Listening to him talk about the Spanish Flu, and clearly not understand why secondary bacterial infections killed more people than the flu itself, was my personal point of "wow, this guy is an idiot".
In his book "The Real Anthony Fauci" he spends a whole chapter claiming that HIV does not cause AIDS and it was actually caused by recreational drug use.
He believes germ theory is a creation of Big Pharma to push "patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology"
He believes in the miasma theory and just maintaining a healthy immune is enough to keep you from getting sick.
Just read his book, "The Real Anthony Fauci" and you'll realize that this man shouldn't be trusted to run a kindergarten nurses office.
We don’t need good vaccines anymore even though infectious diseases are on the rise. Other global medical experts seem to be going against many of his plans.
> There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective. [interviewer pushes back, brings up polio vaccine] So if you say to me, “The polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?” I’m going to say, “Yes.” And if say to me, “Did it cause more death than avert?” I would say, “I don’t know, because we don’t have the data on that.”
> The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine. [...] That vaccine caused so many injuries that Wyeth, which was the manufacturer, said to the Reagan administration, “We are now paying $20 in downstream liabilities for every dollar that we’re making in profits, and we are getting out of the business unless you give us permanent immunity from liability.” And by the way, Reagan said at that time, “Why don’t you just make the vaccine safe?” And why is that? Because vaccines are inherently unsafe. They said, “Unavoidably unsafe, you cannot make them safe.”
Not going quote the whole thing because it's long, but he repeatedly drives home his point that all vaccines are inherently unsafe, and the injuries and deaths they cause always outweigh their effectiveness against disease.
> I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.
> If you’re one of 10 people that goes up to a guy, a man or a woman, who’s carrying a baby, and says, ‘Don’t vaccinate that baby,’ when they hear that from 10 people, it’ll make an impression on ‘em, you know. And we all kept our mouth shut. Don’t keep your mouth shut anymore. Confront everybody on it.
This one is interesting because the interviewer prompts him with something like "we aren't anti-vaccine, we just want to make sure they're safe" and he does not agree, he repeatedly says, with no qualification, "tell everyone not to vaccinate their children".
I don't believe he has ever voluntarily made a positive public comment about any vaccine. He did during his confirmation hearing, but he was obviously heavily incentivized to do so. During that hearing he did not say his opinion had changed, he simply lied about all past comments and claimed they never happened.
The end result of his vax push has been to reduce the set of government required vaccines down to the same set used by Europe already. Additional vaccination is still available should an individual elect.
Are you of the opinion that the European recommendation is insufficient? Would you petition European healthcare industry that they are requiring too few vaccines? If so, I would expect Europeans to be chronically far more diseased than Americans, do we see that in the data?
Once those additional vaccines are off the "routine" schedule, they'll be pulled by the suppliers, because it eliminates exemption from lawsuits. If you "choose" a non-routine vaccination, people can then sue pharma for ANY harm, and you can be sure there'll be a bunch of crackpot right-wingers trying to prove each one is "bad" and they'll disappear sooner or later. RFK's fans (Del Bigtree) have admitted that this is their plan. And if they're NOT routine, they'll probably not be covered by insurance, so you'll have to pay hundreds or thousands to get one. I would still do that, but not many others will.
Electing to get all ZERO optional vaccines actually available to you because of "reasons" isn't much of a choice.
They are based on denmark's guidelines, which as you know is a very cold country.
One of the vaccines made strictly optional was for dengue, which is not really a thing in denmark since I think they don't have that many mosquitos due to weather.
However, in the US, mosquitos and tropical weather are common for a large part of the population.
Point being, a huge country with a huge variety of climates and diseases shouldn't follow the lead of a small country with a fairly homogenous weather and disease pattern.
Antivax, avocated against pasteurization, thinks fries are healthy when fried in beef tallow, swam in sewers with his grandkids to prove the human body is naturally immune to diseases and vaccines are unnecessary, tried to ban paracetamol based on bad research linking it to autism, and much more if you care to dig a little.
He's never been anti-vax, though he has advocated for better data about vaccines with good reason--it's abominable. He's advocated against requiring milk to be pasteurized. One of the few reasonable datasets suggesting it doesn't help is the amish. The other ones sound weird so I will indeed dig a little.
> One of the few reasonable datasets suggesting it doesn't help is the amish
When you literally live on the farm where the cow is milked, there is less benefit to pasteurization, yes. Unless you want us to live like the Amish, then let's keep our pasteurized milk, OK?
Acetaminophen, honestly, shouldn't be recommended so frequently, especially for kids, and if he's against it, I view that as a big point in his favor. The distance between the therapeutic and liver toxic doses is too small for kids, less than 2.5x the max recommended dose, and it's based on kid's weight, so very young kids can't really be given the amount shown on the box. For example, a hepatotoxic dose for my 5 year old based on their weight is just 3/4 of the adult daily max recommended dose. That's a pointy-ass UX failure.
Growing up, my mom, a pediatrician, never let tylenol in the house because she saw too many kids come through the pediatric ER with liver failure because of it in her hospital shifts. It's the leading cause of acute liver toxicity in the US.
Anti-vaccine, anti-tylenol, stating that circumcision causes autism, stating wireless 5G damages DNA, stating that vaccines are part of a anti-black conspiracy, hiv/aids denialism, believing that contrails are actually chemtrails, etc etc etc.
But he didn't say that. He cited the studies that said increased Paracetamol during pregnancy correlates with higher rates of autism, and people should know that and be careful.
Whenever we discover a link between two things, it's important to share that in a responsible way. It takes years or a decade of research to prove causation, but we should issue warnings once a link is established. A lot of people can be harmed if the government does not publish when it finds harm that correlates with a substance.
With serious studies showing the opposite. You also seem to ignore that fever is a major, and well-proven cause of birth defects and these kinds of fake announcements based on no solid proof could lead part of the population to simply not take any fever-reducing medication by not being knowledgeable on which medicines are NSAID or not.
All of this because of a promise that in the first 6 months of the mandate RFK would find "the great cause of autism", this was not because of a new study suddenly discovered.
I mean he literally said this, without any citation(!): "There's two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It's highly likely because they are given Tylenol" [1]
He is continuously spouting non-sense not including aggresive anti-vaccine stance, hydrochloroquine curing COVID-19 and that pesticides makes kids go transgender [2]. Yes, you definitely should know all of that and be careful, because the secretary of health has said so.
> He cited the studies that said increased Paracetamol during pregnancy correlates with higher rates of autism, and people should know that and be careful.
Don't mealy mouth it. He didn't say anything so nuanced as "be informed and careful".
He actually said it should be "minimized or avoided". Point blank. And then he said it should be "avoided entirely during pregnancy". It was only over a month later, when the WHO was clarifying that there was no conclusive evidence, and that acetaminophen is the safest pain relief to use during pregnancy, that he started suggesting "working with your physician".
Don't present RFK Jr's takes as reasonable. They're not.
> He cited the studies
He cited one fringe study that was discredited because it didn't consider confounding factors.
If you believe there might a real issue there, you've been misled. That's the danger of having people like RFK in a position of authority: it makes people who don't understand the issues much more likely to listen to them. Which is bad for everyone.
Listening to him talk about the Spanish Flu, and clearly not understand why secondary bacterial infections killed more people than the flu itself, was my personal point of "wow, this guy is an idiot".
In his book "The Real Anthony Fauci" he spends a whole chapter claiming that HIV does not cause AIDS and it was actually caused by recreational drug use.
AI generated health report citing hallucinated research and incorrectly representing real research.
He believes germ theory is a creation of Big Pharma to push "patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology"
He believes in the miasma theory and just maintaining a healthy immune is enough to keep you from getting sick.
Just read his book, "The Real Anthony Fauci" and you'll realize that this man shouldn't be trusted to run a kindergarten nurses office.
We don’t need good vaccines anymore even though infectious diseases are on the rise. Other global medical experts seem to be going against many of his plans.
Kennedy has never said anything like that
"There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective."
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/11/scicheck-rfk-jr-incorrectl...
1 reply →
Some direct, in-context quotes:
> There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective. [interviewer pushes back, brings up polio vaccine] So if you say to me, “The polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?” I’m going to say, “Yes.” And if say to me, “Did it cause more death than avert?” I would say, “I don’t know, because we don’t have the data on that.”
> The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine. [...] That vaccine caused so many injuries that Wyeth, which was the manufacturer, said to the Reagan administration, “We are now paying $20 in downstream liabilities for every dollar that we’re making in profits, and we are getting out of the business unless you give us permanent immunity from liability.” And by the way, Reagan said at that time, “Why don’t you just make the vaccine safe?” And why is that? Because vaccines are inherently unsafe. They said, “Unavoidably unsafe, you cannot make them safe.”
Not going quote the whole thing because it's long, but he repeatedly drives home his point that all vaccines are inherently unsafe, and the injuries and deaths they cause always outweigh their effectiveness against disease.
- https://lexfridman.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-transcript/
> I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it, you know, maybe he will save that child.
> If you’re one of 10 people that goes up to a guy, a man or a woman, who’s carrying a baby, and says, ‘Don’t vaccinate that baby,’ when they hear that from 10 people, it’ll make an impression on ‘em, you know. And we all kept our mouth shut. Don’t keep your mouth shut anymore. Confront everybody on it.
- https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-way-forward/hffh-th... timestamp 11:54, 13:30
This one is interesting because the interviewer prompts him with something like "we aren't anti-vaccine, we just want to make sure they're safe" and he does not agree, he repeatedly says, with no qualification, "tell everyone not to vaccinate their children".
I don't believe he has ever voluntarily made a positive public comment about any vaccine. He did during his confirmation hearing, but he was obviously heavily incentivized to do so. During that hearing he did not say his opinion had changed, he simply lied about all past comments and claimed they never happened.
> We don’t need good vaccines anymore even though infectious diseases are on the rise
To clarify, this is an example of RFK's lunacy, not the user's opinion to be voted on.
The end result of his vax push has been to reduce the set of government required vaccines down to the same set used by Europe already. Additional vaccination is still available should an individual elect.
Are you of the opinion that the European recommendation is insufficient? Would you petition European healthcare industry that they are requiring too few vaccines? If so, I would expect Europeans to be chronically far more diseased than Americans, do we see that in the data?
I haven't particularly kept up with RFKs brand of MAGA craziness, but all European countries have different childhood vaccination schedules, with some overlap, see here: https://vaccination-info.europa.eu/en/about-vaccines/when-va...
3 replies →
Once those additional vaccines are off the "routine" schedule, they'll be pulled by the suppliers, because it eliminates exemption from lawsuits. If you "choose" a non-routine vaccination, people can then sue pharma for ANY harm, and you can be sure there'll be a bunch of crackpot right-wingers trying to prove each one is "bad" and they'll disappear sooner or later. RFK's fans (Del Bigtree) have admitted that this is their plan. And if they're NOT routine, they'll probably not be covered by insurance, so you'll have to pay hundreds or thousands to get one. I would still do that, but not many others will.
Electing to get all ZERO optional vaccines actually available to you because of "reasons" isn't much of a choice.
2 replies →
They are based on denmark's guidelines, which as you know is a very cold country.
One of the vaccines made strictly optional was for dengue, which is not really a thing in denmark since I think they don't have that many mosquitos due to weather.
However, in the US, mosquitos and tropical weather are common for a large part of the population.
Point being, a huge country with a huge variety of climates and diseases shouldn't follow the lead of a small country with a fairly homogenous weather and disease pattern.
1 reply →
The argument I've seen is that because the US has worse medical care in general, it makes sense to get more vaccinations.
It's true - none of his conspiracy theories involve the moon directly.
Antivax, avocated against pasteurization, thinks fries are healthy when fried in beef tallow, swam in sewers with his grandkids to prove the human body is naturally immune to diseases and vaccines are unnecessary, tried to ban paracetamol based on bad research linking it to autism, and much more if you care to dig a little.
He's never been anti-vax, though he has advocated for better data about vaccines with good reason--it's abominable. He's advocated against requiring milk to be pasteurized. One of the few reasonable datasets suggesting it doesn't help is the amish. The other ones sound weird so I will indeed dig a little.
> One of the few reasonable datasets suggesting it doesn't help is the amish
When you literally live on the farm where the cow is milked, there is less benefit to pasteurization, yes. Unless you want us to live like the Amish, then let's keep our pasteurized milk, OK?
3 replies →
While he moderates his take on it depending on who his audience is, he has said "There's no vaccine that is safe and effective."
https://apnews.com/article/rfk-kennedy-election-2024-preside...
Show us all how all the data on vaccines is "abominable".
1 reply →
Acetaminophen, honestly, shouldn't be recommended so frequently, especially for kids, and if he's against it, I view that as a big point in his favor. The distance between the therapeutic and liver toxic doses is too small for kids, less than 2.5x the max recommended dose, and it's based on kid's weight, so very young kids can't really be given the amount shown on the box. For example, a hepatotoxic dose for my 5 year old based on their weight is just 3/4 of the adult daily max recommended dose. That's a pointy-ass UX failure.
Growing up, my mom, a pediatrician, never let tylenol in the house because she saw too many kids come through the pediatric ER with liver failure because of it in her hospital shifts. It's the leading cause of acute liver toxicity in the US.
> The distance between the therapeutic and liver toxic doses is too small for kids, less than 2.5x the max recommended dose
If you’re giving your kid 2.5x the listed maximum dose of a medication, that’s on you.
> a hepatotoxic dose for my 5 year old based on their weight is just 3/4 of the adult daily max recommended dose
Sure, and even a small drink of alcohol can poison a kid. Something being OK for adults doesn’t make it OK for kids. Read the packaging.
1 reply →
Anti-vaccine, anti-tylenol, stating that circumcision causes autism, stating wireless 5G damages DNA, stating that vaccines are part of a anti-black conspiracy, hiv/aids denialism, believing that contrails are actually chemtrails, etc etc etc.
Link to chemtrails comments: https://gizmodo.com/rfk-jr-goes-full-tinfoil-pledges-to-stop...
Link to autism comments: https://www.cato.org/blog/circumcision-tylenol-autism-rfk-jr...
Misc including 5g comments: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/11/15/rfk-jrs-con...
The Cato.org one is interesting because it only speculates what might have influenced him, then attempts to debunk those sources.
Obviously I feel like he should be providing his sources.
1 reply →
Can you link to your strongest source for one of those claims?
https://www.factcheck.org/2025/10/rfk-jr-s-inaccurate-claims...
Staunch anti-vaccine, and he's tearing apart the CDC wit regards to the same.
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But he didn't say that. He cited the studies that said increased Paracetamol during pregnancy correlates with higher rates of autism, and people should know that and be careful. Whenever we discover a link between two things, it's important to share that in a responsible way. It takes years or a decade of research to prove causation, but we should issue warnings once a link is established. A lot of people can be harmed if the government does not publish when it finds harm that correlates with a substance.
> He cited the studies
A preprint citing 2 studies.
With serious studies showing the opposite. You also seem to ignore that fever is a major, and well-proven cause of birth defects and these kinds of fake announcements based on no solid proof could lead part of the population to simply not take any fever-reducing medication by not being knowledgeable on which medicines are NSAID or not.
All of this because of a promise that in the first 6 months of the mandate RFK would find "the great cause of autism", this was not because of a new study suddenly discovered.
> and people should know that and be careful
This implies a causal relationship.
2 replies →
I mean he literally said this, without any citation(!): "There's two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism. It's highly likely because they are given Tylenol" [1]
He is continuously spouting non-sense not including aggresive anti-vaccine stance, hydrochloroquine curing COVID-19 and that pesticides makes kids go transgender [2]. Yes, you definitely should know all of that and be careful, because the secretary of health has said so.
[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rfk-jr-circumcision-linked-auti... [2] - https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/01/politics/rfk-jr-fact-chec...
> He cited the studies that said increased Paracetamol during pregnancy correlates with higher rates of autism, and people should know that and be careful.
Don't mealy mouth it. He didn't say anything so nuanced as "be informed and careful".
He actually said it should be "minimized or avoided". Point blank. And then he said it should be "avoided entirely during pregnancy". It was only over a month later, when the WHO was clarifying that there was no conclusive evidence, and that acetaminophen is the safest pain relief to use during pregnancy, that he started suggesting "working with your physician".
Don't present RFK Jr's takes as reasonable. They're not.
> He cited the studies
He cited one fringe study that was discredited because it didn't consider confounding factors.
2 replies →
If you believe there might a real issue there, you've been misled. That's the danger of having people like RFK in a position of authority: it makes people who don't understand the issues much more likely to listen to them. Which is bad for everyone.
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