Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s pick to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), was grilled by Democratic senators during his confirmation hearing on Jan. 29, who confronted him with conspiratorial and conflicting statements he has made about COVID-19.
Here’s what to know about Kennedy’s positions on COVID-19, and why some experts and lawmakers are concerned about him leading the U.S.’s response to a next potential pandemic.
Kennedy’s racial and ethnic claims about COVID-19
Kennedy has held some controversial and unsubstantiated views on COVID-19 and ethnicity.
According to a 2023 video shared by the New York Post, when Kennedy was a presidential candidate, he said at a private dinner in New York City, “There is an argument that [COVID-19] is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” After being accused of being anti-Semitic, Kennedy wrote on X that the Post story was “mistaken,” and that “I have never, ever suggested that the COVID-19 virus was targeted to spare Jews. I do not believe and never implied that the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”
Senators brought up the statement at the hearing. “I didn’t say it was deliberately targeted,” Kennedy said again.
What science says about COVID-19 and race
Government health data on hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 indicate that at times during the pandemic, the virus affected Blacks and Hispanics disproportionately. But that data also showed that the reason for the imbalance was not due to any biologic factors related to race, but to a slew of social factors. During the pandemic, people in these demographic groups tended to have a higher risk of exposure to the virus because they were more likely to work essential jobs that could not be done at home, a greater likelihood of living in larger households where infections can spread quickly, more limited access to health care and vaccines, and higher rates of underlying chronic conditions such as asthma, diabetes and heart disease, which can make them more vulnerable to serious illness from COVID-19.
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Much of the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 “reflect inequities that arise due to structural racism and not race,” says Samantha Artiga, vice president and director of the racial equity and health policy program at KFF who has published an analysis of COVID-19 trends by race and ethnicity. “The idea of biological differences by race has been disproven,” she says. “Historically, it’s been used for an array of abuses and mistreatment of people of color.”
Kennedy’s 2023 comments about COVID-19 “capitalize on confusion and mistrust in the public to push his own agenda of natural medicine and demonizing the medical industry,” says Dr. Eric Burnett, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University. “He just wants to burn everything down and then not provide real solutions for how to fix the problems he talks about.”
RFK Jr.’s opposition to COVID-19 vaccines
Kennedy, who is known for his anti-vaccine views, has been a vocal critic of the government’s response to COVID-19, including the lockdowns and vaccine and mask mandates, which he once compared to Nazi practices in concentration camps. “Even in Hitler Germany, you could…cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did,” he said at a rally protesting vaccine mandates in Washington, DC in 2022. (After his remarks were widely condemned, Kennedy apologized.)
His opposition to the vaccine also came up in the hearing when he said that “COVID vaccines are inappropriate for six year old children who basically have a zero risk COVID.” That’s not supported by data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which show that young children can and do develop infections.
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Kennedy has called himself an advocate for “medical freedom” and “bodily autonomy,” supporting the idea that people should be able to chose for themselves whether they get vaccinated, based on having informed data.
But the evidence he espouses is “his evidence, evidence that supports whatever his current theory is,” says Dr. Gregory Poland, president of Atria Research Institute, which provides personalized health care. “Part of the problem is that these are appalling errors in communication and result from not being a scientist and not being train scientifically. You use words and phrases that sound right, like evidence-based medicine, but evidence-based medicine is completely based on the scientific method which he evidently rejects.”
As head of HHS, Kennedy would also have considerable power to influence vaccine policy in innumerable ways, including through CDC committees that recommend vaccine policy for everything from childhood vaccinations to the yearly flu and COVID-19 shots, and at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which reviews and approves vaccines as safe and efficacious.
Concern over how Kennedy would lead during another pandemic
Senators pressed Kennedy on his past statements about COVID-19 as a window into how an HHS under his leadership would respond to a new pandemic—a thought that troubles Burnett. “The guardrails are gone” in President Trump’s second term, he says. “Medical experts, people who are familiar with pandemics and have worked on them before: they just aren’t going to be there. I think it will be more difficult for the American people to weather that storm.”
The concern isn’t purely hypothetical; as cases of bird flu continue to rise among farm animals, public health experts are carefully monitoring the virus’ potential shift to spreading among people. “I intend to devote the appropriate resources to preventing pandemics,” Kennedy said during the hearing when questioned about bird flu. “That’s a central part of my job.”
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Yet the Trump Administration has already taken steps to weaken the government’s ability to respond to a pandemic. Just days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization (WHO); days later, public health officials were told to immediately cease working with the WHO. The Administration also froze federal health communications until further notice—including stopping publication of the CDC’s weekly MMWR report, which details the latest outbreaks of diseases like bird flu and keeps physicians and public-health experts informed about emerging threats.
“You and I as private citizens have no way to gather, collate, and synthesize data from across the U.S., much less from across the world,” says Poland. “We are dependent on the government to do that for us. But what happens when that government won’t, or can’t, or manipulates that kind of information? That’s a world of hurt.”
