‘Bobby is an outlier’: Inside RFK Jr’s world of anti-vax conspiracy theories

The next US health secretary has suggested erecting a statue of the disgraced British doctor who claimed the MMR vaccine causes autism

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On a windy afternoon in October 2015, a Black middle-aged man spoke from the famous Capitol steps on the United States National Mall. Looking out upon a crowd of African Americans stretching halfway to the Washington Monument, his voice seethed with outrage and incredulity.
“Brothers and sisters,” he called into a mike. “I’m here to bring you some vital information.”
He’d been approached, he said, by Robert Kennedy Jr, nephew of an assassinated president, JFK; son of a murdered senator after whom he was named; and who eight years later, in November 2024, would be picked by Donald Trump to become his health secretary.
The speaker had the style of a mix-n-match colonel. He wore a navy-blue uniform with gold trim at the collar, white shirt, narrow shades, red shoulder flashes and an un-soldierly red bow tie.
But this was no military man or Manhattan doorman. This was Tony Muhammad, Western Regional Minister of the Nation of Islam: the extreme Black nationalist faction led by Louis Farrakhan: widely reviled in polite society as antisemitic, homophobic and misogynist.
“Four months ago,” Mr Muhammad continued, “Bobby Kennedy, the son of Robert Kennedy, met with me in Los Angeles to give me some shocking, and revealing, and I mean terrible, information.”
Before Mr Kennedy’s current dabble in the deep end of politics, he was a product liability and personal injury lawyer working a shrewd twin-track, crusade-and-sue, strategy that had won him both applause and wealth.
He’d chalked up many triumphs in environmental disputes. Then, a decade before meeting the man with the mike, his gaze settled on vaccine controversies.
First up: a 5,000-word article, published in July 2005 by Rolling Stone and Salon magazines. It accused the US government’s flagship public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), of hosting a hideous plot.
He claimed a vaccine preservative – listed for withdrawal after 60 years’ use – wasn’t only a prime cause of autism in children but that the Atlanta-based agency’s scientists and managers had discovered this and covered it up.
This came as news to them, and his complaints led nowhere. The preservative wasn’t as toxic as the lawyer assumed. Both science and court cases failed to link it with autism. And the magazines deleted his article.
“It was the worst mistake of my career,” wrote former Salon editor Joan Walsh last year of her decision to publish his allegations. “We were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood [and] incorrectly cited data. Some of his sources turned out to be known crackpots.”
But in the giant CDC, he’d found a juicy target and adjusted his product of interest. Now he claimed a conspiracy over MMR – the three-in-one shot against measles, mumps and rubella – turning to the Nation of Islam for help.
“The senior lead scientist at the centre of disease control,” Mr Muhammad’s voice rang out on the Mall with what he claimed Mr Kennedy told him, “has admitted that the MMR of vaccines, and many of the vaccine shots, have been genetically modified to attack Black and Latino boys.”
As the wind brushed the crowd of gasps and boos, the minister doubled down into scripture. “Like Pharoah did doing the children of Israel,” he called. “Pharoah said, ‘Let us kill all the boy babies’.”
Of course, it wasn’t true. But Mr Farrakhan recalled much the same as his minister after the famously named lawyer came to his home. And although quite what he told them is lost down rabbit holes, Mr Kennedy later went public saying “the senior scientist” at the CDC confessed “we lied about all of our science.”
That wasn’t true either. One mid-rank researcher among its 10,000 staff had slammed a badly designed study from which Black subgroup data was held back as implausible. “Reasonable scientists” might differ, he conceded.
But, whatever the story, Mr Kennedy must have known he was crossing a boundary in bringing his business to Mr Farrakhan. “Satanic Jews,” the Black leader once declared, for instance, in a speech memorialised by the respected international Anti-Defamation League, “run America, run the government, run the world, own the banks, own the means of communication. They are my enemies.”
Could the Harvard-educated future health secretary have missed his new ally’s reputation? Either way, two weeks after the Washington event, at an anti-vaccine rally outside the CDC’s headquarters, Mr Kennedy mortgaged his name.
“I want to thank Minister Farrakhan for committing his church and his integrity and his credibility to this issue,” he declared. Even Mr Muhammad, among the speakers, said he was “shocked.”
But Mr Kennedy hadn’t stumbled or stepped out of character. After years of being corrected or dismissed by experts, he’d retreated to a bewilderness of conspiracy theories and come to revel in the company of the strange.
Take, for example, his MMR story. He’d sourced that from Andrew Wakefield, a former British doctor who’d been booted from medicine over a litany of misconduct for trying, and failing, to pin an “epidemic” of autism on the shot.
Charges proven against Mr Wakefield ranged from the medical abuse of developmentally challenged children to dishonesty in research he published in a medical journal. Even parents of kids he recruited to the project dismissed it as “fabrication” and “fraudulent”.
But Mr Wakefield, dubbed “father of the anti-vaccine movement,” was embraced by Mr Kennedy as a hero. “In any just society,” he told whooping supporters from a platform they shared, “we would be building statues to Andy Wakefield.”
In alliance, the pair moved from vaccine to vaccine, with never a good word for any. From those with the preservative, then MMR, hepatitis B, HiB and HPV, a shot against shingles (over which Kennedy trawled for clients in a TV commercial) and, naturally, SARS-CoV-2.
Today, the candidate, now 69, claims a mission to “tell America the truth”. “I’ve never been anti-vaccine,” he says in one of countless interviews on the campaign trail. “If somebody calls me anti-vaccine it’s because they have an agenda, which is to marginalise or vilify me, or make me look like I’m crazy.”
But, asked by a filmmaker if any shot in history was of benefit, he replied, “I don’t know the answer to that.” And during an intimate speech in Ohio during the pandemic, his audience couldn’t miss his message.
He joked that if there was a product against Covid from which you “take one shot” and get “lifetime immunity,” with side effects less than one in a million, and a 70 per cent take-up meaning “nobody in this society ever gets it again”, he would be “happy to look at it.”
As for looking crazy, the company he keeps allows modest room for manoeuvre. Joining him and Wakefield at the pinnacle of what she calls a “pyramid,” or “inner circle,” of the anti-vaccine movement, is an osteopathic doctor, Sherri Tenpenny.
Dr Tenpenny has said Covid vaccines were devised to create “transhumanoids” capable of being controlled through a “quantum entanglement.” She believes the shots will kill “much more” than 50 million Americans and has long been worried that a “metal piece” inside can render those injected magnetic.
She admits her medical board thinks she should see a psychiatrist. But Mr Kennedy, again, isn’t fazed. While anyone else might have left the room backwards, he calls her “one of the great leaders of this movement”.
Many interesting characters circle around him. Too many to painlessly detail. On the next ring in orbit is a New York journalist, Celia Farber, 57, a key source and advisor for a recent Kennedy best-seller, who has spent more than 35 years denying the settled science that HIV causes AIDS.
“I am a conspiracy theorist, and an anti-vaxxer, and an HIV denier,” Ms Farber brags without irony on her Facebook page, sprinkled with abuse of Jews. There’s George Soros (“Satanic…” A Nazi”), David Rockefeller (“All we need is the right major crisis”) and, as what she identifies as “the source of Trump loathing,” a “download from the Rothschild bankers”.
Here are voices to which Mr Kennedy listens. “I got a call last night from Bobby Kennedy,” says Dr Tenpenny online, tipping viewers as to who called whom. “Just got off the phone with Robert F. Kennedy Jr who called,” Ms Farber tells Facebook, more formally.
Some wonder if such associates stir murmurings from his childhood. Was a second shooter present on the grassy knoll when Bobby was nine and his uncle was gunned down in Dallas? And, five years later, was his father’s killer, who was himself killed, an agent of some deep state plot?
“I’m a trial lawyer,” he told The New Yorker’s editor a few weeks ago. “I can guarantee you, looking at this case, that I could prove that my uncle’s death was caused by the CIA. I have enough evidence right now, without any deposition, to prove that my uncle’s death was the result of a conspiracy.”
And yet, rather than do that – honouring his uncle, father, and family with a landmark revelation to rewrite history – he’s on the phone to Dr Tenpenny and Ms Farber.
Whatever, whoever, he didn’t launch a far-fetched bid to seize Joe Biden’s mantle as the Democratic Party’s man in the White House with any expectation of winning. According to CBS News, he was persuaded to run by Steve Bannon, former aide to Mr Trump, as a “chaos agent” to damage the incumbent.
“The people who were there, they’re QAnon believers, anti-vaxxers, Republicans. I didn’t see one Democrat that I knew,” said Massachusetts political analyst Mary Anne Marsh, after his campaign launch in Boston.
“Bobby is an outlier,” wrote three close relatives in May 2019, dissociating themselves from his anti-vaccine campaigning during an upsurge of measles in America. “We are proud of the history of our family as advocates of public health and promoters of immunisation.”
Confronted with their views during what the Gawker website once headlined “A very weird interview,” Mr Kennedy shrugged off the rebuke. “My family members are not experts on vaccines,” he hit back.
Then they asked: “What is your expertise?”
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