🌊 The RFK Jr. Deep Dive

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In 2016, RFK Jr. was the headline speaker at Austin’s SXSW environmental festival. Eight years later, a boycott prevented him from even speaking.

What changed?

Kennedy was born in Washington, DC, in 1954. By the time he was a boy, his initials were already well known: His father, RFK, had led the Senate’s effort to challenge the alliance of labor unions and the mafia overseen by union president Jimmy Hoffa. When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, he made RFK the US’ attorney general.

RFK Jr. was nine years old when his uncle, JFK, was assassinated. Then at 14, he received a call: His father – then a US senator running for president – had been shot while campaigning in California. RFK Jr. flew to Los Angeles and was at the hospital when his father died.

He proceeded to be thrown out of two boarding schools for drug use and face arrest for marijuana possession, but he managed to graduate from Harvard in 1976.

Over the next eight years, RFK wrote a book, studied in London, and received a law degree from the University of Virginia. He landed a job as a Manhattan assistant district attorney, but failed his first bar exam and walked out during the second. Within a year of taking his job, he had resigned – allegedly to study for the bar full-time – and become addicted to heroin.

While flying to South Dakota several months later, the 29-year-old became dazed and ill on the airplane, prompting first responders to meet it upon landing. Police, suspecting a drug overdose, searched his bag and found “a small amount” of heroin.

RFK announced, “With the best medical help I can find, I am determined to beat this problem.” He pleaded guilty, checked himself into rehab, and was placed on probation, which required him to work as a volunteer. He did so with Bob Boyle, an environmentalist and a fisherman.

Boyle co-founded Hudson Riverkeeper, a group dedicated to protecting the Hudson River, which runs the length of New York State and through New York City. So many factories, energy companies, sewers, and cities had been pumping their waste into the Hudson that fish couldn’t live in much of it and areas were rainbow-colored and flammable. Riverkeeper sought to hold those polluters accountable, and RFK became their lead prosecutor.

As a prosecutor, one of RFK’s early targets was General Electric, which had disposed of over 1M tons of hazardous chemicals (PCBs) in the river 200 miles north of New York City, filling the water and its fish with carcinogenic chemicals. The Riverkeepers provided evidence so the government could deem a 200-mile stretch of the river a contamination zone and bring a lawsuit against GE, which resulted in a multi-billion dollar cleanup effort.

RFK also led negotiations to fix New York City’s water supply, which in 1989 had at least 85 sewage treatment plants disposing waste into it. The city was responding by pumping chemicals into the contaminated water, which was killing aquatic life. RFK’s efforts helped bring about a deal in which the City would fund projects to protect upstream drinking water sources. The deal became a template for sustainable drinking water management that has been replicated around the world.

Then in 2003, Kennedy came across a pair of government-funded studies.

One showed that all freshwater fish in America had dangerous levels of mercury; the other showed that one in six American women had dangerous levels of mercury in their blood.

“The mercury was largely coming from coal-burning power plants…and it precipitates out when there's rain,” Kennedy has explained. “When you burn the coal…[mercury] falls onto the landscapes and it washes off the landscapes into the rivers and the fish were all contaminated.” The findings led to lawsuits against coal plants and lectures about what they had been doing.

After each lecture, the same group of women kept attending, sitting in the front row, and trying to approach Kennedy afterward.

“As it turns out, they were all the mothers of intellectually disabled children, and they believed that their children had been injured by the vaccines, by mercury in the vaccines. So they would say to me in kind of a respectful, but vaguely scolding way, if you're really interested in mercury contamination and exposure to children, you need to look at the vaccines.”

“Now, this is something I didn't want to do, because …I'm not a public health person. I wanted to do environmental stuff.”

But eventually RFK relented.

What changed his mind, he has said, was one of the women who kept coming to his speaking engagements. She, a psychologist from Minnesota, managed to find his home and drop off an 18-inch-thick stack of scientific studies about vaccines. “She pointed to that pile and she said, ‘I'm not leaving here until you read those,’” RFK said last year.

The woman’s son had been diagnosed with autism after receiving his vaccines, and the US’ vaccine court had awarded her a $20M settlement.

The US has had a vaccine court – technically the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program – since 1988, two years after Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. That bill was prompted by pharmaceutical companies’ warnings that lawsuits over their vaccines risked making vaccine production untenable. The government responded by creating the vaccine court, which shielded pharma companies from lawsuits and had the government compensate people who suffered vaccine side effects.

According to the vaccine court, “Most people who get vaccines have no serious problems. Vaccines, like any medicines, can cause side effects, but most are very rare and very mild.”

“In very rare cases, a vaccine can cause a serious problem, such as a severe allergic reaction. In these instances [the court] may provide financial compensation to individuals who file a petition and are found to have been injured by a VICP-covered vaccine.”

The court had awarded $20M to the woman who approached RFK, and he said her story caught her attention. Upon reading her pile, he “recognized that there was this huge delta between what the public health agencies were telling us about vaccine safety and what the actual peer-reviewed published science was saying.”

RFK thus dove into the world of vaccines

RFK became convinced that vaccines were dramatically more harmful than the government and the pharmaceutical companies were acknowledging. He claimed that their components – such as aluminum – were harmful and caused rapidly rising rates of autism, asthma, allergies, and other health conditions.

At first, RFK’s ideas were widely disseminated: In 2003, the Washington Post even ran an essay entitled “Reaction” that was written by the woman who had given him the 18-inch stack.

RFK said parallels existed between his environmental work and his vaccine research. He had long accused coal and oil companies of “capturing” the Environmental Protection Agency, by which he meant that they had come to control the agency that was supposed to be regulating them. He alleged that pharmaceutical companies had done the same by using their power to craft the Food and Drug Administration’s agenda.

The government, companies, and medical establishment responded by accusing Kennedy of peddling conspiracy theories that risked undermining support for vaccines, which they all attributed with underpinning a steep rise in life expectancy over the last 60 years. Kennedy was labeled an “anti-vaxxer,” hurting his credibility and visibility.

Yet on some issues, like the environment, he remained a widely respected figure: As recently as 2016, he headlined SXSW and did an extended Vanity Fair interview that didn’t mention vaccines once.

Covid changed that.

RFK alleged that pharma companies were working with the government to profit off the pandemic and that vaccines were part of their effort to do so.

He took a long-time feud with Dr. Fauci public, publishing, “Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” a book that alleged Fauci and Gates had used “their control of media outlets…to flood the public with fearful propaganda about COVID-19…and to muzzle debate and ruthlessly censor dissent.”

One “anti-disinformation” advocacy group claimed that RFK was one of a dozen people responsible for spreading 65% of anti-vax content online. Instagram banned him for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims,” while Facebook banned his non-profit. Yet as RFK faced ever-mounting criticism, he tapped into a growing segment of the American population that had lost trust in the media, government, and corporations during the pandemic.

When RFK was running for president, he said vaccines were not his focus: “I’m not running on vaccines. The only time that I will talk about vaccines is if somebody asks me about it,” he said.

Instead, he focused on America’s health crisis, as evidenced by the US having the developed world’s highest rates of maternal mortality, diabetes, obesity, and other conditions. After dropping out and endorsing Trump, he called for “Making America Healthy Again” through eliminating corruption and regulating pharmaceutical, agriculture, and food companies. 

RFK Jr. has called for restricting the use of pesticides, hormones, and food additives, including dyes; ending what he calls the “suppression” of psychedelics and natural foods, like raw milk; and eliminating fluoride, which he believes harms brain development, from drinking water. He’s also called for blocking pharmaceutical advertisements, trying to shut the “revolving door” between corporations and the government; and funding research into the health impacts of vaccines, seed oils, and other areas where he says research has been biased.

Now, RFK may have a chance to turn these words into policy: Having been tapped by Trump to become Health and Human Services Secretary, he’ll oversee the US government’s health bureaucracy, including the CDC, NIH, and FDA, if confirmed. If he is, it’s unlikely to be business as usual in the American health agencies. 

Editor’s Note

Thanks for reading this story. We know RFK Jr. is one of the most controversial people in politics, and we tried to give the full picture. We thank you for your trust and hope you enjoyed.

For those traveling over the holidays, we hope you have safe and pleasant journeys. We’ll be back next weekend.

–Max and Max

RocaNews co-founders