The dark roots of RFK, Jr.’s public health ideology

March 13, 2026 Add Us On Google Add SciAm The dark roots of RFK, Jr.’s public health ideology How Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s ideas about public health—from vaccines to seed oils—are shaping Americans’ health By Kendra Pierre-Louis , Dan Vergano , Sushmita Pathak , Jeffery DelViscio & Alex Sugiura Bloomberg/GettyImages SUBSCRIBE TO Science Quickly Apple | Spotify | YouTube | RSS [CLIP: Theme music] Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American ’s Science Quickly , I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman. Last February, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was sworn in as the U.S. secretary of health and human services. The HHS, which oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, is effectively the nation’s public health department. It’s responsible for protecting the health of the American people. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. And yet, since assuming the role, Secretary Kennedy has often taken actions that have contradicted best practices in public health. The CDC no longer recommends hepatitis B vaccine for all newborns, and last August the HHS cut funding for 22 mRNA vaccine development projects. The secretary has proffered up unproven treatments for measles and muddied the waters on the effectiveness of the measles vaccine amid one of the largest measles outbreaks in recent memory . When the health secretary hasn’t been undermining vaccines, he has been propping up fringe health theories, such as that seed oils are uniquely unhealthy . [CLIP: RFK, Jr., speaks in an August 24, 2024, interview on Fox & Friends Weekend : “Seed oils ... they are associated with all kinds of very, very serious illnesses, including body-wide inflammation.”] Pierre-Louis: And the false conspiracy theory that the U.S. military bioengineered Lyme disease. [CLIP: RFK, Jr., speaks on a January 19, 2024, episode of the RFK Jr Podcast : “Hey everybody, today we’re gonna talk about Plum Island, the military laboratory 257 and the origins of Lyme disease.”] Pierre-Louis: Undergirding his actions is a belief system that many public health experts say is not only at odds with almost everything we know about public health but is indicative of what some are calling, quote, “ soft eugenics .” While eugenics of the 20th century focused on forced sterilization, the idea is that soft eugenics takes a different tactic. It focuses on enacting policies to take away lifesaving health care, like vaccines, from the most vulnerable. The presumed goal is for nature to take its course, leaving a wake of dead bodies and allowing only the so-called genetically superior to survive. When asked about this characterization, an HHS spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to SciAm that it was, quote, “absurd” and that the secretary, quote, “continues to focus on ensuring that vaccines ... meet the highest standards of safety.” So today we take a deep dive into what we know the health secretary believes, how that ties into eugenics and the effects of his policies that are already being felt. We begin with Dan Vergano, a senior editor at Scientific American, who, in February, wrote a story about how Kennedy has already altered public health . Pierre-Louis: Thanks for taking the time to chat with us today. Dan Vergano: Great to be here. Pierre-Louis: The first thing that struck me was something that you wrote in the piece, which is that during his confirmation hearings, he pledged not to fire anyone who was doing their job, but almost as soon as he was confirmed there were massive layoffs of staff. Can you talk about those layoffs, especially in concert with some of the appointments and hirings that he has made? Vergano: Despite his pledge, there were huge layoffs at HHS, and that’s serious blows to agencies like FDA, CDC and [the National Institutes of Health]. We’re talking about thousands of people at each place leaving: NIH directorships, which are very experienced people, gone. CDC senior leadership, people who are very experienced at responding to outbreaks of all kinds, have left, and they’ve left over, you know, sheer disagreement with RFK, Jr., including his own handpicked CDC director. So it’s a major whack to the scientific establishment in the U.S. The most famous, probably, staffing changes made was on the vaccine committee at, at CDC, which became famous in the pandemic as the place where, you know, vaccines were sort of evaluated. And he removed very accomplished people, very good vaccine experts, and replaced them with people who have an antipathy to vaccines in their backg