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In our earlier coverage of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, we focused on his familiar claims about vaccines and chronic disease, along with his citation of a flawed paper that claimed to identify a link between vaccines and autism.
But in his more than six hours of testimony, Kennedy made other incorrect or misleading claims, including on obesity treatments for kids and National Institutes of Health funding.
- Sparring with Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, Kennedy claimed that research backed up his earlier assertion that Black people need a different vaccine schedule than whites “because their immune system is better than ours.” Scientists say he’s distorting that work.
- Kennedy impossibly claimed that his 2021 petition to pull authorization of the COVID-19 vaccines was filed because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the vaccines for 6-year-olds “without any scientific basis.” The CDC did not recommend vaccines for that age group until months after the petition was filed — and did so based on positive clinical trial results.
- He claimed GLP-1 weight loss drugs were being used as the “first front-line intervention” to treat obesity in 6-year-old kids. They’re not. Guidelines recommend intensive behavioral therapy for children that age.
- Kennedy accused the National Institutes of Health of spending “almost nothing” on research investigating the causes of chronic diseases because the “money is going to infectious disease.” Each year, billions in NIH funds are devoted to chronic conditions.
- Defending his false claim that the COVID-19 vaccine “was the deadliest vaccine ever made,” Kennedy cited an increased number of unvetted reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Increased reporting to VAERS was expected with a new, widely distributed vaccine and doesn’t mean a vaccine is unsafe.
- He incorrectly said that 12-step programs were a “gold standard” approach for treating opioid addiction.
On Feb. 4, after Kennedy won the support of Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician who had previously said he was “struggling” with the pick, the Senate Finance committee voted 14-13 along party lines to advance the nomination.
After the vote, Cassidy spoke on the Senate floor, saying that he had spoken with Kennedy repeatedly over the weekend and had received commitments from him and the administration that Kennedy would “work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems,” maintain the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee “without changes” and would not take down CDC webpages that state vaccines don’t cause autism.
Kennedy also pledged to meet regularly with and “have an unprecedently close collaborative working relationship” with Cassidy.
With that hurdle cleared, Kennedy’s nomination heads to the full Senate. If all Democrats oppose him, he can afford to lose three Republican votes and still be confirmed with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President JD Vance.
Studies Don’t Support Claim That Black People Need Different Vaccine Schedule
In a contentious exchange with Democratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, of Maryland, during his second confirmation hearing, Kennedy insisted that scientific research, including by Mayo Clinic vaccinologist Dr. Gregory Poland, supported his previous claim in 2021 that “we should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites because their immune system is better than ours.” When making that claim, Kennedy alleged that vaccines were “overloading” Black boys and causing autism. Kennedy, however, misinterpreted the research.
“There’s a series of studies, I think most of them by Poland, that show that to particular antigens that Blacks have a much stronger reaction,” Kennedy said, when Alsobrooks asked him to explain his earlier remarks. “There’s differences in reaction to different products by different races.”
Alsobrooks, who is Black, then asked Kennedy which “different vaccine schedule” she should have received.
“Well, I mean, the Poland article suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens than — for,” Kennedy said, before Alsobrooks cut him off to say that his comments were “so dangerous.”
“Well, it’s the truth. It’s the science,” Kennedy fired back. After Alsobrooks said she would not vote to confirm him because his views are dangerous, he added, “Do you think science is dangerous, senator? This is published peer-reviewed studies.”
Kennedy is correct that some research has shown that for certain vaccines and for specific aspects of the immune system, people of African descent have demonstrated a stronger immune response, on average, than other ethnicities. A 2014 study by Poland and others at the Mayo Clinic, for example, found that African Americans, including Somali Americans, produced more neutralizing antibodies after rubella vaccination compared with people of European or Hispanic descent.
But that is very different from Kennedy’s conclusion that it means that Black people “need fewer antigens” or that they need a different immunization schedule to avoid harm from vaccines.
Dr. Janet A Englund, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Seattle Children’s Hospital, told us that it was “not correct” that Poland’s research “suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens.”
“I have never seen data suggesting this in the peer-reviewed literature coming from North America or Africa,” she told us in an email. “I am familiar with Dr. Poland’s work on vaccines, and do not know of Dr. Poland ever stating this.” She added that Black children do not need a different vaccination schedule than other children.
Poland was not available for an interview, but he previously told us for a 2021 story, when Kennedy made similar claims about his 2014 rubella vaccine study in a video discouraging Black people from getting the COVID-19 vaccine, that his study was being distorted.
“We do not have a study that shows African Americans need half the dose,” he said, explaining that his study was “preliminary” and it was not yet clear why people of different ethnicities had different antibody responses. “We do not have a study that shows African American children are being overdosed.”
At the time, Poland described the claim as being “like a good conspiracy theory — it contains a grain of truth with a lot of speculations around it.”
Dr. Richard Kennedy, a Mayo Clinic co-author on the 2014 rubella study who is not related to the HHS nominee, also told NPR that suggesting that Black people should have a different vaccination schedule was “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate.”
Kennedy’s earlier suggestion that Black people have a superior immune system across the board is also incorrect. A 2013 study by Poland, for instance, found that people of European descent mounted stronger immune responses to the smallpox vaccine than people of African or Hispanic descent.
The remarks Alsobrooks highlighted, notably, were made during a 2021 event in which Kennedy first brought up Poland’s research to explain why, in his view, Black children were more likely than whites to be harmed by vaccines and develop autism.
That faulty premise was based on a study he claimed found Black boys who received the MMR vaccine on time were at 336% higher risk of autism than children who did not get it on time. But as we’ve explained before, including when writing about the 2021 video, the cited paper was a reanalysis of a 2004 CDC study that was performed by a known vaccine opponent and was retracted. There is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism.
Kennedy’s False Petition Claims
In both of his confirmation hearings, Kennedy deflected and mischaracterized his 2021 effort to petition the government to remove access to lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines. He incorrectly claimed it was related to the CDC’s decision to recommend the vaccines for 6-year-olds. No COVID-19 vaccines were available for that age group until months after the petition was filed.
“We brought that petition after CDC recommended COVID vaccine without any scientific basis for 6-year-old children,” Kennedy said in response to Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden during his first confirmation hearing on Jan. 29. “Most experts agree today — even the people who did it back then — that COVID vaccines are inappropriate for 6-year-old children who basically have zero risk from COVID. That’s why I brought that lawsuit.”
Kennedy filed the petition, along with a colleague, on behalf of the anti-vaccination group he founded, asking the FDA to revoke authorization of all COVID-19 vaccines and to “refrain” from issuing any future authorizations or approvals of COVID-19 vaccines “for all demographic groups.”
In the hearing before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee the following day, Kennedy used nearly the same line again in response to questioning from Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont.
“I filed that lawsuit after CDC recommended the vaccine for 6-year-old children without any evidence that it would benefit them and without testing on 6-year-old children,” he said. “And that was my reason for filing that lawsuit.”
None of those claims is true. In the case of Kennedy’s purported rationale for filing the petition, we cannot know his thinking. But the timeline of events contradicts his account.
Kennedy filed his petition in May 2021, around the time that healthy, non-prioritized people were beginning to gain access to the vaccines in most states. The CDC did not make its recommendation that 5- to 11-year-old children get vaccinated against COVID-19 until Nov. 2. That occurred only after clinical trials testing a pediatric version of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine had been done and the Food and Drug Administration had reviewed the results and decided to authorize the vaccine. In addition, an independent panel of scientists advising the CDC had voted unanimously to recommend the vaccine to children.
Contrary to Kennedy’s claim that the vaccine had not been tested in 6-year-olds, the placebo-controlled trial included 4,600 children ages 5 through 11 years, 3,100 of whom received the vaccine. The trial found that compared with young adults given the adult vaccine, the kids’ vaccine produced a comparable immune response and was 90.7% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, with no identified serious safety risks.
It’s possible that Kennedy is thinking of a different CDC decision regarding minors and the COVID-19 vaccine. Six days before he filed the petition, the FDA amended its authorization for Pfizer/BioNTech’s adult vaccine, which was originally authorized for people 16 years of age and older, to include teens ages 12 to 15. Two days later, the CDC recommended that those younger teens get the vaccine.
But here, too, the decision was based on positive clinical trial results — so it was not “without any scientific basis,” as Kennedy claimed.
It’s worth noting that Kennedy’s petition claimed that the vaccine authorizations should be revoked because of safety issues and because “existing, approved” drugs, including chloroquine drugs and ivermectin, effectively treated and prevented COVID-19. But in fact, at the time, there already were multiple studies showing hydroxychloroquine didn’t work for COVID-19, and there wasn’t good evidence for ivermectin (randomized controlled studies have since shown that it doesn’t work, either). Serious side effects of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines occur but are rare.
The petition also called on the FDA to “amend” its guidance on the unproven drugs and to state that no one should be required to get a COVID-19 vaccine to keep a job or go to school.
The petition further requested that the FDA not allow children to participate in any vaccine clinical trials due to “the extremely low risk” of severe COVID-19 in kids.
As for that notion, which Kennedy repeated in the hearings, it’s true that children are generally at low risk of severe disease. Some children, however, have medical conditions that put them at higher risk, and at the time, COVID-19 was a leading cause of death of children. About a third of children who were hospitalized with COVID-19 had been previously healthy.
Many experts still recommend that children, including 6-year-old children, get a COVID-19 shot every year, recognizing that it is not as important for most children as it is for higher-risk groups.
Some experts may have changed or appeared to have changed their recommendations, but part of that is related to the fact that the coronavirus is no longer so new.
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia pediatrician and vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit, for example, who was a strong proponent of all children receiving a COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, previously told us he does not think all children need an annual COVID-19 vaccine, although they can opt for one if they wish. He does, however, think any child who has never received a COVID-19 vaccine should get one.
Medication Is Not Front-line Obesity Treatment for Kids
During an exchange with Sen. Andy Kim, a Democrat from New Jersey, Kennedy falsely claimed that new drugs to treat obesity were being used as the “first front-line intervention” for young children.
“GLP-1 drugs — the GLP drugs, the class of drugs — are miracle drugs,” he said, referring to the newer class of glucagon-like peptide-1 medications for type 2 diabetes and obesity. “But I do not think they should be the first front-line intervention for 6-year-old kids, for whom they are currently, that is the, that is the standard of practice now.”
But neither the American Academy of Pediatrics nor the US Preventive Services Task Forces, a federally funded panel of independent national experts in disease prevention, recommend the drugs at all in children as young as 6.
The USPSTF recommendations, issued in June 2024, favor “comprehensive, intensive behavioral interventions” over medication for children and adolescents age 6 and up. Such interventions include at least 26 hours a year of counseling, coaching and physical activity sessions supervised by health care providers.
The task force called the “totality of the evidence” on GLP-1 drugs for kids and adolescents “inadequate,” noting that there was only one trial per medication that was longer than two months, limited evidence on weight maintenance after stopping the drugs and no evidence on the potential harms of using the medications for a long time. It also highlighted the drugs’ known gastrointestinal side effects.
“Therefore, the USPSTF encourages clinicians to promote behavioral interventions as the primary effective intervention for weight loss in children and adolescents,” the recommendation statement reads.
The American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines, issued in January 2023, recommend that providers consider using medications for weight loss, but only for older children and only in conjunction with intensive health behavior and lifestyle treatment. That latter treatment, which AAP calls “foundational,” is what the group recommends for all children 6 years of age and older with obesity or who are overweight — and can be considered for younger children down to the age of 2.
The AAP guidance says pediatricians “should offer” teens 12 years and older and “[m]ay offer” kids 8 through 11 years of age weight loss drugs, “according to medication indications, risks, and benefits, as an adjunct to health behavior and lifestyle treatment.”
“In particular, children with more immediate and life-threatening comorbidities, those who are older, and those affected by more severe obesity may require additional therapeutic options,” the guidelines read.
NIH Funding for Chronic Disease
In both confirmation hearings, Kennedy misleadingly said that the National Institutes of Health spent “almost nothing” on researching the causes of chronic disease, focusing instead on infectious disease.
Kennedy told Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, during his first hearing that his previous call for NIH scientists to take “a break” from studying infectious diseases for eight years was because those diseases have “been the principal preoccupation.”
“Almost nothing is studied at NIH about the etiology of our chronic disease epidemic,” he continued, referring to the causes of the conditions. “The money is going to infectious disease.”
Similarly, the next day, during an exchange with Sen. Jon Husted, the Ohio Republican who was appointed to replace Vice President JD Vance, Kennedy said that the NIH “has been diverted … away” from “studying the etiology of chronic diseases.”
“So there’s almost nothing at NIH — very, very little, a low percentage of its budget, a $42 billion budget, that is devoted to … finding out why we’re having this obesity epidemic,” he said. “The focus is on infectious disease,” he added later, “and we almost altogether ignore chronic disease.”
It’s difficult to say how much funding specifically goes to projects that investigate the root causes of chronic diseases. But it’s not true that there isn’t much funding for them.
According to an estimate of NIH funding by research and disease areas published on the agency’s website in May 2024, “infectious diseases” received $8.2 billion in fiscal year 2023 — the eighth largest single category on the list.
For comparison, cancer, a disease the CDC considers a chronic disease, received only a bit less — $7.9 billion. Other chronic diseases receiving $1 billion or more that year included Alzheimer’s disease ($3.5 billion), heart disease ($1.8 billion), obesity ($1.1 billion) and diabetes ($1.1 billion).
In fiscal year 2023, smaller amounts were spent on other chronic diseases, including chronic pain ($823 million), kidney disease ($703 million), hypertension ($462 million), stroke ($443 million), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis ($447 million), arthritis ($321 million), autism ($306 million), asthma ($274 million), epilepsy ($245 million), inflammatory bowel disease ($199 million), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ($148 million), and food allergies ($86 million).
Kennedy’s rhetoric also fails to recognize that there is not always a clear distinction between chronic and infectious diseases. Someone living with HIV, of course, is dealing with an infectious disease, but thanks to treatment advancements, it’s now a chronic condition that can be managed.
Cancer can be caused by viruses and bacteria. This includes cervical cancer, which is caused by HPV, and can be prevented with a vaccine that Kennedy has previously opposed. Many other chronic diseases are associated with infections or can be triggered by infections, including autoimmune diseases. Emerging evidence also suggests Alzheimer’s disease may be caused by infections, although that is still far from clear.
“The evidence is mounting, for many of the chronic conditions, that there is an infectious etiology,” Garth Ehrlich, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, told NBC News. “To me, chronic disease and infectious disease almost go hand in hand.”
As we’ve written before, Kennedy has put forth unsupported narratives on the causes of chronic disease in children.
Vaccine Safety and VAERS
During the second hearing, Sanders asked Kennedy if the COVID-19 vaccine “was the deadliest vaccine ever made,” as Kennedy has falsely claimed in the past.
“The reason I said that, Sen. Sanders, is because there were more reports on the VAERS system, on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System … than any other — than all other vaccines combined,” he said. He then claimed we don’t know if the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives “because we don’t have a good surveillance system” and “because we don’t have the science to make that determination.”
But a large body of work across the globe has confirmed the overall safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, which only rarely cause serious side effects. VAERS, as we’ve explained numerous times, is an early warning system for vaccines that quickly flags potential safety concerns. The system collects reports of potential side effects, but the reports aren’t vetted for accuracy and they do not mean the vaccine caused a particular problem. Scientists and regulators then follow up on any concerning patterns, using several other safety surveillance systems to identify real concerns.
As we explained back in 2021, when Kennedy’s nonprofit was making the same claim, simply having more reports in VAERS, as the COVID-19 vaccines do, is not evidence of a safety issue. With more people getting vaccinated all at once, with a new vaccine that is under intense scrutiny, it’s expected that there would be an unusually large number of reports to VAERS for the COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, the government expanded the reporting requirements specifically for the COVID-19 vaccines.
False Claim About ‘Gold Standard’ Opioid Addiction Treatment
Kennedy replied in the affirmative when Kim asked him whether he supported medications such as buprenorphine and methadone to treat opioid addiction. The drugs help manage withdrawal symptoms and have been shown in numerous studies to reduce opioid use.
But when asked if those medicines are safe and considered the “gold standard” approach, Kennedy demurred.
“The Cochrane Collaboration, which is the most prestigious scientific — or scientific research organization — has said that the … gold standard is 12 step programs,” he said.
That’s wrong. A 2020 Cochrane review on alcohol use disorder found that Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12‐step programs were similar or more effective at reducing drinking than other psychological clinical interventions, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. But the review did not compare the strategy to medication — and it did not apply to opioid use disorder.
For the latter, medications are widely recognized as the most effective options, although not everyone wants or needs to use them. On its website, the American Psychiatric Association specifically refers to the medications as “the ‘gold-standard’ of treatment.”
Kennedy, who regularly attends AA meetings and has been in recovery for a heroin addiction for decades, went on to acknowledge that many people “will not respond immediately, at least, to 12 step programs,” and that “suboxone and other and even methadone are critical interventions that save lives, that get addicts off the street, and they should be available as a treatment option.”
“I wouldn’t describe them as gold standard, but I would describe them as medically necessary,” he added.
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