Kennedy, 71, was once a celebrated environmental lawyer who accused climate change deniers of treason.
By the mid-2000s, he began shifting his focus toward public health, taking on obesity and criticizing harmful practices by Big Agriculture.
However, he also took a hard turn toward conspiracy theories, chairing Children’s Health Defense — a nonprofit widely regarded as a source of vaccine misinformation.
In a recent book, he went so far as to question whether germs truly cause disease and cast doubt on whether HIV causes AIDS, positions thoroughly at odds with scientific consensus.
Epidemiologist Syra Madad, a fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, believes Kennedy has succeeded in exploiting a void left by successive governments’ failure to address persistent public health problems.
“They’re highlighting statistics that are true — like the obesity crisis — and as a mom of three, that resonates with me,” she told AFP.
“I’m very conscious about what my children eat and what they put into their bodies.”
Yet she faults Kennedy for “bumper sticker” slogans that lack deeper substance, coupled with his harmful anti-science positions.
“That’s where the rubber meets the road: when you look at RFK — his experience, his line of thinking, and who he surrounds himself with — it’s concerning because he doesn’t support science-based evidence.”
Madad also found it troubling that Kennedy, during his hearing, seriously downplayed his history of hostility toward vaccines — from falsely linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) shot to autism, to calling Covid-19 vaccines the “deadliest ever made.”
On the question of vaccines, the Moms for RFK generally take a dim view.
Walker noted that while her son received his early-childhood shots, she eventually sought a religious exemption so he would not need any further ones.
Another member, 49-year-old business owner Shari Nielsen, blamed Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine for her husband’s heart problems.
© 2025 AFP