Robert F Kennedy Jr. is now one of the most influential figures in healthcare, hand-picked by Donald Trump to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services.
It comes despite a series of bizarre health claims made by Kennedy over the years, including that a worm “ate” part of his brain, that chemicals in water are making children question their sexual identity and that vaccines cause autism.
Experts fear that his appointment and the possible policies that could be implemented could have consequences far beyond the shores of the United States, especially when it comes to global vaccination rates.
Here MailOnline details the scandalous health theories spread by the 70-year-old ahead of his planned takeover of America’s major healthcare agencies.
Kennedy has taken a keen interest in drinking water for years, recently labeling fluoride, a mineral that helps prevent cavities, as “neurotoxic” and calling for it to be removed from U.S. supplies.
However, its strangest claims have focused on atrazine, a herbicide that is a known endocrine disruptor, a substance that can interfere with hormones.
Kennedy has combined studies showing that such chemicals can cause frogs to change sex with a completely unfounded concept that they could cause children to question their gender identity.
In a podcast, Kennedy said: “Our children now, you know, we’re seeing these impacts that people suspect are very different than in past eras in terms of sexual identification among children and sexual confusion, gender confusion “.
Robert F Kennedy Jr. is now one of the most influential figures in health and has been hand-picked by Donald Trump to lead the US Department of Health and Human Services.
“I think a lot of the problems we see in children, particularly boys, are probably not underestimated because a lot of them come from chemical exposures, including a lot of the sexual dysphoria we’re seeing.”
“I mean, today they are swimming in a soup of toxic chemicals, and many of them are endocrine disruptors. There is atrazine in our entire water supply.
The idea that chemicals in water could influence gender and sexuality has been spread by conspiracy theorists for years.
It was most famously promoted by conservative radio host Alex Jones, who said such substances were “turning damn frogs gay.”
Frogs are not people and many species of amphibians have the natural ability to change sex in response to stimuli. Experts have repeatedly rejected claims about a link between endocrine disruptors and children’s gender and sexuality.
One of the most striking and recent health claims spread by Kennedy is that a parasitic worm ‘ate’ part of his brain.
While it only came to light this year, it emerged from documents discovered as part of his divorce proceedings from Mary Richardson in 2012, after he complained that cognitive problems were affecting his income.
In 2010, Kennedy’s doctors suspected that a dark spot that appeared on scans of his brain was a possible tumor after he complained of memory loss and mental confusion.
The revelations were part of a 2012 deposition during Mary Richardson’s (left) divorce proceedings, where Kennedy claimed her earning power had decreased due to cognitive difficulties.
But further scans discovered that they were the result of a parasitic infection.
The New York Timeswho discovered the documents, said Kennedy wrote that his mental problems “were caused by a worm that entered my brain and ate a part of it and then died.”
It is unclear how Kennedy became infected with the worm in the first place, although he suspects he contracted it while traveling in South Asia.
This, combined with the fact that it was found in his brain, has led some doctors to suspect that he was probably infected with a tapeworm that can be found in pigs.
But Kennedy’s claims that the worm “ate” part of his brain are probably not correct.
These worms only directly infect the digestive system. However, sometimes people consume eggs that are so small that they can pass into the bloodstream and end up in parts of the body such as the brain.
While they cannot survive there for long, these eggs can develop into cysts that can cause problems due to the very sensitive nature of brain tissue, including triggering potentially fatal seizures. However, this does not imply that the parasite “eats” the brain.
One of Kennedy’s long-standing health claims is that vaccines are not safe; previously claimed that no injection is “effective” and suggested that childhood vaccines could be driving rising autism rates.
Kennedy is the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, left, and son of former Attorney General and New York Senator Robert Kennedy, second from left.
He also wrongly claimed that Covid vaccines have killed more people than all injections “in the last 30 years,” in what experts called an inaccurate representation of the data.
Kennedy has also previously floated the idea that schools that require vaccinations to attend in the US should be defunded.
One of the most shocking incidents involving vaccines and Kennedy was a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.
He is widely credited with reaffirming anti-vaccine sentiment in the country through completely debunked and discredited links between the vaccine and autism.
One study found that an anti-vaccine charity Kennedy headed at the time called the World Mercury Project, and now called Children’s Health Defense, helped fund a large number of anti-vaccine ads for Facebook users in the Pacific nation, according to the Washington Post.
More than 80 people died in the measles outbreak in Samoa, most of them children.
Kennedy has backed away from his hardline stance on vaccines this week, telling NBC News in the US: ‘If vaccines work for someone, I’m not going to take them away.
However, it has left the door open to flexible policies to make some vaccines not mandatory.
Kennedy has repeatedly posted videos and photos of himself shirtless and working out on social media.
“People should be able to choose, and that choice should be based on the best information, so I will make sure that there are safety studies and efficacy studies and that people can make individual assumptions about whether that product is going to be good for them. ‘
Kennedy has also repeatedly and wrongly suggested that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.
In another dubious health claim, he linked Wi-Fi to cancer in a conversation with podcast host Joe Rogan.
Kennedy also previously told Elon Musk, owner of the social media website X, that antidepressants could be responsible for school shootings in the US, a claim without evidence.
“I’m also going to look very closely at the role of psychiatric drugs in these events,” he said in an interview on Musk’s platform.
“Before the introduction of Prozac, we hardly had any of these events in our country.”
Kennedy, like many anti-vaxxers, enjoyed more publicity during the Covid pandemic.
He made many controversial statements at the time, including that wearing a mask was like being a slave.
But the most shocking comment was bizarre statements that Covid was an ‘ethnically targeted’ bioweapon and that ‘the most immune people’ are those of Jewish or Chinese origin.
The comments were widely condemned, but Kennedy claimed he never suggested Covid was aimed at “liberating” the Jewish people, instead pointing out that the government was developing ethnically targeted biological weapons.
There is no evidence that such weapons exist or that Covid was one of them, although some experts suspect that the virus may have leaked from a laboratory before spreading around the world.
British experts and doctors have reacted with alarm at the possible consequences that Kennedy’s appointment could bring.
Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford, said: “There is a real concern that his appointment could provide a new platform which he can use to pursue the same anti-science positions on public health interventions as “They save lives.” that has been advanced before, and could continue to promote and misrepresent evidence to support spurious claims about vaccines.
“If this causes families to hesitate to get vaccinated against the deadly diseases that threaten children, the consequences will be fatal for some.”
Dr David Elliman, a pediatrician at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, added: “It has perpetuated myths, including that of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, with complete disregard for the evidence.”
“If he is appointed and continues in the same way, I fear not only for the vaccination program in the US, but also for similar programs around the world.”