though the EU’s report, published in April, had already found no relationship.
Cast himself as a staunch opponent of abortion
During the hearings, Kennedy said repeatedly that he agrees with President Trump that “every abortion is a tragedy,” as he put it, and that the state “should control abortion,” presenting this as a long-held position. But it isn’t: Kennedy previously said on his own 2024 presidential campaign’s website he would have, as president, restored Roe vs. Wade, adding, “Body sovereignty must be protected.”
Denied calling antidepressant users “addicts”
“You described Americans who take mental health medications as addicts who need to be sent to wellness farms to recover,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) said during Wednesday’s hearings. “Is that what you believe?” Kennedy then denied ever having said “that antidepressants are like addicts.”
Yet as Mother Jones reported in July, when he made a podcast appearance to unveil a plan to overhaul addiction treatment programs during his 2024 campaign, Kennedy described a vision of opioid, antidepressant, and ADHD “addicts” receiving treatment on tech-free “wellness farms,” where they would spend as much as three or four years growing organic produce.
Denied suggesting pesticides could cause children to become transgender
On Wednesday, Bennetasked Kennedy, “Did you say exposure to pesticides causes children to be transgender?” Kennedy replied, “No, I never said that.” But in July, a report by CNN found dozens of instances of Kennedy spreading the notion. In a 2022 episode of his podcast, for example, Kennedy said, “If you expose frogs to atrazine, male frogs, it changes their sex and they can actually bear young…and so the capacity for these chemicals that we are just raining down on our children right now to induce these very profound sexual changes in them is something we need to be thinking about as a society.”
Although the hearings questioning Kennedy have concluded, it’s unclear when the Senate will schedule a vote on his confirmation. Several senators indicated they’d follow up with further questions over the weekend. Clearly, they’ll have a lot to ask about.
