Fact check: RFK Jr. denied saying things he did say | CNN Politics
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Over and over at a confirmation hearing on Wednesday, Democratic senators confronted Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about controversial comments they said he had made in the past. And over and over, President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health and human services either denied having said those things or said he wasn’t sure he had said them.
So CNN reviewed his comments in context — listening to full recordings of his interviews and poring over one of his books. We found that Kennedy did make some of the comments he denied making or claimed not to remember whether he had made, though there was at least one case in which his Wednesday denial was accurate.
Here is a look at six of the exchanges Kennedy had with members of the Senate Finance Committee:
Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado asked Kennedy, “Did you write in your book, and I (quote): ‘It’s undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS.’ Yes or no, Mr. Kennedy?”
Kennedy responded, “I’m not sure.”
Facts First: Kennedy did write that, word for word, in a 2021 book.
The sentence cited by Bennet appeared in a Kennedy book called “The Real Anthony Fauci.” It was part of a conspiratorial section in which Kennedy baselessly insinuated that the number of people diagnosed with AIDS in Africa had been inaccurately inflated to enrich people whose organizations get money to help fight the disease on that continent.
The book makes clear that Kennedy wasn’t claiming that the science of the disease itself is different among Africans than among Westerners. Rather, he was claiming, baselessly, that it is suspicious that the statistics on the demographics of people with AIDS in Africa — for example, the fact that a large percentage of Africans diagnosed with the disease are heterosexual women — are different from the statistics on the demographics of people with AIDS in Western countries.
Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia said Kennedy had compared the work of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “Nazi death camps.”
Kennedy said, “Senator, I don’t believe that I ever compared the CDC to Nazi death camps. I support the CDC.” When Warnock asked him whether he is retracting his statement, Kennedy said, “I’m not retracting it; I never said it.” Then, when Warnock read out a quote in which Kennedy used the words “Nazi death camps,” Kennedy said, “I was not comparing the CDC to Nazi death camps; I was comparing the injury rate to our children to other atrocities. And I wouldn’t compare, of course, the CDC to Nazi death camps.”
Facts First: Kennedy did compare the CDC to Nazi death camps. He did so in 2013 while baselessly linking vaccines to autism in children.
At a 2013 conference for the parents of children with autism, an audience member asked Kennedy a question about the CDC and autism (some of the question is inaudible in a low-quality recording of the event). In his response, Kennedy told a story about the CDC supposedly turning down a past offer from the “vaccine industry” to remove harmful material from vaccines.
Kennedy said, “I can’t tell you why they did it,” but that he has seen people get caught up in institutional “vortexes” in which they “go to extremes” and make decisions merely to “protect themselves.” He then said, “To me, this is like Nazi death camps.”
He then asked, “What happened to these kids?” citing the prevalence of autism in boys. Moments later, he returned to his comparison between the Nazis and the CDC’s supposed decisions on vaccines, saying, “I can’t tell you why somebody would do something like that. I can’t tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust.”
Pesticides and transgender children
Bennet asked Kennedy, “Did you say that exposure to pesticide causes children to become transgender?”
Kennedy responded, “No, I never said that.”
Facts First: Kennedy has not explicitly declared that “exposure to pesticides causes children to become transgender,” but he has promoted that unfounded conspiracy theory using slightly different language. As CNN’s KFILE reported in 2023, Kennedy has a history of touting the baseless idea that man-made chemicals in the environment, such as a herbicide called atrazine, could be making children transgender or gay.
To cite just one example, Kennedy spoke in a 2023 interview about how atrazine can “chemically castrate and forcibly feminize” frogs, and he said, without providing any evidence, that “if it’s doing that to frogs, there’s a lot of other evidence that it’s doing it to human beings as well.”
He also said in the interview: “I think a lot of the problems we see in kids, and particularly boys, it’s probably underappreciated of that, how much of that, is coming from chemical exposures, including a lot of the sexual dysphoria that we’re seeing.” Gender dysphoria (not “sexual dysphoria”), which is often experienced by transgender people, is the psychological distress some people feel when there is a difference between their sex assigned at birth and their gender identity.
A spokesperson for Kennedy’s unsuccessful 2024 presidential campaign told CNN in 2023: “Mr. Kennedy’s remarks are being mischaracterized. He is not claiming that endocrine disruptors are the only or main cause of gender dysphoria. He is merely suggesting that, given copious research on the effects on other vertebrates, this possibility deserves further research.”
Antidepressants and school shootings
Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota said, “In an interview in 2023 and again in 2024, you blamed school shootings on antidepressants. You said, and this is a quote, ‘There is no time in American history or human history that kids were going to shoot schools and shooting their classmates. It really started happening coterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and with other drugs.’ So do you believe, as you’ve said, that antidepressants cause school shootings? This is a — should be a simple question.”
Kennedy responded, “I don’t think anybody can answer that question; I didn’t answer that question. I said it should be studied along with other potential culprits,” mentioning “social media.”
Facts First: Kennedy has gone further than merely saying, “It should be studied along with other potential culprits.” Though he has indeed repeatedly called for more research into the possibility of a link between antidepressants and school shootings, including in the 2023 interview Smith was quoting here, he has also lent support to the unfounded notion that there is indeed a link.
For example, in a 2023 public conversation with tech billionaire Elon Musk, Kennedy made his usual call for additional research into “the role of psychiatric drugs in these events” — but then said moments later that there is “tremendous circumstantial evidence that those, like SSRIs and benzos and other drugs, are doing this.”
Smith said to Kennedy, “You’ve described Americans who take mental health medications as addicts who need to be sent to wellness farms to recover. Is that what you believe?”
Kennedy responded, “No, of course I didn’t say that anybody should be compelled to do anything.”
Smith said, “No, but you said they should be sent.”
Kennedy said, “I said it should be available to them. I didn’t say they should be sent.”
Verdict: Kennedy was correct here. He didn’t say Americans taking legal mental health medications “should be sent” to the “wellness farms” he had proposed creating.
Rather, in a 2024 interview, he suggested that such rural rehabilitation centers could be used to treat people convicted of drug crimes, then said that people seeking to get themselves off of legal medications, such as those used to treat depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), could voluntarily go to the centers “if they want to.”
The safety and effectiveness of vaccines
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said that although Kennedy now denies he is anti-vaccine, Kennedy said on a 2023 podcast that “no vaccine is safe and effective.”
Kennedy responded by asserting that Wyden’s claim has “been repeatedly debunked.”
Kennedy continued, “That statement that I made on the ‘Lex Fridman Podcast’ was a fragment of the statement. He asked me — and anybody who actually goes and looks at that podcast will see this — he asked me, ‘Are there vaccines that are safe and effective?’ And I said to him, ‘Some of the live virus vaccines are,’ and I said, ‘There are no vaccines that are safe and effective,’ and I was gonna continue, ‘For every person; every medicine has people who are sensitive to them, including vaccines.’ He interrupted me at that point.”
Kennedy added: “I’ve corrected it many times, including on national TV.”
Facts First: It’s not true that the claim that Kennedy said “no vaccine is safe and effective” has been “debunked.” As Kennedy acknowledged even in this answer, he said in the 2023 interview with Fridman, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective” — a comment in line with years of other comments in which Kennedy expressed anti-vaccine sentiment. It is true he preceded those comments to Fridman by saying, “I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing.”
It’s impossible to fact-check Kennedy’s Wednesday assertion that he would have made a more nuanced claim about vaccine safety and effectiveness had Fridman not “interrupted” him. However, a review of the video shows Kennedy had finished his sentence before Fridman interjected; Kennedy had continued with the words, “In fact …”
Also, Kennedy’s interview with Fridman proceeded for more than half an hour after this exchange; Kennedy never added the nuance he now says he wanted to. And in Kennedy’s comments to…
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