Why Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So Convinced He’s Right?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in some way knew, at the same time as just a little boy, that destiny can lead an individual to horrible locations. “I all the time had the sensation that we had been all concerned in some nice campaign,” Kennedy as soon as wrote, “that the world was a battleground for good and evil, and that our lives could be consumed in that battle.” He was 9 years previous when his uncle was assassinated and 14 when his father suffered the identical destiny. I occurred to be sitting subsequent to him this fall when he realized that his good friend Charlie Kirk had been shot. We had been on an Air Nationwide Guard C-40C Clipper en route from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and certainly one of Kennedy’s advisers, her eyes filling with tears, whispered the information in his ear. “Oh my God,” he mentioned.

Nationwide Guard stewards handed out reheated hen quesadillas, which Kennedy declined in favor of the quart of plain, natural, grass-fed yogurt his physique man had secured for him. A number of weeks earlier, a person who believed that he’d been poisoned by a COVID vaccine had fired practically 200 bullets on the CDC’s campus in Atlanta, hitting six buildings and killing a police officer. Kennedy, who as secretary of Well being and Human Companies oversees the CDC, had simply advised me that his safety group just lately circulated a memo warning him of threats to his personal life. “It mentioned the resentments towards me had elevated ‘above the edge of lethality,’ ” he mentioned. Kennedy greeted the risk evaluation with exceptional equanimity. He put down his spoon with a purpose to end his yogurt in gulps immediately from the container.

In an environment of rising mistrust of U.S. establishments, the place even once-untouchable bastions of experience such because the scientific institution had been badly weakened by the coronavirus pandemic, Kennedy had emerged as a Rorschach check—truth-telling crusader, or brain-wormed loon?—for a way People understood the populist furies riling the nation. I’d advised him that I wished to know his journey from liberal Democrat and environmental activist to MAGA insider and Kennedy-family heretic, on the speculation that by analyzing his odyssey, I would higher perceive what separates us and assist slender the political divide. He was sympathetic however skeptical. “Yeah, in the event you pull that off …,” he mentioned, trailing off with amusing.

Kennedy himself has executed a lot to gasoline the rising mistrust. He views a few of the world’s most celebrated scientific and political leaders as charlatans. He calls a few of the consultants who work beneath him at HHS “biostitutes,” as a result of he considers their integrity on the market to the industries they regulate. He rejects a lot of the scientific consensus concerning vaccines, arguing that they’ve seemingly seeded the rising epidemic of power diseases. Throughout a Senate Finance Committee listening to simply days earlier than our flight from Chicago, Kennedy had known as one U.S. senator a liar and one other ridiculous. A bipartisan majority of the panel, together with two Republican medical doctors, voiced issues that vaccine insurance policies he supported threatened the lives of American kids. Kennedy argues that journalists like me are complicit, together with the public-health institution, in hiding fact from the American individuals. The nation was tearing itself aside, and Kennedy had positioned himself on the seams.

“The entire medical institution has enormous stakes and equities that I’m now threatening,” he advised me. “And I’m shocked President Trump lets me do it.”

A yr earlier, Kirk, the founding father of the conservative youth group Turning Level USA, had hosted an occasion with Kennedy the identical day the candidate ended his quixotic presidential marketing campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. JFK and RFK Sr. “are wanting down proper now and they’re very, very proud,” Trump had mentioned on the event. Now, as we flew over Ohio, nobody knew if Kirk would reside. On the entrance of the aircraft, aides to Legal professional Common Pam Bondi, who was additionally on board, had been utilizing the in-flight Wi-Fi to stream the grotesque movies of the capturing on social media. Kennedy’s adviser got here again with a draft put up for the secretary’s X account: “Praying for you, Charlie.”

“Say ‘We love you, Charlie.’ ” Kennedy instructed.

Three days later, Kennedy had simply returned from a Saturday-morning 12-step assembly for habit close to his new home in Georgetown—a neighborhood that the prolonged Kennedy clan had lengthy known as dwelling however that he now described as a “liberal enclave”—when he texted me saying that he wished to proceed our dialog in regards to the nation’s social breakdown.

A majority of the individuals in his restoration assembly, he mentioned, “had been most likely horrified the primary time I walked in, as a result of, , they learn The New York Instances they usually watch CNN, and so I’m form of like a monster to them,” he mentioned. “Over time, I turned very welcome.”

This gave him hope that, exterior the rooms of restoration, we might shrink our divisions. Elements of society, he mentioned, are presupposed to operate impartial of politics. Science is certainly one of them. “The complete objective of science is to seek for existential truths,” he mentioned. “It’s not subjective. It ought to be goal. I imagine science is a spot the place you’ll find unity if you may get a dialog going.”

The issue is that the dialog had lengthy since damaged down. In 1900, the highest three causes of demise in the US had been pneumonia, tuberculosis, and diarrheal illnesses, which collectively killed practically 1 % of the nation yearly. A staggering 30 % of all deaths occurred in kids youthful than 5. By the top of the century, vaccinations, antibiotics, clear water, improved sewage therapy, and pest management had drastically diminished the lethality of infectious illnesses. At this time, younger kids account for lower than 1 % of U.S. deaths. Life expectancy has been prolonged by practically 30 years. It is a monumental accomplishment, attributable to the efforts of scientists and lawmakers who examined hypotheses, constructed consensus to go insurance policies, after which corrected that consensus when new proof arose.

However since about 2010, the lengthy, regular improve in life expectancy has flatlined. Persistent diseases corresponding to coronary heart illness, most cancers, stroke, and lung illness now high our mortality tables—affecting some 130 million People and accounting for 90 % of our $4.9 trillion annual health-care expenditure. We’re the world’s least wholesome high-income nation, bombarded with prescription-drug advertisements and buffeted by a wellness {industry} of different fixes. A September ballot by Navigator, a Democratic public-opinion agency, discovered that seven in 10 People are satisfied that the well being system “is designed so drug and insurance coverage corporations earn more money when People are sick.”

Kennedy goals to channel the frustrations of that majority to remake public well being. He arrived at this aim by means of his a long time as a trial lawyer targeted on contamination of the nation’s water by polluting firms. Within the latter a part of his profession, he has come to understand a comparable contamination of American well being by pharmaceutical and meals corporations. A central premise of Kennedy’s management at HHS is that trendy science is contaminated with bias that prices lives—that the regulatory companies have been captured by {industry}, that medical journals are corrupted by the necessity to flip a revenue, that even revered organizations such because the American Academy of Pediatrics function with a myopic groupthink that hurts children.

For years, Kennedy was a gadfly outsider. The scientific institution ignored him. Even now that he sits atop America’s well being forms, Kennedy advised me, public-health authorities—whose convictions, he mentioned, are extra akin to faith than science—is not going to have interaction with him. He blamed his opponents for dodging his arguments on vaccines. “Why for 15 years have they refused to have a dialog with me? I’ve been asking for 15 years for any person to return up and debate me on this,” he advised me. “Their response to that’s ‘Oh, don’t debate him. He’s too loopy. You don’t wish to give him a platform.’ ”

In 2017, Kennedy thought he’d lastly gotten the viewers that may permit him to make his case about vaccines. At Trump’s insistence, Kennedy and a few allies, together with Aaron Siri, a vaccine-safety litigator, got here to the Nationwide Institutes of Well being with a stack of 84 research that they mentioned supported their claims in regards to the unrecognized risks of vaccines.

“We tried to have interaction him. We had been making an attempt to debate him,” Joshua Gordon, the previous director of the Nationwide Institute of Psychological Well being, advised me. He and his colleagues attended the assembly to argue that present research demonstrated no connection between vaccines and situations corresponding to autism, and to elucidate why Kennedy’s papers “had been suspect.” However, Gordon mentioned, “Kennedy and Siri refused to have interaction.”

Kennedy and Siri insist that it was the medical doctors and scientists who refused to have interaction, and Siri has printed emails displaying that Gordon finally ended the dialog by referring them to the CDC. The assembly solidified Kennedy’s conviction that he was coping with a cult unwilling to take a look at proof that challenged its worldview.

At this time, the same sample is taking part in out between Kennedy and his personal employees. In late August, Kennedy requested that Trump fireplace Kennedy’s handpicked CDC director, simply 4 weeks after she’d been confirmed by the Senate, as a result of Kennedy was satisfied that she was aligning herself along with her company’s scientific employees and towards him. He changed the members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee as a result of he’d concluded that their COVID-era resolution making had been unscientific and industry-influenced. His group makes use of social media to assault science reporters by title.

Even some members of Kennedy’s newly adopted social gathering are alarmed. Final February, Senator Invoice Cassidy of Louisiana, a gastroenterologist and the Republican chair of the Senate Well being, Training, Labor, and Pensions Committee, forged the deciding vote to substantiate Kennedy as HHS secretary. A liver specialist, Cassidy has handled sufferers with cirrhosis attributable to having been born with hepatitis B, a situation that may be prevented with new child vaccination. Although Cassidy has to date declined to resign his endorsement of Kennedy, he rejects the secretary’s suggestion that the hepatitis vaccine is perhaps harmful when given to newborns.

“I’ve invited Invoice Cassidy and others to take a seat down with me and undergo the research and let’s determine which of them are proper,” Kennedy advised me. “That has to occur by actual debate and dialog, and there’s no actual place to have that within the present political milieu.”

Once I conveyed Kennedy’s frustrations to Cassidy, the senator mentioned that he and the HHS secretary repeatedly share scientific articles and papers with one another. “I discover that he usually will ship me the identical article greater than as soon as,” Cassidy advised me. But at any time when Cassidy factors out “statistical flaws” within the article, he mentioned, Kennedy says he considers these “immaterial.”

I had been having the same expertise. As I reported this text, Kennedy referred me to many research meant to persuade me there are usually not two legitimate sides to this debate, that his is the one legitimate one. I’m not a scientist. I’ve admittedly been inconsistent in getting my yearly COVID and flu boosters, confused about their advantages. Now probably the most highly effective public-health official within the U.S. was asking me, a political reporter, to referee a medical debate with life-and-death stakes.

I known as Paul Offit, a pediatrician and the director of the Vaccine Training Heart on the Youngsters’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and some of the outspoken critics of Kennedy’s vaccine views. Offit helped invent a rotavirus vaccine that has mitigated a significant reason behind early-childhood hospitalization all over the world. Kennedy routinely assaults him as a paragon of economic battle as a result of the house owners of the vaccine patent, together with his hospital, gave him a few of the proceeds from its sale. The accusation depends fully on circumstantial proof: Offit’s early rotavirus analysis was funded by the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, not non-public {industry}; he advocates for vaccination and sells books about the advantages of vaccines, however nothing means that he has ever executed something untoward in pursuit of revenue. Like most of the individuals I spoke with for this text, Offit has confronted demise threats from radicals who imagine his vaccine advocacy is lethal. Some have focused his kids.

Offit advised me that Kennedy is a “liar” and a “horrible human being.” I requested him to elucidate. “It doesn’t matter what I say,” Offit mentioned. “He thinks the medical journals are within the pocket of the {industry}, he thinks that the federal government is within the pocket of the {industry}, he thinks I’m within the pocket of {industry}, and he’s flawed.” Offit continued: “If he has information displaying he’s proper, then fucking publish it. He can’t, as a result of he doesn’t have these information.”

I requested Offit if he noticed a approach to reverse the general public’s rising mistrust in science. “I don’t assume there may be any approach to regain that belief apart from have the viruses do the schooling, and the micro organism do the schooling, after which individuals will notice they paid approach too excessive a price,” he mentioned.

From 2011 to 2024, the share of kindergarten college students whose households requested for nonmedical exemptions to vaccine mandates doubled, to greater than 3 %, based on the CDC. Florida simply introduced an finish to highschool vaccine mandates, and Idaho handed a regulation banning them. Cassidy’s workplace has been monitoring rising charges of pertussis, a bacterial an infection also referred to as whooping cough; symptomatic an infection is avoidable with a vaccine. Cassidy’s working speculation is that declining vaccination charges in pink states will present up within the information. Kennedy counters that present information are usually not particular sufficient to indicate whether or not the brand new infections are among the many unvaccinated.

I first interviewed Kennedy for this story in June, in his workplace on the sixth flooring of HHS headquarters, a brutalist grey block of concrete that resembles a large air-conditioning unit. Kennedy’s employees jokes that the constructing looks like a jail; the secretary identified the good view he would have of the U.S. Capitol’s dome, if not for the constructing’s deep-set home windows.

Kennedy is 71, however with the assistance of weight lifting, synthetic tanning, a cautious weight-reduction plan, and testosterone-replacement remedy, he appears to be like extra like a comic-book character than a senior citizen, his bronzed face all chiseled angles, his eyes sky blue. He adheres to a strict uniform at work—darkish, embroidered skinny ties like his father generally wore, with swimsuit jackets that bulge over his bodybuilder’s chest and biceps. He repeatedly pulls Zyn nicotine pouches from his shirt pocket or desk drawers to tuck between his decrease lip and gum. Once I requested him to sq. his nicotine behavior and the time he spends tanning with the federal well being advisories towards each, he shifted in his chair. “I’m not telling those that they need to do something that I do,” he mentioned. “I simply say ‘Get in form.’ ”

Kennedy advised me his employees believed that talking with me was a mistake. For the primary half century of his life, nationwide magazines hailed him as a public servant, a possible inheritor to the Kennedy kingdom—even, as Time journal put it in 1999, a “Hero for the Planet.” “The Kennedy Who Issues,” New York journal declared in 1995, saluting RFK Jr.’s environmental advocacy. In 2006, Vainness Truthful posed him on the quilt of its “inexperienced challenge” with George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

However the favorable protection dried up about 20 years in the past, when he started arguing that mercury components in vaccines had been seemingly inflicting an epidemic of autism. This declare was contradicted even on the time by epidemiological research by the CDC and others. Editors who didn’t wish to discourage lifesaving vaccination stopped working flattering articles and began working essential ones. “All-out hit items,” he advised me, “each certainly one of them—like, ugly, hateful stuff.” For 20 years now, he mentioned, solely “unhealthy articles” have been written about him.

But within the aftermath of COVID, his recognition has surged. Like Trump, Kennedy has drafted on the currents of populist backlash towards knowledgeable authority. “Once I’m on the road, I get stopped 3 times a block by individuals saying that they love me,” he mentioned. Kennedy is among the many hottest members of Trump’s Cupboard, based on an August Gallup survey: 42 % of the nation holds a positive view of him, on par with the president himself. The general public assaults on Kennedy’s character and integrity trouble him, naturally, however he wished me to know that I used to be not a risk. “If he screws us on this,” he recounted telling his employees, “it’s simply one other shitty article in a liberal paper, which doesn’t actually damage me.”

He believed that I’d screwed him earlier than, anyway. I’d first met him within the spring of 2023, when he was difficult President Joe Biden for the Democratic Get together’s nomination. The Washington Submit story I wrote targeted on his argument that the highly effective had been mendacity to the American individuals—about vaccines, environmental threats, the assassinations of his father and uncle, and far else. He hated the story largely as a result of I’d used the phrase conspiratorial within the headline, which he argued was an elitist epithet for tinfoil hat. I positioned him within the custom of what the political scientist Richard Hofstadter described as America’s paranoid model, whereas acknowledging that secret conspiracies of the highly effective—tobacco corporations, the intelligence group—generally do exist.

He responded by sending me an electronic mail practically twice the size of my authentic article, with 78 footnotes. (On the time, he was suing the Submit for its function in a consortium designed to fight misinformation on-line.) “Your reporting on me displays, exquisitely, the overt aspirations by your employer and its co-conspirators to crush nonconformist viewpoints with a purpose to safe their very own financial self-interests,” he wrote. Weeks later, on a podcast, he accused me of being “a part of a conspiracy, a real conspiracy.”

I had by no means acquired an electronic mail like that from a politician. If I used to be hopelessly corrupt, why spend hours writing a response? It struck me that Kennedy believed himself to be on a ferocious quest. “There may be nothing that could be a present about what you’re seeing,” Mike Papantonio, a former authorized companion of Kennedy’s who co-hosted a program with him on the liberal radio community Air America within the mid-aughts, advised me. “That’s actual rage.”

Kennedy and I stayed in contact. In October 2023, getting little traction from Democratic-primary voters, he relaunched his presidential marketing campaign as an impartial. Regardless of not having a transparent path to even a single electoral vote, he didn’t cease till August 2024, when he endorsed Trump, a person he had weeks earlier publicly described as interesting to “a few of the darkest impulses within the nationwide psyche.”

As we talked extra just lately in his wood-paneled HHS workplace, he leaned again in his chair behind an oversize desk, with certainly one of his 5 book-length assaults on the federal medical institution, The Actual Anthony Fauci: Invoice Gates, Large Pharma, and the World Warfare on Democracy and Public Well being, displayed close by. From that seat, he oversees one out of each 4 {dollars} within the federal funds and regulates about 17 % of the nation’s financial system. How, I requested him, did he clarify going from scorned activist to the boss of the public-health equipment?

“I might say in a single phrase: providential,” Kennedy mentioned.

If I had been to do that story proper, Kennedy advised me, I wanted to speak along with his high deputies: Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the NIH; Marty Makary, the commissioner of the FDA; and Mehmet Oz, the cardiothoracic surgeon turned TV physician identified for having hyped doubtful “miracle” cures, who’s now working the Facilities for Medicare and Medicaid Companies. All three of those physicians, like Kennedy, say that they had been reworked by the pandemic, which they thought public-health authorities had mishandled. That they had dissented from authorities edicts concerning vaccine mandates and masking. Though they don’t embrace all of Kennedy’s views on vaccines, his deputies share his big-picture view that America’s public-health system is damaged.

Early within the pandemic, Bhattacharya, a Stanford College doctor and well being economist, co-wrote the 2020 “Nice Barrington Declaration,” a doc that argued towards common COVID lockdowns in favor of permitting wholesome individuals to collect whereas isolating solely these teams at biggest threat of extreme sickness or demise, such because the aged and the infirm. For this, Bhattacharya was ostracized by colleagues at Stanford and the broader scientific group: An electronic mail that later turned public reveals Francis Collins, then the NIH director, telling colleagues that they wanted a “fast and devastating printed take down” of the declaration. (Tens of 1000’s of People a month had been dying from COVID at the moment; overstrained hospitals had been susceptible to collapse.) Demise threats—a recurring function of public-health work nowadays—adopted for Bhattacharya, who now compares the COVID years to pre-Enlightenment Europe, when Galileo Galilei was imprisoned by Catholic leaders for arguing that the Earth orbited the solar.

“What you had is a comparatively small variety of scientists who might resolve what’s true or false for all of science and all of society,” Bhattacharya advised me. At this time, even a few of those that led the public-health response throughout these years admit that COVID-vaccine mandates might have been counterproductive, that social distancing lasted too lengthy, and that masking might not have executed a lot to restrict transmission—although it is usually true that we can’t know now how a lot larger the demise fee would have been with out these measures in place.

The COVID vaccines led to a considerable discount in hospitalization and demise from the illness, based on peer-reviewed research. However Kennedy likes to emphasise that, because the virus advanced, the vaccines failed to stop an infection, as scientific authorities had initially urged they might. Kennedy additionally dismisses the mathematical modeling of the lives saved, and says CDC estimates of the COVID demise toll had been inflated by “information chaos” within the authorities. What nobody doubts is that the severity of the pandemic—greater than 95,000 People had been reported useless in a single month at its top—has reworked the nation’s relationship with medical authority. From 2020 to 2022, public confidence within the CDC dropped from 82 to 56 %, based on a examine by researchers on the College of Texas Southwestern Medical Heart. The nation has nonetheless not recovered.

Kennedy’s group blames its Biden-era authorities predecessors. Once I met with Makary, who labored as a pancreatic surgeon earlier than being named FDA commissioner, he mentioned that, in instances of uncertainty, a harmful and self-defeating “groupthink” can take over. Kennedy and his allies level to how public-health authorities urged social-media platforms to curb the posting of COVID misinformation, stifling debate. Kennedy himself received kicked off Instagram. In a single social-media put up, he known as the demise of the baseball nice Hank Aaron at age 86 “a part of a wave of suspicious deaths amongst aged intently following” COVID-vaccine photographs. Critics accused Kennedy of speculating baselessly about Aaron’s reason behind demise, and quoted the medical expert’s workplace saying Aaron had died of pure causes. Kennedy, in flip, accused his critics of ruling out a vaccine connection and not using a correct post-mortem, and demanded that one be executed.

The COVID expertise bonded Kennedy, Makary, Bhattacharya, and Oz in a fellowship of the ostracized. “We turned renegades, personae non gratae, as a result of we requested questions which you’d assume, definitely inside educational drugs, it’s best to have the ability to ask,” Oz advised me in his workplace, the place he retains a taxidermic honey badger to represent fearlessness and aggression.

After Trump’s reelection, Kennedy’s HHS-leadership-team-in-waiting gathered at Oz’s 10-bedroom, 18,559-square-foot Palm Seaside home, not removed from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property. The home was constructed by the identical architect who constructed the mansion down the seashore the place Kennedy had spent holidays throughout his childhood. “It has the identical scent to it,” he mentioned. Within the mornings, Kennedy would name on anybody who was round to go swimming within the ocean or throw a soccer with him, earlier than his group settled all the way down to plan the way forward for U.S. drugs. Kennedy’s good friend Russell Model—a comic, an actor, and a fellow recovering addict who has pleaded not responsible to rape and sexual-assault prices in England—would generally be a part of them. Kennedy says that these months in Palm Seaside validated his resolution to stroll additional away from the Democratic Get together and most of his family, who remained distinguished Trump opponents. The Republicans hanging round Oz’s home, Kennedy advised me, “had been all very idealistic individuals, which was not my view of the Republican Get together rising up. To me probably the most breathtaking and refreshing a part of being down there may be that individuals weren’t sitting in rooms, because the Democrats think about, pondering, How will we reduce taxes for wealthy individuals and screw the poor? They had been saying, ‘How do you make each American higher?’ ”

At one level, leaders of Stanford visited, solely to be grilled by Kennedy and Oz about why the college had opened an investigation into Bhattacharya’s skilled conduct in the course of the pandemic. The outcasts had turn into the authorities.

Kennedy now compares his relationship with the president to “once you’re relationship any person that you just maintain liking an increasing number of.” They started assembly after the failed assassination try on Trump in July 2024. Kennedy got here to imagine that his earlier impressions of Trump—that he was a “bombastic narcissist” who lacked curiosity and didn’t learn books—had been flawed. “At some point he sat on the aircraft with me. We had been speaking about Syria, and he drew a map of the Mideast for me. And it was an ideal map,” Kennedy advised me. “Then he drew within the troop energy of every nation, and in addition the troop energy on numerous borders.” Trump would recite sports activities trivia to Kennedy, and recount the web price of main Wall Avenue financiers.

“I needed to begin seeing Trump as a populist who’s standing as much as actually entrenched energy and the deep state and that merger of state and company energy,” Kennedy advised me. He acknowledges that this makes Trump an odd “paradox”—“as a result of he’s probably the most business-friendly man no less than since George W. Bush.”

That’s saying one thing coming from Kennedy, who within the early 2000s in contrast Bush’s pro-corporate environmental insurance policies to the work of European fascists. I requested how he reconciled his criticism of Bush with working within the Cupboard of a president who appointed an oil government, Chris Wright—who just lately known as Al Gore’s climate-change warnings “nonsense”—as power secretary. “Chris Wright has a various worldview,” Kennedy advised me.

For many years, RFK Jr. continued to name himself an “FDR/Kennedy liberal.” The embrace of MAGA has misplaced Kennedy mates and strained his household. At a rally towards vaccine mandates in 2022, Kennedy described the U.S. COVID response as totalitarian, and warned that new applied sciences would give the federal government larger energy to manage People than the Nazis had over Anne Frank in Europe. In response, his sister Kerry Kennedy posted on X, “Bobby’s lies and fear-mongering yesterday had been each sickening and harmful.” When RFK Jr.’s personal spouse, Cheryl Hines, well-known for enjoying Larry David’s spouse on the HBO present Curb Your Enthusiasm, publicly criticized him for these remarks, he apologized. Kennedy and Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, had been as soon as such shut mates that they had been in one another’s weddings. Now, when Whitehouse questions Kennedy at public hearings, his voice drips with disdain. “You will have my cellphone,” Kennedy advised his former good friend throughout their final Finance Committee confrontation, in September. “I’ve by no means heard from you in seven months. Name me up. I’d love to fulfill with you.” (Kennedy says Whitehouse replied to his supply in late October and mentioned he would meet, after Whitehouse’s Senate workplace had declined a request for remark from The Atlantic.) Extra just lately, his cousin Tatiana Schlossberg, certainly one of JFK’s granddaughters, who has terminal most cancers, wrote in The New Yorker that she “watched from my hospital mattress as Bobby, within the face of logic and customary sense,” turned HHS secretary, and admonished him for reducing cancer-research funding. (Kennedy declined to remark.)

“To remain on the right track regardless of that jeering actually tells you a large number about his messianic self-regard,” the New York Democratic politician Mark Inexperienced, one other former good friend of Kennedy’s, advised me just lately. “He’s sadly off his rocker to argue that Biden was extra anti-speech and fascist than Donald Trump.”

Over time, Kennedy and his group united round an organizing concept of their division. “It’s a $1.73 trillion bundle of perverse incentives,” he advised me. “The medical doctors, the hospitals, the insurance coverage corporations, the opposite suppliers, the pharmaceutical corporations are all incentivized to generate income by conserving individuals sick.” Fixing this could require radical measures.

The following yr has been a whirlwind of controversy, destruction, and new initiatives. Kennedy and the Trump White Home pushed out, by firings and induced retirements, about one in 4 HHS staff, together with a lot of the senior profession employees and 1000’s of employees on the CDC, which Kennedy described to me as a “snake pit.” Early on, working with Elon Musk’s group on the Division of Authorities Effectivity, Kennedy canceled a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} in analysis grants, and defended a White Home funds proposal that reduce 40 % of the NIH’s funding, even whereas saying that he would settle for more cash if Congress determined in another way. “I talked to Elon so much about this,” Kennedy advised me. “It’s a must to do one thing disruptive in the beginning.” When you don’t, “you lose momentum.”

On Might 27, he shook scientists on the CDC by saying that his division would now not suggest COVID boosters for wholesome kids or pregnant ladies, on the grounds that scientific trials had not sufficiently demonstrated security and efficacy for these populations. The profession employees was outraged; Kennedy introduced no new information on potential hurt that may have compelled rescinding the prevailing advice, and it’s properly established that COVID an infection will increase the hazard to each mom and fetus. “I knew that these choices had been going to hurt individuals,” Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, a high adviser on COVID vaccines for the CDC, who resigned in response to Kennedy’s new coverage, advised me. “From my perspective as a scientist and somebody who has executed this her total profession, he has lots of blood on his fingers.”

Days later, Kennedy eliminated the 17 members of the CDC committee liable for recommending vaccination schedules and changed them with a smaller group that promptly ordered the elimination of a mercury preservative, thimerosal, from flu vaccines, regardless that the CDC continues to explain thimerosal as “very protected.” Kennedy’s new committee put up limitations towards a single shot to vaccinate kids for measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella, citing previous research by Merck and the CDC that discovered a better incidence of febrile seizures following the mixed vaccine. Kennedy additionally canceled $500 million in federal grants for mRNA-vaccine analysis, citing his conclusions, disputed by medical associations, that the know-how performs poorly towards fast-mutating respiratory viruses.

In different areas, he’s pushed for adjustments that well being activists and wellness influencers on the left, in addition to many within the scientific mainstream, have lengthy sought. He launched initiatives to assessment baby-formula elements, challenge new tips for fluoride use, restrict scholar cellphone use, cease the sale of unlawful flavored vapes, and take away restrictions on whole-milk gross sales at faculties, and he persuaded governors in 12 states to ban using meals stamps to purchase sugary sodas. He introduced plans to discover limits on direct pharmaceutical promoting and the advertising and marketing of unhealthy meals to kids, improve diet schooling for medical doctors, scale back costs on some medicine, add front-of-package labeling on ultra-processed meals, and require extra testing of meals components. Underneath strain from Kennedy’s HHS, main meals producers introduced that they might take away sure petroleum-based meals dyes from cereals and sweet.

Kennedy’s deputies describe him as endlessly interested by new science, and keen to take heed to dissenting views. Bhattacharya advised me that, in the course of the 2025 measles outbreak in Texas, the worst in a long time within the U.S., he privately suggested Kennedy to endorse the measles vaccine as the best approach to stop the illness. “If you give him the proof, he alters his thoughts alongside the strains of what the proof says,” Bhattacharya mentioned. Kennedy did go on to name the measles vaccine efficient—whereas additionally emphasizing that folks ought to make their very own choices and selling disputed therapies corresponding to cod-liver oil for measles signs.

The secretary additionally consumes scientific research by the bushel. In August, Andrea Baccarelli, the dean of the Harvard T. H. Chan Faculty of Public Well being, printed a assessment of the prevailing science suggesting a doable connection between taking Tylenol throughout being pregnant and the event of autism or consideration deficit dysfunction in kids. Kennedy advised me he spent a weekend studying 70 research associated to this. He spoke with Baccarelli, began texting immediately with one other researcher on the subject, and requested the CEO of Kenvue, the corporate that now owns the Tylenol model, to convey scientists to HHS to temporary him.

Kennedy arrived at a quite nuanced set of conclusions—extra nuanced than what his boss would subsequently categorical. Excessive fevers in pregnant ladies are identified to trigger unhealthy outcomes in newborns. So any public-health recommendation recommending towards Tylenol, which reduces fevers, must be rigorously weighed, he advised me. However when he briefed Trump on his findings, Kennedy mentioned, the president’s response was to counsel instantly posting a Tylenol warning on social media.

“You may’t do this,” Kennedy mentioned he advised the president. “There’s nuance to it, and you’ll’t scare individuals away from Tylenol, and also you’re going to get an enormous quantity of pushback from highly effective pharmaceutical corporations.” Trump’s reply: “I don’t give a shit about that.” The FDA-advisory notice that Marty Makary launched to accompany the announcement weeks later requested medical doctors to train warning in utilizing the treatment for low-grade fevers however mentioned that there was as but no proof of a causal hyperlink between Tylenol and developmental issues.

Trump, nonetheless, has much less endurance for nuance. “Don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it,” the president mentioned at a press convention on September 22. “Combat like hell to not take it.” The medical group responded with outrage. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American School of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and different distinguished well being organizations put out statements advising medical doctors and sufferers to ignore Trump’s advice.

By all this, Kennedy has praised the president’s fearlessness and compassion. A number of months earlier, at a White Home occasion, RFK Jr. in contrast Trump to President Kennedy, who had labored with the biologist Rachel Carson within the early Sixties to cut back using pesticides. “My uncle tried to do that, however he was killed and it by no means received executed,” Kennedy mentioned, sitting alongside Trump. “And ever since then, we’ve been ready for a president who would arise and communicate on behalf of the well being of the American individuals.”

In a household steeped in its personal mythology, RFK Jr. was all the time significantly vulnerable to the pathos and grandeur of the Camelot mystique. His father inspired him to learn heroic poems like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” and as a baby Bobby Jr. memorized Rudyard Kipling’s “If—” and “Gunga Din.”

The legend of King Arthur resonated with a boy who was extra interested by catching salamanders and snakes within the forest than in schoolwork. T. H. White’s novel The As soon as and Future King, which tells the story of younger Arthur’s tutelage beneath Merlyn, was a specific favourite. “That was how I received interested by falconry,” Kennedy advised me. When he was 11, his father gave him his first red-tailed hawk. Kennedy named the hen Morgan le Fay, after Arthur’s sorcerer half sister.

However when his father was murdered, Ethel Kennedy, Bobby Jr.’s mom, was left to look after 11 kids in a world churning with youthful rise up. At some point in the summertime of 1969, Kennedy remembers, he attended a farewell social gathering on Cape Cod for a younger soldier heading off to Vietnam. He mentioned LSD had arrived from California that summer time, and whereas he was hitchhiking dwelling that evening, somebody provided him a dose. His favourite comedian e-book on the time, Turok, Son of Stone, adopted the exploits of Native People who lived amongst prehistoric animals. In one of many comedian’s storylines, the Native People devour a hallucinogenic fruit. “Will I see dinosaurs?” Kennedy advised me he requested the individual providing him the LSD. “I had a deep curiosity in paleontology,” he defined to me. That was maybe the primary time this explicit purpose has ever been given for deciding to take psychedelics.

An image of his useless father and uncle behind the counter of a neighborhood diner because the drug wore off spoiled his journey. At which level one other group of children provided him a line of crystal meth. The preliminary rush was sturdy sufficient to set him on a brand new life path. Inside months, he was touring to New York Metropolis to purchase $2 heroin on 72nd Avenue. “I had been administering medicine and giving photographs to animals since I used to be a child. And so it wasn’t a tough soar for me,” he mentioned, about utilizing needles to inject himself with medicine. “There have been different children in my city who had been capturing pace.” He was 15.

In January 2025, after Trump introduced that he could be nominating Kennedy as HHS secretary, his cousin Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s daughter, wrote a public letter opposing his affirmation, partly due to what she’d witnessed throughout his years as a younger drug consumer; she blamed him for main others within the household “down the trail of habit.” She described younger Bobby as a “predator” just like the raptors he’d raised, saying he had grown “hooked on consideration and energy.” “His basement, his storage, and his dorm room had been the facilities of the motion the place medicine had been out there, and he loved displaying off how he put child chickens and mice within the blender to feed his hawks,” she wrote. “It was usually a perverse scene of despair and violence.”

Once I learn Kennedy these phrases, he barely reacted. “I might not contest it that a lot,” he mentioned. “Habit is form of narcissistic.”

By the point he was accepted into Harvard (his father, his uncles, and his grandfather had all gone there), he had been pushed out of a number of boarding faculties, been arrested for marijuana possession, and turn into estranged from his mom. When he was nonetheless a youngster, he hopped trains to Haight-Ashbury, in San Francisco, to hold with the hippies, and labored in a Colorado lumber camp. His heroin habit would final 14 years, persevering with throughout his time as a regulation scholar on the College of Virginia, in addition to by his first marriage, to Emily Black, a fellow UVA regulation scholar, whom he married in 1982. In September 1983, he overdosed on a flight to South Dakota. He was charged with heroin possession, for which he was sentenced to 2 years’ probation, and spent the following 5 months in a rehab facility in New Jersey. Shortly after he left therapy, his brother David Kennedy, youthful by a few yr, died of a drug overdose in a Palm Seaside resort room whereas different relations had been gathered on the Kennedy property close by.

Though Kennedy says he has not taken heroin since he received clear, he nonetheless considers his mind to be a type of “formulation pharmacy,” in a position to remodel something—mountain climbing, falconry, intercourse—right into a drug. In 2024, New York journal parted methods with its reporter Olivia Nuzzi after studying of what it deemed was an inappropriate private relationship with Kennedy, whom she’d profiled the earlier yr. (After the print version of this text went to press, extra detailed allegations about his relationship with Nuzzi emerged. Kennedy declined to remark.) A former babysitter for Kennedy’s kids advised Vainness Truthful that he had groped her when she was 23 and he was 45. Kennedy apologized to the babysitter in a textual content message after the article’s publication, although he mentioned he didn’t bear in mind the incidents she described. “I’m not a church boy,” he mentioned publicly. “I’ve so many skeletons in my closet that if they may all vote, I might run for king of the world.”

After his time in rehab within the early Nineteen Eighties, Kennedy says he remade himself by the routines and rules of Alcoholics Nameless—a mix of religious devotion, radical transparency, and a concentrate on service. As a presidential candidate, he advised his safety element that he needed to attend a 12-step assembly every single day, irrespective of the place he traveled. He has continued that follow since transferring to Washington from Los Angeles. I requested him how a lot being an addict in restoration nonetheless impacts him. “I believe it’s formed every thing,” he mentioned. At the same time as HHS secretary, he sponsors others in restoration. “I take calls on a regular basis.”

In his personal view, restoration from heroin habit has returned him from damnation to stroll once more among the many dwelling. “Having form of lived by hell,” he advised me, paraphrasing one thing he mentioned he’d learn whereas he was nonetheless utilizing, offers you a special perspective on life, and the chance for “a form of redemption.” To rebuild his shallowness, he labored to interchange the key disgrace of his habit with a life devoted to a objective larger than himself. On this approach, his non-public restoration, anchored in his Catholic religion, fused along with his public campaign towards what he believes are grave threats to American well being. However that is additionally, maybe, what offers his jeremiads about vaccines and different issues such fervor. “You’ve received to, , utterly commit your self to a lifestyle,” he mentioned, speaking in regards to the 12-step course of. “It’s Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey that we’re all on.”

After getting into restoration, he constructed up Riverkeeper, a nonprofit devoted to defending the Hudson River and different New York watersheds; based an environmental-law follow; divorced Black; received married a second time, to Mary Richardson, an architect; and started a lifelong battle towards chemical contamination of human well being. In 2010, after 16 years of marriage, he filed for divorce from Richardson; she accused him of intensive infidelity, and he described her as abusive. Earlier than the acrimonious proceedings concluded, Richardson dedicated suicide. In 2014, Kennedy married Hines. He has six kids, two with Black and 4 with Richardson.

In his work as a litigator, he thrived: He received judgments towards Common Electrical for contaminating the Hudson River; DuPont for contamination at a zinc-smelting plant in West Virginia; and Monsanto for a sort of most cancers allegedly attributable to glyphosate, then the important thing ingredient of one of many world’s hottest herbicides, bought beneath the model title Roundup. He argued many circumstances himself.

John Morgan, one of many nation’s most profitable trial legal professionals, labored with Kennedy on lawsuits after a natural-gas leak in Southern California in 2015 and the spectacular 2023 prepare derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Morgan says there are three kinds of legal professionals: finders, who get the plaintiffs; grinders, who strive the circumstances; and minders, who maintain all of it on monitor. Kennedy was among the finest finders he’d ever met. “Individuals comply with him,” Morgan advised me.

Though Kennedy has been litigating towards environmental polluters for greater than 4 a long time, his concentrate on vaccines started solely after moms with autistic kids began displaying up at his talks—and after certainly one of them persuaded him to learn research suggesting a hyperlink between vaccines and autism. The truth that vaccines can hurt individuals shouldn’t be contested: The existence of the Nationwide Vaccine Damage Compensation Program is a testomony to the American public-health institution’s acknowledgment of that. The frequency and nature of that hurt, nonetheless, is extremely contested. From 2006 to 2022, about 5 billion vaccine doses had been distributed within the U.S. The NVICP paid about one settlement for each 1 million doses. Kennedy believes that the actual fee of harm might be 100 instances larger than what’s reported. As in his campaign towards company polluters, he brings a litigator’s instruments to the vaccine battle—humanizing the victims, demonizing his opponents, and overwhelming his audiences along with his analysis and with the nuclear pressure of his indignation.

Science, not like fairy tales and courtroom dramas, doesn’t all the time supply a transparent narrative. Preliminary outcomes might fail to copy. Actual findings can get drowned out by statistical noise. Catastrophic negative effects might take time to emerge. Within the evolving seek for fact, the general public can discover itself whipsawed: Margarine was a wholesome butter different—till research discovered it to be a supply of the substitute trans fat that trigger 50,000 untimely deaths a yr. The Merck drug Vioxx was a miracle ache reliever—till researchers estimated that it was related to as many as 140,000 extra circumstances of coronary heart illness. The meals pyramid of the Nineties, which emphasised processed carbohydrates over fiber and protein, now appears to be like like a sick joke given what analysis has proven in regards to the roots of our present weight problems epidemic.

Kennedy thinks extra individuals ought to comply with his lead by consuming science immediately. “ ‘Trusting the consultants’ shouldn’t be a function of science,” he likes to say. “It’s not a function of democracy. It’s a function of totalitarianism and faith.” However having everybody “do their very own analysis,” as Kennedy recommends, was untenable even earlier than the arrival of applied sciences like nanoscience and genomic modifying. Once I urged to Kennedy that he was now presuming to play the function of well being knowledgeable himself, he rejected that. “I don’t inform individuals to belief me. I inform individuals, ‘Don’t belief me.’ ”

All through our conversations, we regularly discovered ourselves jousting in regards to the particulars of 1 scientific debate or one other. For example, I reminded Kennedy that again in 2005, he had urged that the elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines would end in a decline in autism diagnoses—however that since then, thimerosal had been faraway from most vaccines, but autism diagnoses continued to rise. He in flip argued that this might be defined by the addition of aluminum to vaccines throughout that very same interval, and by the truth that some flu vaccines nonetheless contained thimerosal. However most pregnant ladies and younger kids now not obtain flu vaccines with the preservative—and that’s been true since earlier than Kennedy banned thimerosal from flu vaccines.

One other time, he identified that the U.S., a closely COVID-vaccinated nation, represents solely 4.2 % of the worldwide inhabitants however accounts for 19 % of the deaths from COVID. I countered that these variations are seemingly defined by different components, together with America’s extra complete reporting, larger chronic-disease charges, older inhabitants, and colder local weather. He conceded all of that, however mentioned he was making a narrower level, which was that the notion “that the one factor that saved us was the vaccine is unconvincing.”

He despatched me a placebo-controlled COVID-vaccine examine of pregnant ladies, performed by Pfizer, which confirmed extra congenital anomalies in infants born to the vaccinated group than the unvaccinated group. I countered that Pfizer had discovered the distinction statistically insignificant. The rationale the distinction didn’t attain statistical significance, he pushed again, was that the examine was not massive sufficient and “Pfizer reduce it off as quickly as they noticed a foul end result.” If true, this urged malicious intent on the a part of the corporate. “Why aren’t you asking Pfizer about this?” he requested. “You need to be burning up their telephone line.”

So I known as Pfizer, which granted me an interview with a scientist who was a part of the corporate’s COVID-vaccine program, however requested that I not use the scientist’s title, to guard their privateness. This researcher advised me that the examine had been stopped not due to a foul end result however as a result of the info revealed no security issues with the vaccine—which meant that conserving the management group from getting it will have been unethical, given the intense dangers stemming from COVID an infection throughout being pregnant.

The researcher additionally defined that additional investigation had decided that, of all of the congenital anomalies initially reported, just one had originated after the vaccine administration, at 24 weeks’ gestation. “You can’t make a vaccine liable for one thing that occurred earlier than you gave the vaccine,” the researcher advised me.

When introduced with information that contradict his arguments, Kennedy repeatedly claims unhealthy religion on the a part of his adversaries—that they’re motivated by revenue or skilled development. His expertise as a litigator might have made this reflexive. As John Morgan, his litigation companion, advised me, it’s arduous to sue polluters and cigarette corporations and never come away satisfied that the defendants are “within the enterprise of premeditated homicide.” Kennedy has utilized the identical lens to the medical institution, casting it as powered by the massive pharmaceutical corporations and their authorities protectors—even supposing most pediatricians and virologists and epidemiologists have devoted their lives to serving to kids and lowering struggling.

And if Kennedy is so involved about conflicts of curiosity, what of his overhauled CDC vaccine panel? A few of the consultants he appointed had beforehand been paid to function witnesses for plaintiffs in vaccine-safety lawsuits. Kennedy himself, along with the tens of millions he made as a trial lawyer, took a big wage from Youngsters’s Well being Protection—$510,515 in 2022—a nonprofit he led from 2016 to 2023 that fundraises to battle for tighter vaccine regulation. His total political undertaking—his marketing campaign, his hiring by Trump, his function at HHS—is entwined along with his skill to show that scientists had been deceiving the general public about vaccines. He would lose so much if he modified his thoughts.

Throughout his presidential marketing campaign, Kennedy would repeatedly say that in a examine of the COVID vaccine, Pfizer had discovered that “the individuals who received the vaccine had a 23 % larger demise fee from all causes on the finish of that examine”; he nonetheless says this at present. He bases this on his interpretation of an early trial of the Pfizer COVID vaccine, and it sounds terrifying—a smoking gun for these on the lookout for a purpose to doubt official well being recommendation. The principle takeaway from that 2020 trial was that the speed of an infection was considerably decrease within the vaccinated group than within the placebo group (eight infections versus 162). The examine adopted about 44,000 individuals, who had been randomly divided into two blinded teams, one which received the COVID vaccine and one which received a placebo shot. Over the course of six months, 21 individuals within the vaccine group and 17 within the placebo group died. (Scientists use these numbers to derive what they name “all-cause mortality charges.”) These are the numbers Kennedy makes use of to assert {that a} examine discovered that your threat of demise will increase by 23 % in the event you take the vaccine.

However the scientists I spoke with about Kennedy’s assertion defined that the examine was not massive sufficient and didn’t final lengthy sufficient to disclose any elevated mortality threat. As well as, an FDA assessment mentioned not one of the deaths within the examine was vaccine-related. (Kennedy says this assessment was subjective.) Kennedy’s numbers had been additionally deceptive. Throughout the blinded portion of the examine, there have been 15 deaths within the vaccine group, and 14 deaths within the group that acquired the placebo. (After the unblinding, the placebo group began getting the vaccine.) In 2023, Peter Doshi, an editor of a prestigious British medical journal, wrote Kennedy’s group an electronic mail advising that, primarily based on these numbers, the right conclusion about mortality from the examine was that “there have been mainly equal numbers of deaths in vaccine and placebo arms.”

As we talked and texted this previous fall, Kennedy and I stored returning to the identical arguments we’d been having two years earlier. He would level to the all-cause mortality information from the Pfizer-vaccine examine. I might reply that scientists who understood the info mentioned they didn’t imply what he mentioned they did—and I might level out that, even after the virus had mutated into new variants, observational research continued to indicate that the Pfizer shot remained extremely efficient towards each hospitalization and demise.

Kennedy refused to relent. When the vaccines had been launched, he advised me, public-health consultants “had been telling individuals, ‘It will save your lives.’ They didn’t have proof for that. Twenty-three % all-cause mortality! That’s not significant? I don’t know what universe you’re dwelling in.”

Vaccinologists advised me they’re dwelling in a universe the place they’re educated to learn and interpret information—not one wherein you cherry-pick information from research, extrapolate alarmist conclusions, after which counsel that they present a vaccine-caused improve in mortality when actually they present nothing of the kind.

Like Bhattacharya, Kennedy tends to invoke Galileo. However in Kennedy’s telling, the villains weren’t solely the clergy who arrested Galileo and censured his discoveries, but in addition the astronomer’s fellow scientists, who, cautious of struggling his destiny, refused to look by his telescope. It’s a parable that posits unrecognized vaccine risks as a type of fastened level within the evening sky, a supernova or moon, prepared for discovery by anybody keen to threat their fame with a purpose to search the reality.

4 days after Charlie Kirk’s demise, Kennedy requested to talk with me once more. He had his daughter Kick arrange a Zoom name in order that he would have a recording of our alternate. My efforts to transcend the divide weren’t going properly.

“You form of telegraphed the place you had been going,” he mentioned once we convened that Sunday. “That there’s two sides that aren’t listening to one another, and each of them are intractable, and each of them assume they’re science-based.” He known as this a journalistic system. “It’s just a little bit self-serving as a result of, , the journalist takes the place that ‘Okay, I’m this phenomenon the place there’s two sides and I’m within the center’—the sensible one that can form of see every thing,” he mentioned. He urged that he regretted agreeing to speak with me, and in contrast our relationship to the fable of the scorpion who asks the frog for assist crossing a river, solely to sting and kill the frog after it does.

“Each article about me is similar, which isn’t science-based; it’s by no means an argument; it’s all the time an advert hominem assault,” he continued. “ ‘He’s a conspiracy theorist, he’s anti-science, he’s a loopy individual, he’s received a mind worm,’ or the bear story, or the whale story, or the canine story, any of those, and that’s what they concentrate on.” Articles about a few of these colourful episodes from his previous, he believed, had been efforts to distract from the substance of his arguments. “I problem you to inform me one conspiracy that I’ve talked about that has not come true,” he mentioned. “Is it a conspiracy that I mentioned that glyphosate—that Roundup—may cause most cancers, like non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma? All three juries agreed with me. Is it a conspiracy concept that I mentioned that the COVID vaccine was not going to stop transmission? Now everyone admits that. Is it a conspiracy concept that I mentioned that masks are usually not science-based? Everyone now agrees with that. Faculty closures had been a mistake.”

He wasn’t executed. He fumed that individuals had used his curiosity in his father’s and uncle’s assassinations to discredit him. “I’ve by no means mentioned my father was killed by the CIA. I’ve mentioned there’s circumstantial proof.” Nobody, he mentioned, has defined the inconsistencies in his father’s post-mortem, which contradicted the declare that his father’s sole killer was the Palestinian activist Sirhan Sirhan. “Robert Kennedy was shot from behind 4 instances. We all know what occurred to each bullet in Sirhan’s gun. He hit six different individuals. He couldn’t have killed my father. So, , that’s a reality. It’s science. And possibly you possibly can determine a approach that he might’ve gotten behind my father.”

We had been again the place we began. “You realize, an actual journalist” would report that individuals had been afraid of his arguments and that they had been denying details, he mentioned, “however I don’t assume The Atlantic will assist you to do this.”

“You’re the HHS secretary,” I mentioned. “Presumably you possibly can name anyone at CDC to have this debate.”

“There’s 21,000 individuals in that company, and I’m not going to have a private debate with every certainly one of them,” he responded. “By the best way, they’re leaving as a result of they’ll’t defend their place.” After all, the individuals quitting their jobs would dispute that. However to win within the court docket of public opinion, I suspected, Kennedy most well-liked to debate me.

This was all beginning to appear quite hopeless. As I drafted this text, I felt rising dismay over my lack of ability to determine even the fundamental factual widespread floor that scientific progress typically requires. So I despatched Kennedy a message describing the place I had ended up, and asking for one more dialog. Minutes later, an adviser texted: “Wish to meet at Secretary’s home at present at 1 pm?”

Kennedy purchased his new Georgetown dwelling, not removed from the place Uncle Jack had lived as a congressman and senator, weeks after his affirmation. An inside doorway is embellished with signed notes to him from 4 current Republican presidents—Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Trump. I requested him why there have been no letters from Barack Obama or Invoice Clinton, the final presidents he’d campaigned for earlier than Trump. “They’re in storage,” he mentioned. An American flag from 1865 hangs in his lounge, a companion, Kennedy advised me, to 1 that was given to President Abraham Lincoln shortly earlier than he was shot.

We began out by discovering no less than one level of settlement, the significance of free speech. In actual fact, Kennedy broke with lots of his Republican brethren, saying that “something that weaponizes Charlie Kirk’s demise to justify censorship shouldn’t be constant along with his values.”

Inevitably, although, we had been quickly again the place we’d left off. Kennedy urged that my story conclude by a press release printed on the CDC web site—“Vaccines don’t trigger autism.” Throughout the affirmation course of, Invoice Cassidy had made him promise to not take away the phrase in alternate for his vote. However Kennedy had a work-around. On November 19, he up to date the web page and put an asterisk subsequent to the phrase, including language stating that “research haven’t dominated out the likelihood that toddler vaccines contribute to the event of autism.” Though the MMR vaccine and thimerosal have proven no ties to autism, Kennedy says he has not been capable of finding any research of doable autism threat from numerous different childhood vaccines. This absence of analysis, he believes, undercuts the validity of the CDC web site’s declare.

Kick joined us on the sofa. Hines sat upstairs, working by the ultimate edits of her memoir. I requested Kennedy: Was he now, because the nation’s well being secretary, arguing that science confirmed vaccines prompted autism, as he had up to now? Or was he merely arguing that the query had not been conclusively answered by science? He responded rigorously. “I’ve opinions about issues, however, , my opinions are irrelevant,” he mentioned. “What we’d like is science, and we’d like definitive science. Now we have suggestive science.”

I had spoken with others about this level. They agreed with Kennedy that not each vaccine had been studied for its impact on autism charges. However they argued that doing so was not pressing, as a result of the prevailing high-quality proof round vaccines confirmed no connection. Joshua Gordon, who because the director of the Nationwide Institute of Psychological Well being helped oversee federal autism analysis, advised me that the current improve in autism charges might largely be defined by broadened standards for analysis and by the advancing common age of oldsters on the time of conception.

“If vaccines contribute to autism, it’s such a really, very small impact that there is no such thing as a query that in the event you did the examine and also you definitively confirmed the small impact, that small impact could be far outweighed by the good thing about vaccines,” Gordon advised me. “The notion that after you probably did these research you’ll provide you with a special scientific advice is patently false.” Once I requested him in regards to the assertion on the CDC web site that Kennedy contests (“Vaccines don’t trigger autism”), Gordon mentioned it was “a plain-English assertion” that distilled the scientific consensus and was meant to encourage lifesaving vaccination.

Stanley Plotkin, one of many nation’s premier vaccinologists and the lead creator of the medical-school textbook Plotkin’s Vaccines, had the same message. “Can I say that vaccines don’t trigger autism?” he requested rhetorically. “All I can say is there is no such thing as a proof” that they do. He rejected a few of the research Kennedy cited as poorly conceived. He mentioned he wouldn’t oppose a big new epidemiological examine that regarded on the challenge, with the correct design to bear in mind confounding variables. However he mentioned he wouldn’t settle for “a examine constructed by a biased individual with the target of acquiring a sure end result.”

Trump was duly elected, and he appointed Kennedy as HHS secretary to hold out priorities Trump had superior in the course of the marketing campaign. This provides Kennedy’s scientific insurance policies democratic legitimacy, even when educated well being consultants shudder at what which will imply. However as we sat in his lounge, I noticed that Kennedy was making an argument I had not beforehand understood—a coverage declare, not a factual one. He was saying that whatever the lives saved by vaccines, it was irresponsible for the federal government to suggest them with out first comprehensively ruling out all hidden risks. He believes that only some vaccines, together with the tuberculosis vaccine, have been studied sufficient to clear this bar. Kennedy had slashed the funds of his personal division. However now, he says, he plans to spend billions of {dollars} on a whole bunch of research investigating vaccines’ potential ties to power illnesses. “The default setting in drugs is ‘Do no hurt,’ ” he mentioned, as we talked in regards to the COVID-vaccine boosters. “You by no means do an intervention—significantly with a wholesome human being—until that it’s protected and efficient. And we don’t know if it’s protected and efficient.”

What in case you are flawed about vaccines? I requested. Six former surgeons basic, most vaccine consultants, and virtually the whole scientific institution believes he’s. What if, over time, the proof reveals that his actions lowered vaccination charges with no discount in power illnesses, however with a rise in struggling and demise from viruses and micro organism? How would he reply?

“I imply, we might pay attention,” Kennedy mentioned. It was the reply I wished to listen to. However then he listed, as soon as once more, the explanations he wouldn’t be flawed: He spoke in regards to the power illnesses that seem as potential opposed reactions on the producers’ label for vaccines; the proof that demise charges from the illnesses that vaccines inoculate towards had been already declining earlier than the vaccines materialized; and America’s poor coverage choices and excessive mortality charges in the course of the COVID years. “You realize, we now have every kind of interventions,” he mentioned. “Good well being doesn’t simply are available a syringe.” The trial lawyer was nonetheless laboring to attach the dots that led to his most well-liked verdict, the orphaned baby of American royalty, again from hell, nonetheless preventing to meet his birthright.

This text seems within the January 2026 print version with the headline “The Most Highly effective Man in Science.”