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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. often cites a particular saying, one he invoked on the day of his confirmation as U.S. Health Secretary. “A healthy person has a thousand dreams, a sick person only has one,” he stated in the Oval Office, adding, “60% of our population has only one dream – that they get better.”
The nation’s top public health official has declared his mission to address what he calls a chronic illness epidemic in America, an encompassing term for conditions ranging from obesity and diabetes to heart disease.
This diagnosis – that the U.S. faces a health crisis – resonates with many healthcare experts nationwide.
However, Kennedy has also been known to promote unsubstantiated health conspiracy theories, including claims that COVID-19 selectively targeted ethnic groups and that tap water chemicals could cause transgenderism in children.
Since assuming office, he has also significantly reduced the Department of Health and Human Services workforce and eliminated programs at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
“It is extraordinarily exciting to have a federal official addressing chronic disease,” observes Marion Nestle, a retired public health professor at New York University. “However, the dismantling of the federal public health apparatus cannot possibly aid this agenda.”
Kennedy is widely criticized within medical and scientific circles, with Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University, describing him as an “evil nihilist.”
Yet, even some critics acknowledge Kennedy’s ambition and drive in tackling neglected areas of healthcare. Could this controversial figure, who elicits strong reactions, potentially lead a resurgence of health in America?
Prior to joining the Trump administration, Kennedy had long targeted multinational food companies, accusing them of poisoning American children with artificial additives already banned in other countries.
“We have a generation of kids who are swimming around in a toxic soup right now,” he asserted on Fox News last year.
His initial focus was on food colorings, with a commitment to phasing out petroleum-based dyes by the end of 2026.
Chemicals like ‘Green No. 3’ and ‘Red No. 40’ have been linked to hyperactivity and behavioral problems in children, and cancer in some animal studies.
“What’s happening in this administration is really interesting,” says Vani Hari, a food blogger and former Democrat influential in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. “MAHA is about getting people off processed food, and regulating the chemicals companies use is one way to do that.”
There are indications this pressure is yielding results.
PepsiCo recently announced that Lays crisps and Tostitos snacks “will be out of artificial colors by the end of this year.”
Kennedy negotiated a voluntary agreement with the food industry, but this followed individual states, from California to West Virginia, already introducing their own legislation.
“In the case of food dyes, companies will have to act because states are banning them [anyway] and they won’t want to have to formulate separate products for separate states,” says Prof. Nestle, a longtime critic of the industry.
Kennedy has also signaled support for a radical food bill in Texas targeting additives in various products, from sweets to cereals and fizzy drinks.
These products may soon require high-contrast labels stating, “WARNING: This product contains an ingredient that is not recommended for human consumption by the appropriate authority in Australia, Canada, the European Union, or the United Kingdom.”
The Consumer Brands Association, representing major food manufacturers, opposes this, asserting that the ingredients used in the U.S. food supply are safe and thoroughly studied.
Such regulation in a state like Texas would be unlikely without Kennedy’s and President Trump’s political support.
“He can’t change everything quickly, but the issue of food dyes will soon be history,” says Ms. Hari, who testified before the Senate on this topic last year.
However, concerns exist that the focus on additives may overshadow a larger problem.
“While individual actions are important, they are a drop in the ocean in the larger context of chronic disease,” argues Nicola Hawley, professor of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health. “The focus on personal choice and access to natural food ignores the big, systematic and structural barriers [to healthy eating] like poverty and aggressive marketing of junk food to children.”
The U.S. government, for example, continues to heavily subsidize crops like corn and soybeans, key ingredients in processed foods.
Kennedy is currently updating the U.S. national dietary guidelines, a crucial document shaping school meals and assistance programs for the elderly. A reduction in added sugars and a shift towards locally sourced whole foods are expected. Additionally, he has urged states to prohibit millions of Americans from using food stamps, a welfare benefit, to purchase junk food or sugar-sweetened drinks.
He also supports local officials seeking to stop adding fluoride to drinking water, labeling it a “dangerous neurotoxin.” Used in some countries, including parts of the U.S., to prevent tooth decay, its health effects remain debated. The NHS states a review of risks found “no convincing evidence” to support concerns, while other research suggests detrimental effects only at extremely high levels.
Prof. Hawley also notes a tension between Kennedy’s “important message” on food and chronic disease and what she perceives as a lack of policies grounded in solid scientific evidence.
“There’s the challenge of him drifting into misinformation about the links between additives and chronic disease, or environmental risk factors,” she argues. “And that really just undermines the science.”
This tension is even more apparent regarding another of Kennedy’s major concerns.
Vaccines remain listed on the CDC website as one of the great public health achievements of the last century, alongside family planning and tobacco control. They prevent countless cases of disease and disability annually, saving millions of lives, according to the American Medical Association.
Kennedy, however, is the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptic. Children’s Health Defense, the activist group he led for eight years, repeatedly questioned the safety and efficacy of vaccination.
In 2019, he described the discredited British doctor Andrew Wakefield as the “most unfairly maligned person in modern history,” stating that “any just society” would erect statues in his honor.
Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register in 2010 after his research falsely linked the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine to autism, leading to a surge in measles cases in England and other countries.
Over the past year, Kennedy has repeatedly asserted that he is not “anti-vax” and will not be “taking away anybody’s vaccines.” Faced with a deadly measles outbreak among unvaccinated children in West Texas, he posted that the MMR was “the most effective way to prevent the spread of the disease.”
In other comments, however, he described vaccination as a “personal choice” and emphasized alternative treatments like vitamin A supplements.
A major deal with drugmaker Moderna to develop a vaccine to combat bird flu in humans was canceled, and new rules were introduced potentially requiring extra testing for some vaccines before their annual updates.
In May, Kennedy posted a video on social media stating the government would no longer endorse COVID vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women.
However, some doctors point out that reducing eligibility would align the U.S. with other countries, including the UK, where free COVID boosters are limited to those over 75 or with weakened immune systems.
“They are really just aligning themselves with everyone else, which is not in any way outrageous,” says Prof. Adam Finn, a paediatric doctor and one of the UK’s leading experts on vaccines.
Then in June, Kennedy abruptly dismissed all 17 members of the influential expert committee advising the CDC on vaccine eligibility, accusing the panel of “persistent conflicts of interest” and rubber-stamping new vaccines without proper scrutiny.
A new, smaller committee handpicked by the administration now has the power to change or even drop critical recommendations for immunizing Americans against certain diseases, and to shape the childhood vaccination program.
“It underscores just how much we are backsliding now,” says Dr. Amesh Adalja, the infectious disease doctor and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University. “I think increasingly the panel will become irrelevant if RFK Jr is able to shape it the way he wants to.”
The new panel made its first decision last week, voting to stop recommending a small number of flu vaccines still containing the preservative thimerosal, a topic Kennedy wrote a book about in 2015.
His critics argue that a new era of vaccine policy has begun in the U.S., while his supporters maintain that no subject, including vaccine safety, should be considered off-limits.
“Everything has to be open to discussion and Bobby Kennedy is not anti-vaccine, he’s anti-corruption,” argues Tony Lyons, who co-founded the political action committee that supported his independent presidential campaign.
“It’s about being pro-science, pro-capitalism, and believing you have an obligation to the public to do a thorough job of researching any product that is put in the arms of 40 million children.”
Weeks after Kennedy took office, news emerged that the CDC would launch a research project into the link between vaccines and autism.
Since Wakefield’s now-discredited Lancet paper in 1998, which linked autism to the MMR vaccine given to children, numerous international studies have examined this in detail and found no reputable link.
“There is nothing to debate any more, it has been settled by science,” says Eric Fombonne, an autism researcher and professor emeritus at Oregon Health & Science University.
Kennedy, however, has hired David Geier, a noted vaccine skeptic, to re-examine the data.
Today, autism is widely understood to be a lifelong spectrum condition, encompassing individuals with high support needs who are non-speaking, and those with above-average intelligence who may struggle with social interaction or communication.
Most researchers attribute the rise in cases over decades to a broadening in the way children with autism are defined, as well as improved awareness, understanding, and screening.
But in April, Kennedy dismissed that idea, describing autism as “preventable” and blaming a mysterious environmental trigger for the increase in eight-year-olds being diagnosed.
“This is coming from an environmental toxin… [in] our air, our water, our medicines, our food,” he said.
He pledged a massive research effort to find that cause by September and “eliminate those exposures.”
Dr. Fombonne strongly disputes this. “It is nonsensical and shows a complete absence of understanding,” he says. “We have known for many years that autism has a strong genetic component.”
In the same speech, Kennedy said that many autistic children will never “pay taxes, never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”
Many in the autism community are angry. “What we’re seeing here is a fear-based rhetoric and [a] misleading narrative that is causing harm and perpetuating stigma,” says Kristyn Roth from the Autism Society of America.
But some parents of autistic children are more supportive.
Emily May, a writer and mother of a child with autism, wrote in The New York Times that she found herself “nodding along as Mr. Kennedy spoke about the grim realities of profound autism.”
“His remarks echo the reality and pain of a subset of parents of children with autism who feel left out of much of the conversation,” she wrote.
The administration has since moderated its promise to find the reasons for autism by September but still promises detailed research findings by March 2026.
Ultimately, Robert Kennedy has only been in the job a matter of months. Yet, he has already raised significant questions – particularly about chronic disease – that no previous health secretary has addressed in the same way.
For the first time, this issue has garnered both political attention and bipartisan support in the U.S.
He is clearly not afraid to confront what he sees as vested interests in the food and drug industries, and he retains President Trump’s strong support.
Tony Lyons, who has published books by Kennedy, calls him “uniquely qualified” for the most powerful job in U.S. public health. “He’s a corruption fighter. He has seen what all these kinds of companies do, not just pharmaceutical companies but food companies, and he wants them to do a better job,” he says.
Robert Kennedy’s background as an environmental lawyer challenging big business and the establishment has undoubtedly shaped his current views.
But Jerold Mande, a former federal food policy advisor in three administrations, worries that Kennedy’s personal views and biases will lead to solutions that are predetermined and lack evidence-based support.
Now a professor of nutrition at Harvard, Prof. Mande describes Kennedy as an imperfect messenger and expresses “great concerns” about the administration’s approach to aspects of public health, from tobacco control to vaccination, where there is “no question that what he’s doing is going to result in enormous harm.”
“At a high level, I’m optimistic… but you still need to come up with the right answers, and those answers can only be found through science,” says Prof. Mande.
“We now have a shot and he’s provided that by making it a priority. But it’s how you use that shot that’s going to determine whether it’s a success or not. And that is where the jury is still out.”
Top image credits: Chip Somodevilla / Staff via Getty and Tom Williams via Getty
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