The Daily - How R.F.K. Jr. and ‘Health Freedom’ Rose to Power

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced a crucial nomination hearing on Wednesday where a panel of skeptical senators probed his past, often contentious remarks.Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who covers health policy for The Times, explains how someone who’s considered on the fringe in a lot of his beliefs came to be picked for health secretary to begin with.Guests: Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a correspondent based in Washington covering health policy for The New York Times.Background reading: How addiction and trauma shaped Mr. Kennedy’s turbulent life.In the hearing, Mr. Kennedy defended his shifting views on vaccines and abortion.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. And this is The Daily. Of all President Trump's cabinet picks, perhaps none is more familiar to more Americans than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. In my advocacy, I've often disturbed the status quo by asking uncomfortable questions. On Wednesday, he faced a crucial nomination hearing, where a panel of skeptical senators probed his past, often controversial, remarks. In a podcast in 2020, you said, and I quote, you would do anything, pay anything to go

back in time and not vaccinate your kids. Do you think that people who take antidepressants are dangerous? Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bio weapon? I probably did say that. Today, my colleague Cheryl Gay Stolberg, on how Kennedy became the face of a movement that has railed against the very system he could soon oversee. It's Thursday, January 30th. So Cheryl, I'm so glad you're here today because you are the perfect person for this.

You cover both health and politics, which yesterday and today have come together in a very interesting way with this confirmation hearing of RFK Jr. If he gets confirmed, and that's a big if, he would be leading this vast government agency that's responsible in many ways for the health of Americans. It's called the Department of Health and Human Services. And I think the first thing I really want to understand is how RFK Jr., who's someone who is widely understood to be pretty fringe in a lot of his beliefs and really almost a conspiracy theorist, how he came to be up for that nomination to begin with.

So he's had a remarkable journey, Sabrina. He comes from this storied American family, the Kennedy political dynasty, but he's also a black sheep kind of within his own family. He's had a lot of disagreements with his relatives, most recently his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, and he holds these extremely anti-establishment views that you talked about. He's anti-pharma. He wouldn't say he's anti-vaccine. He's a vaccine skeptic, and he's skeptical of a lot of things, everything from vaccines

to ultra-processed foods. And it might be surprising that these views could be held by the future health secretary of the United States. But they're kind of seeping into the mainstream and they've coalesced around this movement, Maha, Make America Healthy Again. Which obviously is a play on MAGA, right? Make America Great Again. So is this just really a subset of the MAGA movement, a subset of the Trump movement?

No. I think it's its own movement. It's a movement that really Kennedy himself embodies and brought to the fore. This is where the crunchy granola left meets the libertarian right. It's a very broad coalition. It includes wellness influencers and new age environmentalists and also rightwing podcasters, and they come together in this skepticism and antipathy toward the pharmaceutical industry and the scientific establishment. And they embrace everything from like raw milk to don't vaccinate your kids. And they've amassed a considerable amount of political capital.

Tell me how that happened. How'd they get to the point of having so much power? And they've amassed a considerable amount of political capital. Tell me how that happened. How did they get to the point of having so much power? Well, the concept that Kennedy espouses, he calls it medical freedom, that concept has very deep roots in the United States as far back as the 1700s during a smallpox outbreak in Boston when the Reverend Cotton Mather was promoting inoculation, which was the precursor to vaccination. And someone literally in 1721 threw a bomb through his window and said, Cotton Mather,

you dog, damn you, I'll inoculate you with this. Wow. And in the early 19th and 20th centuries, there were these health freedom advocates. They were homeopaths and naturalists, and they wanted recognition for their way of doing medicine. So there's always been this kind of deep sort of fringe suspicion of medical practitioners in this country. But there's one place that we often see this, and that's around vaccines.

I started getting calls from parents who said, my child was developing perfectly normally, and then they had their MMR vaccine in many cases, and then they just disappeared. So most people would date the modern anti-vaccine movement to 1998 and a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield. And our duty was not only to investigate those children to see if we could get to the root

of their symptoms, but also to report their history. Who published a paper that later got retracted and was debunked many times that asserted the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine caused autism. And there are thousands of parents who are all saying the same thing, that the triple antigen, MMR, is to blame for their children's autism.

It created a big flurry. Parents were worrying about rising autism rates and the whole issue of vaccine safety kind of spilled out into the public. I became aware of the autism crisis in America when my grandson Christian became autistic shortly after getting about nine shots. And we had hearings on Capitol Hill with a congressman whose grandson had autism and was convinced vaccines were to blame.

Without a doubt in my mind, I believe vaccinations triggered Evan's autism. We had Hollywood actors like Jenny McCarthy, who had a child with autism. I don't know what happened in 1990. There was no plague that was killing children that we had tripled the amount of vaccines. What happened after 1989?

The vaccine's scheduled. Why do they trip more into 26 more vaccines? Greed. She and her partner at the time, Jim Carrey, led a march, green our vaccines, trying to rally Congress. So there were a lot of people that were really concerned about this, but fundamentally it was debunked, right? Well, it was debunked, but it took some time to do studies and the Lancet, which published

the original Wakefield study, didn't retract it for 12 years. Oh wow, it's a long time. A long time. And so the movement, the anti-vaccine movement, starts to gain steam around the late 1990s and the early 2000s. And over time, we see parents starting to apply for exemptions to vaccination, religious exemptions. In California, they had a philosophical exemption. It was pretty loose.

Pretty much anybody could apply. And as more and more parents applied for exemptions for their children, fewer kids got vaccinated. It's still pretty small numbers, though it tended to happen in pockets in like small communities, maybe in New York or California. And because of that, those pockets began to be vulnerable. I fever, aching eyes, hacking cough, and after a week, every square interview covered by red dots, measles. Tonight the CDC warns it's back and it's spreading. We started seeing predictably measles.

Tonight we're tracking a surge of cases, outbreaks now in 13 states. The number of cases growing at a pace not seen in nearly 20 years. Any public health expert or vaccine expert will tell you that when vaccination rates go down, the first disease to come back is measles. Disneyland has been ground zero for a measles outbreak that started in December and has since spread to numerous states. The big moment was an outbreak that happened in Disneyland in California in late 2014 and 2015.

More than half of those who have contracted the disease were not vaccinated. And after that happened, states started cracking down on vaccine exemptions. California, Oregon, Washington, all tried to enact legislation making it harder for parents to opt out of vaccination. So that probably made people pretty mad. Like that would have been a galvanizing force for people who really didn't like the idea of being forced to take vaccines. Well, it certainly made parents who didn't want to vaccinate their kids mad. What it also did though, we started to see a turn, a shift in the rhetoric around vaccination.

And it wasn't just the kind of crunchy granola, I don't want to put any toxins in my child's body, I want my child to have everything natural. Shift it a little bit to include basically get the government off my back. Don't tell me what to do. It's a liberty argument, a civil liberties, a medical freedom argument. I should have the freedom to make my own medical choices. Interesting. So it's bringing in this kind of sort of libertarian sensibility to the thing that had been the earthy, crunchy, lefty mom thing. Right.

And, you know, the whole argument for vaccines has always been that it's a community-wide activity. It's something that you do to protect yourself against infectious disease, but also to protect your community. And suddenly that argument wasn't flying anymore. Instead of being about the community, it was about me and my kid and what I have the right to do. Okay, so bring us to the pandemic where all of this language, you know, now we're quite familiar with starts to really happen more and more. And not just with a fringe group of people, but a lot of people. This was the

moment when I first understood just how big a portion of the population had skepticism about the medical establishment. Yeah. I mean, I think the pandemic was a perfect storm to allow this anti-vaccine sentiment to flourish. A recent poll reveals about a third of Americans won't get the COVID-19 vaccine or are undecided about getting it. First of all, you had the worst public health crisis in a century. People were dying.

Everyone was frantic. The economy was shut down. You layer over that Donald Trump. The country wants to get back to work. A mercurial, chaotic president who doesn't really want to listen to the experts. Our country was built to get back to work. We don't have a country where they say, hey, let's close it down for two years. We can't do that.

And you've got this political climate that is erupting around the pandemic. We don't want no shots. We don't want no cards. No tyranny. Otherwise, take the Statue of Liberty back to France. The distrust among skeptics isn't just about the vaccine. With resistance to lockdown orders. You won't be able to go into a gym or a ball game or a theater or a restaurant. This is blatant, irrational discrimination.

Resistance to masks and vaccination becomes part of that bigger whole. We will not comply! We will not comply! We will not comply! We will not comply! We will not comply! We will not comply! We will not comply!

We will not comply! We will not comply! We will not comply! We will not comply! We will not comply! We will not comply! that people could actually control, right? It's like, I can tell you what you can't put in my body. That was like the last act of agency in some way that people had. Exactly, and I should add that you've also got social media. Last week, comedian Joe Rogan gave his 13 million Instagram followers an update on his health

and how he was being treated. Where other kinds of misinformation was flourishing about drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. All kinds of meds, monoclonal antibodies, ivermectin. All of this was brewing in this kind of stew, this anti-establishment, anti-public health kind of anti-science, anti-pharma soup. The criminal gang leaders, Pfizer head, Fauci, all of them, they all need to go to prison for the rest of their lives. I remember the Biden administration asking or telling the tech companies to take down

some of this stuff, that there was this profusion of misinformation. Right, Biden was really worried about it. He thought this misinformation was costing Americans their lives. This protest at Michigan State House is protected by the First Amendment, but posts encouraging people to participate were silenced by Facebook. But people start feeling like they're being censored. Well, it's official. YouTube has just now banned anything related to health that doesn't align with the general medical consensus. And that breeds further suspicion. So we're now we're in 1984, or well territory.

So that's sort of malinformation. Malinformation. Well, true information that's inconvenient. Exactly. That results in True information that's inconvenient. Exactly. Like, what is Big Pharma hiding from me? They're making all this money with these vaccines. They have government contracts to sell 300 million doses, you know, for one for every American citizen.

And what do they know that we don't know? And why are they shutting us up? These conversations start to go out into the broader culture on conservative podcasts. People want me to get vaccinated and like my friends who've been vaccinated want me to join the team. Like, go ahead, get the tattoo. Like what are you saying? Joe Rogan and a whole core of kind of conservative doctors

grew up, Robert Malone. It puts you at high risk, okay? They're asking you to take more risk for your health in order to join their club. And suddenly this mistrust started to spill over into other topics beyond vaccines. We have a massive health crisis in this country. The obesity crisis is really legitimate and

it's terrifying. People worrying about obesity fueled by ultra processed foods and God forbid no wonder why cancer and all the things are running rampant nowadays because a lot of people don't know. 90% of what you're finding in the grocery store is pure poison. People promoting clean living and holistic health and vitamins. I think every single person should be at a minimum on a methylated multivitamin. Not that vitamins are bad, but you know, it's this whole kind of return to nature, natural, holistic feeling and the whole kind of I did my own research crowd. Big Pharma made a whopping $1.7 trillion profit last year.

Not a penny went towards making anybody understand how to live a healthier life. Merged with a conservative anger at the liberal elites telling people what to do. If we want a healthy country, the good news is that we can change all this. America can get healthy again. And there's one person who is a natural fit to lead this movement. He's been making these claims for years, and he's a big name. To do that, we need to do three things. First, we need to root out the corruption in our health agencies.

Second, we need to change incentives in our healthcare system. And third, we need to inspire Americans to get healthy again. And that's Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We'll be right back. So Cheryl, you said that RFK was in a lot of ways a natural leader for this movement because he'd been saying a lot of these things for years. But how did he come to be involved in the anti-vax medical freedom movement to begin with? So for much of his career, RFK Jr. had a pretty kind of un-fringy traditional existence.

He was a district attorney in Manhattan, and then he really made a name for himself as an environmental lawyer, and he worked on a number of cases cleaning up waterways, including mercury in waterways. And Kennedy talks about how he would be going out and giving speeches, and these moms of kids with autism would say to him, you have to start looking at mercury in vaccines. And he would be like, no, no, no, that's not what I do. I'm an environmental lawyer. And then finally, in the early 2000s, someone who was a college classmate of a sister-in-law of Kennedy wanted to get in touch with him.

And she showed up at the family compound in Hyannisport, Massachusetts with a big stack of documents. And Kennedy comes to the door and she's like, I want you to look at this. And he says, I have house guests and we're going sailing. And he left. So she waited him out. And he finally said to her, if I look at these things, will you leave? And she said yes. So he starts reading the scientific studies and the abstracts. And he says that he was just struck by this kind of delta between what the public health agencies were saying and what he was reading.

Now what exactly this delta is, it's not really clear, but he starts to use his name to open doors and he gets a meeting with Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious disease specialist, and he goes to see Francis Collins, the head of the NIH. And none of these meetings go anywhere, which gives Kennedy the impression that these people are trying to hide something. And he concludes that they're all in the pocket of big pharma. And he starts feeling like, in his words, this is regulatory capture on steroids. And some of the things he points to, you know, have some truth in them.

Like for example, the NIH does partner with pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs. We saw this in the pandemic, right? Moderna and NIH partnered together to make the COVID vaccine. And then of course, Moderna made some profit when it went to market. That doesn't necessarily mean that you cannot trust the efficacy of these drugs or vaccines just because they made a profit, but in RFK's view, this casts a shadow over the whole enterprise. And this is the thing about him. He often says stuff that has kind of like a kernel or a basis of truth. And there might be a good non-nefarious explanation for it.

But Kennedy's not really interested in that explanation. In the case of vaccines, he decides something suspicious is afoot. So what does he do with this suspicion? So what he does is he starts an advocacy organization and he names it Children's Health Defense and he's gung-ho examining every aspect of vaccine safety. And over the years, he and Children's Health Defense file more than 30 lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers and various public health measures. And he really embraces this crusade against vaccines.

So take us back to the pandemic. You said that it really crystallized this moment of anti-vax, anti-Big Pharma, anti-establishment. How did RFK plug into that? It is an absolute honor to welcome Robert F. Kennedy Jr. So the pandemic gives Bobby Kennedy an opportunity to bring his ideas to a wider audience. And remember how I said that Biden's vaccine mandates just really triggered this incredible backlash? We are watching something now that I never believed that I would see in my lifetime. Well, who do you think was leading the backlash? It was Kennedy. Ashism is defined as a merger of state and corporate power orchestrated by Tony Fauci. We had this Defeat the Mandates rally in Washington in 2022.

What we're seeing today is what I call turnkey totalitarianism. He made some pretty controversial statements there. He basically compared vaccine mandates to Hitler's Germany. Even in Hitler's Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You can hide in an attic like Anne Frank did. He said that, well, at least back in Germany, you can hide in an attic like Anne Frank did. He said that, well, at least, you know, back in Germany, you know, you could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did. Today, the mechanisms are being put in place.

I will make it so none of us can run and none of us can hide. In essence saying that there was no escaping Joe Biden's vaccine mandates. They're putting in 5G to harvest our data and control our behavior. Digital currency that will allow them to punish us from a distance and cut off our food supply. So pretty wild stuff, in other words. Well, certainly stuff that made a lot of people think that he was a conspiracy theorist, yeah.

But... We have the sixth people in the world. There's nobody else who has a chronic disease burden. Kennedy is tapping into something. When I was a kid, the typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in his lifetime. Today, one out of every three kids who walks through his office store is pre-diabetic or diabetic. And people who feel marginalized and people who feel unseen. My brother had asthma and he was told by his doctor, there'll never be a cure for asthma because it's so rare nobody will ever study it. Today, one out of every eight black children

has asthma. What happened? Kennedy starts talking also about chronic disease. Neurological diseases, ADD, ADHD, speech-alarm, language-alarm, tics, Tourette syndrome, heart clefts, he gets the auto... The things he says kind of make sense. They're making tons of money on our illness and they have very little incentive to make us better. The answers he offers are often cherry picking the science in a way that takes it out of

context. But he's speaking to something that people are feeling, that anger that we talked about earlier and that sense that like something is wrong. And he finds himself the leader of this very diverse and very large movement. So at what point does he decide to run for president? So he announces he's going to run for president in April of 2023, goes to Boston to make the announcement against the Kennedy backdrop, and he's going to challenge Joe Biden. And not surprisingly, he's a Kennedy. He's doing it as a Democrat. He's going to wage a Biden and not surprisingly, he's a Kennedy. He's doing it as a Democrat.

He's going to wage a primary challenge to an incumbent president. And that's a pretty tough task. And eventually he realizes that he can't do it. And about six months later in October, he announces he's going to run as an independent. But eventually it becomes clear that he's not going to win. And he became convinced that the best way to present and bring forward the issues he really cared about would be to partner up with Donald Trump. And you can imagine what a shock this is, certainly to his family.

Right. Who are, you know, aghast. I mean, they've all come out for Biden and now to see that he's partnering with Trump? But Kennedy is convinced that Trump will give him the power, the platform, the latitude that he needs to advance this medical freedom agenda. It was pretty crazy when that happened. I mean, I remember him as kind of the spoiler for both parties and then signing up with Trump, which didn't entirely make sense to me from an RFK perspective. I mean, Trump is this guy who's, you know, famous for fast food and doesn't really seem

that concerned about health or environmental regulations. Exactly. And Kennedy famously like says, Oh my God, his diet. But you're saying it was just as simple as RFK saw a route to power and Trump wanted his voters. Yeah, I think it was very transactional. With us tonight is the man who's going to help us get it all straightened out. Robert F.

Kennedy, Jr. out Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I went to a Trump rally in Georgia a few weeks before the election and Kennedy was there and they were very simpatico and Kennedy just got wild applause from the Trump crowd. I mean he was really a showstopper. Nobody gets a standing ovation like that. What's going on over here? That's great, Bobby. Great.

Thank you. So, in other words, Maha is born. Maha is born. Yes, exactly. And suddenly you started hearing, you know, conservatives talking about ultra-processed foods and, you know, big pharma and regulatory capture and all of these catchphrases that were part of Kennedy's rhetoric. So, Cheryl, that brings us to his nomination as HHS secretary. And, you know, I guess given

his whole rise to power and his rhetoric of the past, it makes me wonder, assuming he's confirmed, what do we think he would actually do or be able to do in this new role? So this is a $64,000 question, right? You know, we saw on the first day of his hearings, Kennedy is kind of reeling back in on the vaccines. When he was asked about vaccines, he insisted he supports them, and he names in particular the measles and the polio vaccines. And he tries to steer the focus towards addressing things like obesity and chronic diseases, which are issues that have a broader base of support.

But should he be confirmed, he would have broad latitude over a huge, sprawling agency that is responsible for Medicare and children's health and the Food and Drug Administration, which approves medicines, the CDC, the nation's public health agency, the NIH, the biomedical research enterprise. God, it's vast. It's vast. He would, for instance, oversee the vaccine for children program, an $8 billion program that provides vaccines for more than half the nation's children, kids in low income

and working class families. And would he be able, Cheryl, to just cancel that, for example? No. It's a legislatively created program, but he would have authority as secretary over the contracts that that program signs with drug makers. He would be able to decline to enter contracts or amend contracts. So he could exercise his authority in that way. Danielle Pletka Cheryl, what do public health folks think?

What are they saying to you? Cheryl Kane They're terrified. I can't even begin to tell you the terror that I'm hearing. They are worried that Americans will stop vaccinating their children, that there will be a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases, and they're worried about a bird flu epidemic. The CDC says right now that the risk to humans is low. There's a lot of fear that that virus could shift and suddenly, you know, jump from person to person and would we be prepared? And is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a staunch critic of mRNA vaccines, the right person to lead

the nation through a public health crisis? And what about the people in the movement, Cheryl? The Make America Healthy Again folks, what do they think? a public health crisis. And what about the people in the movement, Cheryl? The Make America Healthy Again folks, what do they think? They're thrilled. They cannot believe that after decades of being on the fringes of American society, suddenly they have power in Washington. So Cheryl, thinking about the arc of RFK's story, where he came from,

you know, from this kind of obscure environmentalist fringe, all the way to controlling one of the biggest, if not the biggest, budget in the entire federal government, and lifted by a movement that, like him, started out fringe and is now very mainstream. What does that say about where we are right now in America? You know, Sabrina, I think this is the apotheosis of mistrust. Think about what Kennedy's life work has been. His whole life's work, or at least the last 10 or more years, has been to sow distrust in these federal agencies, in the CDC and the FDA and the NIH.

And now that work has catapulted him to a place where he is poised to oversee the very agencies that he is telling Americans do not deserve their trust. So, I think that really speaks to something broader in our society, sort of a cultural moment that we're in. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is emblematic of the mistrust that we are seeing across society, a mistrust in government, in the media, in the pharmaceutical industry, in all manner of authority. This crisis of mistrust has seeped into every corner of American society. Cheryl, thank you for helping us understand this. Thank you, Sabrina.

The debate over Kennedy's candidacy will continue today. The Senate Finance Committee is likely to vote next week on whether to send his nomination to the full Senate for a final vote. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Wednesday night, a commercial airlines plane carrying 64 people collided in midair with a U.S. Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan National Airport outside Washington, D.C., and crashed into the Potomac River.

The collision happened around 9 p.m. as the flight was on its approach to the airport's runway. As of Thursday morning, authorities have not given an official count of casualties or bodies recovered, but many are feared dead. The plane was coming from Wichita, Kansas. Some of those aboard were figure skaters coming from championship games, which were held in Wichita. Russian figure skaters were also among the passengers.

And the White House rescinded an order that froze trillions of dollars in grants and loans after it faced legal challenges and prompted mass confusion among places like schools and hospitals that didn't know if they had lost all federal support. The reversal was the first setback in Trump's aggressive use of executive power to reshape the government in his image.

Orders directing agencies to review and cut spending on so-called woke ideology remained in place. Today's episode was produced by Alex Stern, Nina Feldman, and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Devin Taylor with help from Patricia Willens, contains original music by Marian Lozano, Pat McCusker, and Alicia Beatupe, fact-checked by Will Peischel, and engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi.

See you tomorrow.