RFK Jr. Is A Lying Liar Who Lies About Everything (Not That We Didn't Know That)
Because we definitely knew that.
During Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation process as secretary of Health and Human Services, he promised Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a former doctor who loves vaccines and heads up the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, that he would leave the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices as is.
“[Kennedy] has also committed that he would work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems, and not establish parallel systems. If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes,” Cassidy said, ever so confidently, in a speech supporting Kennedy’s appointment, at the time. It’s still posted to his very own website, as a monument to his incredible gullibility.
As you may have noticed, that did not happen. Earlier this week, Kennedy announced that he was firing every member of ACIP, claiming that they all have “conflicts of interest” — which was categorically untrue.
Following that, he announced in a Xitter post that he would not appoint “ideological anti-vaxxers” to the committee.
You can probably guess what he just did.
It’s true! He has already appointed eight new members to the panel, several of whom have stupid ideas about vaccines and at least one of whom proudly identifies as an anti-vaxxer. This, like everything else he does, goes against the usual protocol for appointments to ACIP. Under previous administrations, agency officials vetted potential appointments and then passed them on to the HHS for approval — but Kennedy is just appointing people he knows and likes.
This includes Dr. Robert Malone, whom you may remember from pandemic times as the guy who claimed to have “invented” mRNA vaccines (he was not the guy who invented mRNA vaccines) and who went around spreading misinformation about them on every right-wing show and podcast around.
Next up, we’ve got Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who claims to have been fired from Harvard for his “dissident” views about vaccine requirements for the COVID vaccine. Kulldorff was a co-author of the truly batshit Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for eliminating most pandemic-era restrictions, such as lockdowns and mask requirements, and instead having people who were not “at risk” of dying from the virus go out and get it in order to develop “herd immunity” that would then protect those who were at risk of dying from it. There were just a few problems with that, starting with the fact that a whole lot of people who thought they were not at risk of dying from COVID did, in fact, die from COVID.
Ironically, when the CDC temporarily paused the Johnson & Johnson vaccine due to safety concerns, Kulldorff wrote an op-ed criticizing them for doing so.
Dr. Cody Meissner? He’s a pediatrics professor who opposed masking and vaccine requirements for children.
Then we’ve got Vicky Pebsworth! Pebsworth has a long-time association with the National Vaccine Information Center — which, despite its reasonable-sounding name, is a deeply kooky anti-vaccine organization — and claims that her own son was injured by vaccines.
She also once compared the “vaccine-injured community” to the victims of Bloody Sunday — the famously horrific day in 1972 when British soldiers shot at citizens of Derry, in Northern Ireland, who were protesting against the internment of suspected IRA members without a trial.
“For those of us within the vaccine-injured communities who are fighting on behalf of our children for the basic human right to make voluntary, informed vaccination decisions that are based on sound science rather than ideology, it is a battle. And it is personal. Like the victims of the civil war described in ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday,’ many lives have been lost, our families torn apart, and everyday there's unbelievable news where indeed, ‘fact’ is fiction and TV becomes reality,” she said, in all seriousness, though thankfully without saying “Hey! We have Troubles too, you know!”
I am at a loss. This statement has blown out my entire brain and I have spent the last 20 minutes trying to come up with a response beyond contorting my face in a variety of ways, and I’ve got nothing. Nothing!
Moving forward (without flashing back too heavily on the time a guy put “Barbed Wire Love” by Stiff Little Fingers on what he apparently thought was a very romantic mix CD for me), we’ve got Retsef Levi, Ph.D., a Professor of Operations Management at MIT who enjoys sending out fear-mongering tweets about pandemic restrictions and COVID vaccines for pregnant women.
Kennedy’s picks also include Dr. Michael A. Ross, Dr. James Pagano, and Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, who seem somewhat normal-ish. Hibbeln did co-author an investigation into whether mercury causes autism (many anti-vaxxers believe mercury in vaccines is what causes autism) or not, but that was actually part of his larger investigations into whether it actually is dangerous to consume fish while pregnant due to possible mercury content (which he believes it is not).
This really is a big deal. This is the group that will decide the vaccine schedule, that will tell insurers which vaccines they are required to cover. We are going to have a lot of people getting sick and even dying as a result.
Unfortunately, this is not the only disturbing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. news this week.
In an interview with Men’s Health, Bill Nye The Science Guy shared that he had been the recipient of “miles and miles of texts” from Kennedy about how vaccines cause autism.
Via Men’s Health:
“This is real,” he says. It’s an old text chain, but all the texts are from the other person—miles and miles of texts, long messages with links and few interruptions, screen after screen. Nye is showing not so much the content of the texts as the volume.
“That’s Bobby Kennedy Jr.” […]
“Just no self-awareness,” he says. “And if you read these articles he sent, they’re all this speculation about autism and just cause-and-effect, and mercury in vaccines, that maybe there’s a connection. I wrote him back and said, ‘Okay, I’ll read your book. I think you’ve confused causation with correlation. Your friend, Bill.’ And he sent this.” More miles of texts. “So I wrote, ‘Okay, no more texts.’ And he started again! So I cut him off. He does not have good judgment. He is not suited for this job.”
We couldn’t agree more! And you know who else couldn’t agree more? The American Medical Association, which is now demanding a Senate investigation into Kennedy, along with the restoration of the ACIP board.
Of course, Kennedy does have a lot of people in his corner — including, it turns out, people who think drinking chlorine dioxide (AKA bleach) is the cure for everything from COVID to autism to malaria to cancer to HIV. A report from Wired this week detailed not only the bleach drinkers’ excitement for Kennedy and their fervent hope that he and the Trump administration will push the toxic substance as a mainstream treatment — but evidence that Kennedy is receptive to it.
Via Wired:
[I]n January, during his Senate confirmation hearing, [Kennedy] referenced chlorine dioxide while praising Trump for “looking at all of the different remedies” for Covid, using it as an example of the open-mindedness that Kennedy characterized as a “demonstration of leadership.” […]
Days after the confirmation hearing, Pierre Kory—a physician and one of the main promoters of ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19, despite there being no credible evidence to back up the claim—claimed on a podcast that Kennedy had called him to discuss the use of bleach ahead of the hearing.
“Bobby thought they were going to come after him on that,” Kory told the Royce White: Call Me Crazy podcast. “So I basically told Bobby what the real story was on it.” Kory, who has appeared alongside Kennedy multiple times, including at a “Defeat the Mandates” protest in 2022, added that the health secretary “called me his hero; he’s my hero.”
Kory is reportedly working on a book titled The War on Chlorine Dioxide, which will surely be a riveting read.
As you may recall, Mark Grenon and his sons, the proprietors of a chlorine dioxide product they call Miracle Mineral Solution (and the leaders of Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, which they created to legitimize the product), were actually sent to prison for advocating its use during the pandemic.
I probably don’t need to explain this to anyone reading this, but do not consume chlorine dioxide. It is not safe and it is not a good idea. Also, while we are doling out advice, maybe don’t compare things that are not actual massacres to things that are actual massacres, especially when the only thing you know about them is a U2 song.
And get your vaccines while you still can!
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
OT: Nat Guards and Grunts not happy with the situation:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/12/los-angeles-national-guard-troops-marines-morale
<the health secretary “called me his hero; he’s my hero.”>
You are the wind beneath my wingnuts.