During the first round of his Senate confirmation hearings on Wednesday, Robert F Kennedy Jr, President Donald Trump’s pick for US Department of Health and Human Services secretary, appeared to be at odds with his past self.
Legislators on the Senate Finance Committee grilled Kennedy on his past positions and comments on topics ranging from abortion to vaccines to school shootings.
Kennedy, appearing astonished at times, consistently downplayed and denied controversial things he has said previously in podcasts, conferences or TV interviews, even though the senators quoted him directly.
On several occasions, legislators asked Kennedy to square his past health positions with his potential HHS role. Each time, he said his remarks were being mischaracterised or that he’d never made such statements.
Here are six examples:
1. Kennedy’s rebuttal of claims that he is ‘antivaccine’ ignores years of activism
Describing Kennedy’s appearance on a 2023 podcast, Senator Ron Wyden said Kennedy had questioned vaccine safety and had said: “No vaccine is safe and effective.”
Kennedy said that comment was a “fragment of” a larger conversation with podcast host Lex Fridman, in which Fridman asked him to name “any vaccines you think are good”. Kennedy said Fridman interrupted him before he could make a more nuanced point.
In that interview, Kennedy said: “I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”
Kennedy during the hearing also said he’s not anti-vaccines, rather, “pro-safety”.
He has long argued that vaccines cause autism, despite many studies contradicting this. Kennedy has also said, falsely, that childhood vaccines aren’t safety-tested.
In 2018, Kennedy founded Children’s Health Defense, a legal advocacy group that sought stories about children “injured” by environmental toxins and vaccines. That organisation has supported and filed lawsuits challenging vaccination requirements, among other issues.
2. Kennedy’s shifting abortion stance
Multiple senators said Kennedy had flip-flopped on his abortion stance.
“A year and a half ago, you went to New Hampshire … and you talked about (how the) government should not tell a woman what she can do with her own body. That’s her choice,” Senator Bernie Sanders said. “I have never seen any major politician flip on that issue quite as quickly as you did when Trump asked you to become HHS secretary.”
Kennedy replied: “I believe, and I’ve always believed, that every abortion is a tragedy.”
Kennedy’s abortion stance has shifted over the years.
In a June 2023 interview with WMUR in New Hampshire, Kennedy characterised himself as “pro choice” and said he thought “the worst solution is if the government is involved in decisions that should belong to a woman.”
In August 2023, Kennedy said in another interview that he would support a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks or 21 weeks of pregnancy. He walked back the statement hours later because he said he “misunderstood” the question.
He gave contradictory answers again in May 2024. During an interview with podcaster Sage Steele, a former ESPN host, Kennedy said he opposed any government restrictions on abortions “even if it’s full term”. Hours later, Kennedy walked that statement back, too, writing on X that “abortion should be legal up until a certain number of weeks, and restricted thereafter.”
Since May 2024, Kennedy has said he supports abortion up until foetal viability (which is typically at about 24 weeks of pregnancy) and that his position changed because he was “willing to listen”.
During his hearing, Kennedy said states should control abortion, mirroring Trump’s view.
3. Kennedy compared the CDC’s vaccine programme to Nazi death camps
Senator Raphael Warnock said Kennedy previously compared the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to Nazi death camps.
“Do you stand by those statements that you made in the past, or do you retract those previous statements?” Warnock asked.
Kennedy said, “Senator, I don’t believe that I ever compared the CDC to Nazi death camps.”
“I never said it,” Kennedy added.
During a 2013 autism conference, Kennedy compared the CDC’s childhood vaccine programme to the Holocaust. He was asked why the CDC wasn’t acknowledging autism as an epidemic. “To me this is like Nazi death camps, what happened to these kids,” Kennedy said of the rising number of children diagnosed with autism. “I can’t tell you why somebody would do something like that. I can’t tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust.”
Warnock also said Kennedy compared the CDC to sexual abusers in the Catholic Church.
At a 2019 conference, Kennedy claimed the CDC hid harms in its child vaccination programmes and compared doing so to the child sexual abuse cover-up of the Catholic Church.
“The institution, CDC and the vaccine programme, is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect,” Kennedy said, according to NBC News reporting. “It’s the same reason we had a pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church, because people were able to convince themselves that the institution, the church, was more important than these little boys and girls who were being raped.”
4. Kennedy said ‘tremendous circumstantial evidence’ linked school shootings to antidepressants
Senator Tina Smith, for Minnesota, said Kennedy had repeatedly “blamed school shootings on antidepressants” and asked whether he still believed that.
Kennedy replied: “I don’t think anybody can answer that question, and I didn’t answer that question,” arguing that his past remarks were mischaracterised. He said what he meant was that any potential link between antidepressants and school shootings “should be studied, along with other potential culprits”.
That’s not how he phrased it in a 2023 livestream with X owner Elon Musk.
Kennedy claimed there was “tremendous circumstantial evidence” that medications contributed to school shootings. He cited selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a class of antidepressants, and benzodiazepines, medicines often used to treat anxiety. He said there were “no good studies” on the role of psychiatric drugs in school shootings and that it should have been studied “years ago”.
Psychiatry experts told PolitiFact there isn’t a causal relationship between antidepressants and shootings. About 13 percent of the adult population uses antidepressants, and experts say if there were a link, they would expect higher rates of violence. Studies on US school shootings show most attackers were not using psychiatric medicines, which have an antiviolence effect.
5. Kennedy said a pesticide in the water supply contributes to ‘sexual dysphoria’ in kids
Senator Michael Bennet, Colorado, asked Kennedy: “Did you say that exposure to pesticides causes children to become transgender?”
Kennedy replied, “No, I never said that.”
Kennedy did not use those exact words in a 2023 podcast interview, but he did say: “I think a lot of the problems we see in kids, and particularly boys, it’s probably under-appreciated how much of that is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of the sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing.”
“Sexual dysphoria” is not a medical term. Gender dysphoria is the experience of distress that can occur when a person’s gender identity does not match their sex, and is common in transgender people.
Kennedy in 2023 said a study found that exposure to the herbicide atrazine in water caused some male frogs to develop female sex organs and become infertile.
Atrazine is a commonly used herbicide in the US. The Environmental Protection Agency regulates how much is allowed in drinking water and evaluates potential ecological and human health risks.
There are important biological differences between humans and frogs, and no scientific studies in humans have linked atrazine exposure to gender dysphoria. Atrazine has been linked, in some studies, to birth defects and other reproductive health problems.
6. Kennedy falsely claimed COVID-19 was targeted to attack ‘Caucasians and Black people’
Bennet also asked Kennedy whether he once said COVID-19 was a “genetically engineered bioweapon that targets Black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people”. (Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of Jewish people who lived in central or Eastern Europe.) Kennedy said he “didn’t say it was deliberately targeted”.
While talking about bioweapons at a July 2023 dinner in New York City, Kennedy said: “There is an argument that it 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.”
PolitiFact rated this claim as false. Although there is still debate on COVID-19’s origins, there is no evidence it was a deliberately engineered ethnic bioweapon designed to spare or target certain races or ethnicities.
Most disparities in COVID-19 infection and mortality stem from social, economic and health inequities.
