12 things to know about RFK Jr., Trump’s pick for health secretary

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 71, is John F. Kennedy’s nephew.

• He is a lawyer known for promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.

• Kennedy ran against Biden in the 2024 primaries, switched to an independent, and endorsed Trump.

A longtime anti-vaxxer, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed to “Make America Healthy Again” if he is confirmed as President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who has promoted public health conspiracy theories and anti-vaccine misinformation, dropped out of the presidential race in August and endorsed Trump.

Trump went on to add Kennedy, along with Tulsi Gabbard, to his transition team to help shape his administration. Upon winning the election, Trump nominated Kennedy to serve in his Cabinet.

Despite his views, Kennedy’s lineage as a member of one of America’s most prominent political families has helped boost his claims about vaccines, COVID-19, and other public health issues.

Here’s a closer look at Kennedy’s family history and controversial statements.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a member of one of America’s most famous political dynasties.

Kennedy is the son of Robert F. Kennedy, a US senator who was assassinated in 1968, and Ethel Kennedy, a human-rights advocate who received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2014. He is the third of the couple’s 11 children, according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

Kennedy is also former President John F. Kennedy’s nephew.

As an environmental lawyer, his work focused on clean water.

Kennedy attended Harvard and studied at the London School of Economics. He received his law degree from the University of Virginia Law School and earned a master’s in environmental law from Pace University School of Law.

He founded the environmental nonprofit Waterkeeper Alliance in 1999, according to the organization’s official website. His primary achievement was forcing the closure of the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant.

A longtime anti-vaxxer, Kennedy has promoted conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kennedy has long espoused anti-vaccine views, suggesting a flu vaccine may have caused his voice disorder (he has spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological disorder).

In 2005, he wrote an article published in Salon claiming that the mercury-based thimerosal compound in vaccines causes autism. After issuing multiple corrections, Salon eventually retracted the piece. Kennedy later founded the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, originally named the World Mercury Project, in 2011.

Kennedy rose to prominence during the pandemic for his opposition to COVID-19 vaccines.

At a press event held at a New York City restaurant in July 2023, Kennedy told the crowd that COVID-19 may have been “ethnically targeted” to attack certain groups of people.

“COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” he said. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential and impact,” he continued.

The Anti-Defamation League called Kennedy’s remarks “deeply offensive,” saying they fed into the “sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that we have seen evolve over the last three years.”

At Kennedy’s Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, he said some of his earlier comments had not been accurately represented.

“I’m not anti-vaccine,” Kennedy said during his opening statement.

He said he would not limit access to vaccines if he were to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

“I support the measles vaccine,” he said. “I support the polio vaccine. I will do nothing, as HHS secretary, to make it difficult or discourage people from taking it.”

When asked about his statements about COVID-19, Kennedy said he did not say it “deliberately targeted” some people, and that he had been referencing a published study in his remarks.

He has promoted a number of other public-health conspiracy theories, including that WiFi causes cancer.

In a June 2023 Twitter Spaces conversation hosted by Elon Musk, Kennedy likened Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now known as X, to patriots who died fighting the American Revolution. He also attributed increased numbers of mass shootings to pharmaceutical companies for marketing antidepressants.

Later that month, in an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Kennedy claimed that “WiFi radiation does all kind of bad things, including causing cancer.”

Kennedy also told CNN in July 2023 that environmental “endocrine disruptors” were causing “sexual confusion” and “gender confusion” in children, misconstruing studies that have shown these chemicals can cause some male frogs to become female and produce eggs.

A Kennedy campaign spokesperson told CNN that his remarks were “mischaracterized” and that he was “merely suggesting that, given copious research on the effects on other vertebrates, this possibility deserves further research.”

He has been married three times and has six children.

Kennedy married fellow University of Virginia Law School student Emily Black in 1982 and had two children, Robert Francis “Bobby” Kennedy III and Kathleen, known as “Kick.” They divorced in 1994.

That same year, he married interior designer Mary Richardson. The couple had four children: Conor, Kyra, Finn, and Aidan. Kennedy filed for divorce in 2010.

Kennedy is now married to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” actor Cheryl Hines, whom he wed in 2014.

On Wednesday, Hines appeared at Kennedy’s confirmation hearing for health secretary.

Kennedy initially announced his candidacy against former President Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries in a long shot campaign.

Kennedy announced his 2024 presidential campaign in April 2023 at Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel.

“My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country,” he said in his speech.

Kennedy acknowledged that some of his family members did not support his presidential bid but harbored “no ill will or any kind of disappointment” toward them.

One of Kennedy’s sisters, Kerry Kennedy, released a statement condemning his “deplorable and untruthful remarks” after he claimed COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to certain races.

In a statement to Business Insider’s Alia Shoaib, Kerry Kennedy also said she would not support his campaign.

“I love my brother Bobby, but I do not share or endorse his opinions on many issues, including the COVID pandemic, vaccinations, and the role of social media platforms in policing false information,” she said.

Former Rep. Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts also posted on X that his uncle’s comments were “hurtful and wrong.”

He later switched to running as an independent.

In October 2023, Kennedy announced that he was no longer running for president as a democrat.

“I must declare my own independence,” he said at a campaign event in Philadelphia. “Independence from the Democratic Party. And from all other political parties.”

In March 2024, he named California attorney Nicole Shanahan as his vice presidential running mate.

She founded the patent technology company ClearAccessIP in 2013 and the Bia-Echo Foundation in 2019 to fund programs dedicated to criminal justice reform, reproductive research, and addressing the climate crisis.

Shanahan had previously donated to Democratic candidates such as Pete Buttigieg and Marianne Williamson but told Newsweek she planned to leave the Democratic party.

“I want somebody who will look out for young people and not treat them as if they’re invisible,” Kennedy told Newsweek of his decision to choose Shanahan as his running mate. “She’s just 38 years old; she comes from technology and understands social media.”

Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race in August 2024 and endorsed Trump.

In August, Kennedy said he met with Trump and was “surprised to discover that we are aligned on many key issues.”

“In those meetings, he suggested that we join forces as a unity party,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy also said that he was making an effort to remove his name from ballots in 10 swing states.

“Our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in the battleground states, I would likely hand the election over to the Democrats, with whom I disagree on the most existential issues,” he said.

Upon receiving his endorsement, Trump added Kennedy to his transition team along with former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.

After winning the election, Trump nominated Kennedy as Secretary of Health and Human Services in his Cabinet.

“I am thrilled to announce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as The United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS),” Trump wrote on Truth Social in November. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health.”

Kennedy vowed to “make America healthy again” by proposing abolishing vaccine mandates, promoting alternative medicine, and lobbying against fluoride in drinking water.

The position of HHS Secretary requires Senate approval. Kennedy’s cousin, Caroline Kennedy, urged lawmakers not to confirm him in a letter she sent to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and posted on X.

“Bobby is addicted to attention and power,” Caroline Kennedy wrote of her cousin. “Bobby preys on the desperation of parents of sick children — vaccinating his own kids while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs.”

Kennedy once said a doctor speculated that a worm had eaten part of his brain.

During a 2012 deposition during his divorce from Mary Richardson Kennedy, Kennedy said that he’d seen neurologists in an effort to diagnose memory issues, The New York Times reported in May 2024.

“I have cognitive problems, clearly,” he said in the deposition. “I have short-term memory loss, and I have longer-term memory loss that affects me.”

Kennedy said that one doctor suggested that he had a worm in his brain based on a dark spot in a scan that could have been “caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.”

Kennedy told the Times the memory issues he experienced have since been resolved.

“He said he had recovered from the memory loss and fogginess and had no aftereffects from the parasite, which he said had not required treatment,” The Times reported.

The health issues were in contrast to how he had portrayed himself in his presidential run, depicting himself as healthier, mentally and physically, than his then-rivals Trump and Biden.

Kennedy has been involved in controversies involving dead animals.

In July, Kennedy denied a Vanity Fair report that he had once eaten a barbecued dog in Korea. The story included a photo of Kennedy holding a charred animal carcass. A veterinarian told the publication that it looked like the animal was a dog based on the number of ribs.

In a post on X, Kennedy said the image showed a goat in Patagonia, not a dog in Seoul.

In August, Kennedy revealed that he was behind the bear carcass that was found in Central Park in 2014. In a video on X, Kennedy said he’d planned to skin the animal after finding it dead on the side of the road but had to catch a flight, so he disposed of it in Central Park.

Kennedy explained he wanted to share the bear story ahead of a forthcoming New Yorker profile mentioning the incident. In the profile, Kennedy said he may have gotten his brain worm from the dead bear.

Also in August, a 2012 Town & Country interview with his daughter Kick resurfaced in which she said her father had decapitated a dead whale they’d found on a beach near the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port when she was 6. Kick said he strapped the whale head to the roof of their minivan before their drive back to New York, prompting “whale juice” to “pour into the windows of the car.”

In response to reporters’ questions about the incident, Kennedy said, “I’m not interested in feeding that feature of the mainstream media.”

Kick Kennedy did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.

In September, journalist Oliver Darcy reported that Kennedy had been in a relationship with New York magazine political reporter Olivia Nuzzi.

“Earlier this year, the nature of some communication between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal,” Nuzzi said in a statement to Darcy. “During that time, I did not directly report on the subject nor use them as a source. The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.”

Nuzzi was placed on leave from New York magazine, and editor in chief David Haskell hired a law firm to investigate the matter and conduct a review of her reporting.

A representative for Kennedy denied the relationship, telling The New York Times, “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.” However, The Daily Beast reported that Kennedy had bragged about the relationship, making it something of an open secret in some circles.

In October, Nuzzi accused her ex-fiancé, Politico reporter Ryan Lizza, of blackmail. In a court filing, Nuzzi said that Lizza “threatened to make public personal information about me to destroy my life, career, and reputation — a threat he has since carried out.”

Lizza denied the claims.

“I am saddened that my ex-fiancée would resort to making a series of false accusations against me as a way to divert attention from her own personal and professional failings,” he said in a statement. “I emphatically deny these allegations and I will defend myself against them vigorously and successfully.”

In November, Nuzzi withdrew her case against Lizza.

In a statement shared with Business Insider, Lizza said: “Olivia shamelessly used litigation with false and defamatory allegations as a public relations strategy.”

“When required to do so, she refused to defend her claims in court last month. She then sought to hide my response to her claims from the public by seeking to seal the proceedings that she began,” he wrote. “Now, on the eve of a hearing at which she knew her lies would be exposed, she has taken the only course available to her and withdrawn her fabricated claims.”

“Olivia lied to me for almost a year. She lied to her editors. She lied to her readers. She lied to her colleagues. She lied to reporters. And she lied to the judge in this case,” Lizza said. “I said I would defend myself against her lies vigorously and successfully and I am fully prepared to do so. But for now, I’m pleased this matter is closed.”

Nuzzi’s attorney, Ari Wilkenfeld, previously told BI: “Ms. Nuzzi has no interest in fighting a public relations battle. For insight into her decision, you can refer to the statements in her motion.”

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