Fact check — where RFK Jr really stands on the big issues

Where does RFK Jr actually stand on the big health issues?

Robert F Kennedy Jr’s cabinet role comes with a budget of dollars US$1.8 trillion (AU$2.8 trillion) and agencies to administer pharmaceutical, disease prevention and healthcare programmes for the poor and elderly.

On Tuesday, his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, urged senators to vote against him, calling the 71-year-old a “predator” whose dangerous views on vaccination made him unfit for office.

The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, two of America’s biggest conservative newspapers, also denounced Kennedy for his embrace of conspiracy theories and his conflicting business interests.

While Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has a history of questioning vaccination and few believe his views have really changed, as he now claims, there is far more to his approach to America’s health and wellbeing.

He wants to clamp down on pesticides, limit pharmaceutical adverts targeting the public and to stop food stamps being spent on processed goods. He also wants to place greater emphasis on nutrition and clean living to stop Americans dying young.

“None of these recommendations I’m opposed to,” said Jerold Mande, a Harvard nutritionist and former deputy under secretary for food safety at the US Department of Agriculture. He added that there had been a “liberal freakout” over Kennedy’s nomination but many of his proposals were “something we should be willing to sit down and discuss”.

Caroline Kennedy urged senators to vote against her cousin, calling the 71-year-old a “predator” whose dangerous views on vaccination made him unfit for office. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Concern has been raised in Washington over the effect of Kennedy’s plans on farmers’ profits. “I may have to spend a lot of time educating him about agriculture,” Chuck Grassley, a Republican senator from Iowa, said last year.

The US food system does not operate like its equivalent in Europe, where chemicals tend to be subject to safety review before they enter the food supply. In the US, new ingredients are regularly added to food without notifying the federal drugs regulator or the public.

Food

Kennedy believes ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are driving obesity to record levels and fuelling chronic illness. Multiple studies have shown a link between UPFs and the risk of chronic disease, and rates of cancer, heart failure and autoimmune conditions are rising.

Improving nutrition is one way to combat this, he says, for example by stopping beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (Snap) using food stamps to buy soda and processed foods, which accounts for 20 per cent of Snap spending. “It’s nonsensical,” Kennedy said in September.

He has called for greater federal funding of nutritional research and urged the government to reform farming subsidies, diverting funds towards making fruit and vegetables cheaper for consumers rather than subsidising crops such as soybean oil or high-fructose corn syrup, which are used in processed foods.

Kennedy has pledged to ban UPFs from school lunch programmes throughout the US and wants warning labels on junk food.

“I completely agree with this,” Mande said, adding that Kennedy’s policies on UPFs would probably attract bipartisan support.

Pesticides

Addressing the US’s reliance on pesticides is another tenet of Kennedy’s bid to improve nutrition and health. Pesticide and other chemical standards should be “revisited,” he has said, pointing to 72 pesticides commonly used in the US that are banned in the EU.

Pesticides are key to food production, protecting or increasing yields, but overexposure can cause illness in humans. Scientists are divided on the risk these chemicals pose and many call for deeper research.

Whether Kennedy would be able to ban pesticides is another matter. Republicans would probably oppose regulation for fear of harming farmers’ profits. In his first two years in power, Trump approved about 100 products with pesticides that were banned in other countries.

Fluoride

When Kennedy said on the campaign trail that he wanted to remove fluoride from tap water, claiming it was associated with a number of ailments, Trump commented: “Sounds OK to me.” Fluoridation of the public water system is cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as one of the top ten public health interventions of the past century for its positive impact on dental health.

Kennedy has described fluoride as “industrial waste” and claimed that its presence in US water supplies was linked to arthritis, bone cancer and IQ loss.

Last year the National Institutes of Health’s toxicology programme determined “with moderate confidence” that there was a link between higher levels of fluoride exposure and lower IQ in children. The agency based its conclusion on studies involving fluoride levels at about twice the US recommended limit for drinking water.

Jim Dickinson, a professor of family medicine and community health at the University of Calgary, said multiple studies over the past 70 years had demonstrated the safety and effectiveness of fluoride in preventing tooth decay. “Removing it from water supplies would be a disaster,” he said.

Pharmaceuticals

Kennedy wants the pharmaceutical industry to cut costs for consumers, promote alternative therapies and restrict advertising.

“We’re one of only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to consumers - everybody agrees it’s a bad idea,” Kennedy said in May, referring to the US and New Zealand.

Prescription drug brands accounted for 30.7 per cent of advertising minutes on evening news programmes on the main US channels last year.

Any order restricting pharma ads is likely to face legal challenges on grounds of violating free speech.

Kennedy’s cabinet role will include oversight of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency that sparked a boom in 1997 when it relaxed rules on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising. Drug companies previously had to disclose all possible side-effects for any claimed effect of their products. After the policy change they only had to disclose the “most important” health risks.

Kennedy also wants legislators to “cap drug prices” for medicines such as Ozempic so companies cannot charge Americans “substantially more than Europeans pay”. To do this he will need to break the hold of the pharmaceutical lobby in Washington and persuade Republicans, who are not known for their love of big government, to regulate the sector.

“I don’t think these policies have a chance, but I don’t object,” said Mande.

Alternative therapies

In October, Kennedy posted about a range of alternatives to pharmaceuticals that he supports, including psychedelics, raw milk, nutraceuticals, peptides and hyperbaric therapies.

Federal law classifies psilocybin, a psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, as a Schedule I controlled substance, making it illegal because it is considered to have a high potential for abuse.

However, psilocybin was legalised in Oregon and Colorado through public ballots and many cities have decriminalised psychedelics, saying they are much less harmful than other illegal drugs such as fentanyl and methamphetamine. Psilocybin has been shown to improve depression symptoms for some patients in clinical trials, and other studies are investigating its use in conditions including obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kennedy’s promotion of nutraceuticals and peptides were strongly criticised in an article by S Bryn Austin, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and Amanda Raffoul, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at University of Toronto.

“Peptides can be extremely dangerous, are widely promoted on social media to young people, and are prohibited by both the US Department of Defense for use by service members and by the World Anti-Doping Agency for use by competitive athletes,” they wrote.

Without sufficient regulation from the FDA, “the supplement industry will no doubt take Kennedy’s stance as a free pass to relentlessly promote its deceptive and predatory products”.

Vaccines

Kennedy today claims to be pro-vaccine and has assured the US public that he would not stop childhood vaccinations; he simply wants to make safety and efficacy data more available.

It marks a notable shift from years of anti-vaccine rhetoric, including scepticism of the safety of the polio and measles jabs that have saved or enhanced countless lives. In 2020 he falsely said that there was “zero evidence that the flu shot prevents hospitalisations and deaths” and that “the flu shot transmits the flu”. This showed a misunderstanding about the flu jab, which does not contain live virus.

Kennedy’s confirmation hearing was noisily interrupted twice in its early stages, each time by a lone protester apparently shouting in response to his assertion that he was not anti-vaccine. In the first case he said in his introduction that he had had all his children vaccinated.

Shortly after the interruption, Ron Wyden, the first Democratic senator to speak, pointed out that Kennedy had said on a podcast in 2020 that he would “do anything to go back in time” and not vaccinate his children.

As recently as July 2023, Kennedy said “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective”, and he has repeatedly spread the false claim that inoculation causes autism.

Speaking against his nomination, Caroline Kennedy said on Tuesday: “His views on vaccines are dangerous and wilfully misinformed.”

His advisers include Aaron Siri, a vaccine injury lawyer who has pressed authorities to revoke or pause distribution of certain treatments, and Del Bigtree, a prominent anti-vaccine activist. They are reportedly urging Kennedy to target vaccines if he becomes health secretary.

Many experts simply do not believe that he has changed his longstanding views. “I don’t buy it,” said Paul Offit, a vaccine specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “He wants to do everything he can to make vaccines less available because he genuinely thinks he’s helping people.”

The Times