Last updated on June 6, 2025
If you saw someone willingly swimming in a river infested with sewage overflow and bacteria, you’d probably assume they lost a bet. Wait until you realize this person oversees the nation’s public health policy. On February 12, 2025, Robert Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services by a Senate vote of 52 to 48. The river incident was reported just over a week ago.
On the surface, he seems like a promising candidate: opposing rampant pesticide use and encouraging drug price negotiations to cut prescription costs. However, if you glance at his alarming track record, he’s a raging conspiracy theorist with no place in modern politics.
Kennedy grew up in a rich, competitive family in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. As the nephew of President John Kennedy, he had enormous shoes to fill. He consistently felt pressure throughout his childhood. After his father’s assassination, he turned to opioids as a mechanism to relieve his pain. Fresh out of law school in 1983, investigators found heroin in his luggage after a flight to South Dakota. He pleaded guilty to a felony charge and claims to have been sober ever since.
This was far from the end of his erratic behavior. When his ex-wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, filed for divorce, she found a red notebook with strange entries. A few pages featured the names of women he wished to sleep with, accompanied by numerical ratings. This unsettling objectification exposed his self-indulgent behavior.
But the recklessness in his personal life has since spilled into the public sphere. Over the years, Kennedy has transformed his presence into a louder, more dangerous brand of notoriety. He has become one of the country’s most prominent anti-vaccine activists. Under his oversight, over 1,000 new measles cases broke out in just a few months. When he’s received criticism for these outbreaks, he has misleadingly asserted that vaccines cause “all the illnesses,” despite scientific evidence stating the contrary.
This rhetoric becomes especially harmful when Kennedy uses vaccines as scapegoats for conditions like autism. He has repeatedly pushed the debunked narrative that vaccines cause autism, which feeds into stigmas. In a recent press conference, he iterated that autistic people will never pay taxes, hold a job, or even use a toilet unassisted. He’s outright expressed that autistic individuals are incapable of living “normal lives.”
As someone with an autistic brother and father, I’ve seen firsthand how difficult it already is to be acknowledged and included in a society that treats neurodiversity as a flaw. When politicians like Kennedy use their platform to spread misinformation, they make it harder for real people to be recognized as human.
Kennedy spent years constructing a public identity on fear. He has demonstrated a major disregard for truth and dignity. What makes it more alarming is that this isn’t happening in isolation. His growing influence is part of a broader trend in American politics where disinformation is given microphones and press coverage with little challenge.
The immense support from factions of the MAGA movement for his positions shows a serious flaw in the direction of our national leadership. Elevating someone like Kennedy represents a moral failure and policy risk. Going forward, voters must demand competence because the cost of ignoring reality is no longer hypothetical. It’s already here.
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