The vaccine-hating, roadkill-eating zealot utterly changing America
Welcome to Power Players, The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers and experts take an in-depth look at the key figures in American politics as the US reshapes itself and the world.
• The most powerful woman in the world you’ve never heard of
• The ‘swamp creature’ eclipsing JD Vance in the race to succeed Trump
• The greatest hope of the Trump resistance is a 34-year-old immigrant
• The 28-year-old Trump attack dog ripping up the Washington playbook
• The ‘pro-white nationalist’ whose power over Trump grows every day
• Trump’s military cheerleader who is learning about war the hard way
• The right-wing judge who put Trump above the law
It’s common to refer to the Kennedys as American political royalty. The analogy works as far as it goes. The Kennedys in many ways symbolise the aspirations of this nation: a blue-collar family that overcame prejudice against both the Irish and against Roman Catholics to attain the loftiest heights of our society.
But as with many royals in the modern era, America’s relationship with the clan is best described as “love-hate.” The glamour and triumphs hide tragedies, scandals and heartbreaks that seemingly follow this family like a shadow. The “Kennedy curse” weighs heavily upon every Kennedy.
So it is with Robert Francis Kennedy Jr, now America’s 26th Secretary of Health and Human Services. He was six years old when his uncle was elected president and his father became JFK’s attorney general. He was just shy of his 10th birthday when that uncle was felled by an assassin’s bullet on national television. His father, later elected senator from New York, seemed on his way to claiming the presidency in his own right when he, too, was killed by an assassin. RFK Jr was just 14 years old.
RFK seemed primed to lead the third generation of Kennedys into public service, beginning his legal career in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. In 1983, however, he was arrested for possession of heroin and sentenced to probation with community service. For Kennedy, however, it became, improbably, a turning point. To fulfill his community service requirements, Kennedy volunteered with environmental non-profits, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and Riverkeeper. Kennedy found a new path.
Although he’s viewed with some scepticism by much of America today (we shall turn to his bizarre behavior later), for roughly two decades, RFK Jr was truly one of America’s most tenacious environmental advocates. He became a bestselling author on environmental topics and a professor of environmental law at Pace University. To be 100 per cent clear: his courtroom victories — against factory farms, coal companies and industrial polluters — were genuine and consequential. Many predicted he would one day run for Senate or governor of New York.
Instead, his work on mercury as an environmental toxin sent Kennedy climbing deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of environmental conspiracy. In the mid-2000s, he began publicly questioning the safety of childhood vaccines, promoting a debunked theory that linked the preservative thimerosal in vaccines to autism. He founded the Children’s Health Defense organisation, which became a major platform for anti-vaccine messaging, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic.
His personal life was no less surreal. In 2010, he began to experience memory loss and mental fogginess; a brain scan revealed a dark spot. After an initial cancer scare, it turned out that he had a dead parasitic worm in his brain. Kennedy bragged he could “eat 5 more brain worms” and still beat president Trump and president Biden in a debate, while his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, chimed in that the worm had only eaten “a little bit” of his brain.
In 2014, Kennedy was on his way to falcon-hunt when he came across a bear cub that had been killed by a car. He pulled over, loaded the carcass into the back of his van, and planned to skin it and freeze the meat before realising he had no means of transporting it on a plane ride home and instead dumped it in Central Park. Kennedy was entirely unapologetic. “I’ve been picking up roadkill my whole life,” he told reporters. “I have a freezer full of it.” He apparently uses it to feed his pet ravens, which he keeps as part of his falconry hobby.
The stories could fill an entire edition of a newspaper. That time he allegedly chopped off a whale head on vacation and strapped it to the hood of the family car for the ride home. That time he had to deny posing with a barbecued dog carcass (he claimed it was a goat). The time he said he was attacked by Indigenous people in Peru, warding them off with dynamite. That time his cousin claimed he put chicks and mice into a blender to feed his hawks. Those times he claimed that Wi-Fi caused cancer, or that antidepressants caused school shootings, or that 5G networks are used for mass surveillance, or that AIDS is not caused by HIV. That time he allegedly had an e-affair with the reporter covering his campaign, though he denied it.
Despite this, in April 2023, he launched a campaign seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. In October, he announced that he would run as an Independent. He drew enormous crowds, raised substantial money and polled in double digits for much of the race. The campaign worried Democratic insiders enough that they launched a partly successful legal campaign to keep him off the ballot in crucial states.
It was a move that would have enormous consequences. Having decided that the courts were ineffective in effectuating change, having watched Democratic administrations compromise with corporations and having watched his family’s party work to keep him off the ballot, RFK made the decision to endorse Donald Trump. For a Kennedy to back a Republican president — and one whose style and politics seemed antithetical to everything his family stood for — was a jarring spectacle. But Kennedy framed it through his “Maha” agenda: Make America Healthy Again. He argued that Trump offered the best platform to pursue his goals of reforming food systems, reducing pharmaceutical industry influence and investigating chronic disease.
It paid off. Kennedy was one of Trump’s most controversial appointments, along with other nominees like Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth. But he made it, narrowly, through Senate confirmation. His tenure as Health Secretary has been no less controversial, with his department increasingly endorsing views on the fringe of the scientific community.
In his confirmation hearings, Kennedy told U.S. senators he would not cut funding for vaccine research or change our official vaccine recommendations. He did both. He assured the committee repeatedly that he supported the childhood vaccine schedule and that all his own children were vaccinated. Within months, those commitments had been abandoned. Anti-vaccine conspiracies became so ingrained in the Kennedy HHS (US Department of Health and Human Services) that the CDC stopped publishing a report showing that Covid shots cut the likelihood of hospital visits. He banned the use of thimerosal in vaccines.
Kennedy fired or forced out several leaders at HHS, among them directors at the National Institutes of Health, the FDA’s former vaccine chief and a director of the CDC whom he had hired less than a month earlier. The firing of the FDA’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, was particularly striking. Marks issued a blistering statement on his way out, saying: “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” Kennedy’s proposed HHS budget for fiscal year 2026 included $93.8bn – a 26.2 per cent reduction from the previous year – drawing bipartisan alarm on Capitol Hill. Republicans and Democrats alike questioned the deep staffing cuts, research funding freezes and drastic policy changes when he testified before Congress.
The FDA withdrew warnings of potential harm from consuming raw milk and chlorine dioxide. Kennedy directed the CDC to launch a new study re-examining the long-debunked link between vaccines and autism, a move that alarmed the medical community given that the question has been studied exhaustively and definitively answered.
It wasn’t all bad. He’s been genuinely praised for overhauling the department’s dietary guidelines, which had sat unchanged for decades. He instead emphasised the importance of protein, dairy and healthy fats. That guidance now squarely criticises ultra-processed food, and advises Americans to avoid sweeteners. Alcohol is now disfavoured, whereas previous guidance had treated it as benign and emphasised moderation.
By early 2026, his political standing had begun to slip even within the administration that appointed him. Kennedy, once polling as Trump’s most popular Cabinet Secretary, saw his broader popularity decline. The White House moved in February 2026 to install four senior officials with experience in drug pricing, and administration officials signalled mounting concern that Kennedy’s controversial vaccine actions were alienating average voters ahead of the midterm elections.
It’s too early to say, then, what RFK’s legacy will be. We are dealing with President Trump, so he could be fired before this is published. At the same time, he’s a larger-than-life figure, and in American politics those figures tend to become symbols that the political tribes fight over long-term. Concerns about vaccine efficacy and the effects of technology and processed foods, for better or for worse, are a genuine part of the conversation in American culture. The notion that we might be poisoning ourselves isn’t just fringe stuff.
RFK Jr doesn’t seem to have affected Trump much personally (one of the funniest pictures in modern time is of a visibly pained Health Secretary posing with a burger at lunch with our McDonald’s-loving chief executive).
Even if he doesn’t end up with a long-term impact on specific policies, the shift at HHS from fighting viruses and bacteria to fighting perceived root causes of our health problems seems likely to endure.
His tenure has been controversial, but the ultra-processed food language alone is arguably the most significant shift in federal nutrition policy in a generation, and it came from a man who allegedly chainsaw-decapitated a beached whale for fun.
