There are so many reasons to reject the HHS secretary nominee’s crackpot health science.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on his nomination to be Health and Human Services Secretary.(Alex Wroblewski / AFP)
“Are you supportive of these onesies?” Senator Bernie Sanders thundered at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during his confirmation hearing as Health and Human Services secretary Wednesday.
We all needed a laugh, and I did laugh, but Sanders’s question was serious.
The onesies read: “Unvaxxed. Unafraid” and “No vax. No problem.” They sell for $26.
As other Democrats pointed out, Kennedy has made millions from organizations and lawsuits deriving from his opposition to vaccines, and one of the groups sells these idiotic anti-vaccine onesies.
Kennedy demurred. He no longer runs the group in question, he said. And he denied that the T-shirts meant what they obviously did.
Sanders was not amused.
Can you imagine Kennedy’s minions saying “no” if he called them and said, maybe those onesies might spread misinformation? Or maybe they’re in poor taste? Or maybe, just get rid of them? For a while? For me?
Bobby, as I’ve said before, is a congenital liar. He claimed, “I spent 30 years trying to get mercury out of the fish in this country and nobody ever called me anti-fish.” The mercury he’s crusaded against, in childhood vaccines, was already taken out of them when he continued to insist it was poisoning us. He can’t be believed, about anything, and I’d say at least 50 of the 53 Republican senators know that.
Yes, this is kinda personal.
But not really. Most of the world realizes he’s a fraud now. My front-row seat 20 years ago isn’t even that interesting. It just keeps me alert to his lies.
Bobby zigged and he zagged on Wednesday.
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Stalwart Democrats tried to ask him “yes or no” questions about his horrible health stances over the years. He was often hard to pin down.
Did he link anti-depressants to school shootings?
Did he say many CDC workers belong in jail?
Did he support tying Medicaid to work requirements?
Did he compare the CDC to Nazi death camps?
Did he say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?
He did, did, did, did, and did.
But he did, did, did, and did try to slightly wiggle out from each. I don’t think it worked, but I’m not in his fan base.
Senator Elizabeth Warren made him sweat.
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“You go online, you do commercials to encourage people to sign up with Wisner Baum [a giant LA law firm] to join lawsuits against vaccine makers,” she said. “And for everyone who signs up, you personally get paid. And if they win their case, you get 10 percent of what they win,” she added, noting that “if you bring in somebody who gets 10 million you walk away with a million dollars.”
Kennedy accused Warren of making him “sound like a shill” before saying that he wouldn’t take any fees from drug companies during his time as secretary. But she was asking about what he ultimately would do with those fees. Kennedy, the scion of a wealthy family, demurred.
If you knew nothing about Kennedy, you might have come away impressed by his opening statement lamenting the poor health and chronic disease suffered by Americans, even as we pay more per capita for healthcare. We all agree there.
But later he falsely claimed that Americans prefer private insurance to Medicare, Medicaid, or the (private) marketplace governed by the ACA. In fact, a December Gallup poll reported that 62 percent of Americans believe it’s the “government’s responsibility to ensure all Americans have healthcare coverage.”
At 71, RFK Jr. uses Medicare Advantage, which is the privatized program that starts out generous when you’re the “young [or wealthy] old” and gets worse every year. Pushing us all into Medicare Advantage, which subjects participants to more scrutiny the older they get, was in Project 2025, so that shouldn’t have been surprising.
But on balance, the whole thing was depressing. I’ve written often about my reluctant contempt for him, but I still haven’t wanted to believe that he’s gone MAGA. Wednesday’s hearing proved that he has gone MAGA, in every way, though he occasionally tried to trick Democratic senators into believing he was kinda sorta with them. They might buy it, but clearly he is Opportunist MAGA, with a dose of old-fashioned Marin County faux-health promotion.
I started the day reading his cousin Caroline Kennedy’s shredding denunciation of him.
“His basement, his garage, his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.” She had already summarized: “I have known Bobby my whole life; we grew up together. It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets, because he himself is a predator.”
If RFK Jr. doesn’t get confirmed, there will be many reasons. But that creepy image of the baby chicks and mice in his blender should be one of them. I watch hawks and owls all the time in Central Park. It’s not pretty. But they acquire their prey the old fashioned way—they work for it.
The sad Kennedy scion can’t relate. He’s had his life prepared for him since childhood. Unfortunately, that didn’t turn him into an upstanding citizen, as his disappointed siblings would attest. It turned him into a vicious, conspiracy peddling nut, trying to put our minds into a blender.
Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.