By all accounts Robert F Kennedy Jr is an odd duck. He is known for being a flamboyant celebrity with an eye for the spotlight which is very much in the Kennedy family tradition. But, unlike his well-known predecessors, he has strayed from the Democratic fold to wander aimlessly in the political wilderness looking for a home. He has a loose tongue and a weakness for a broad range of racist, homophobic and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.
The 70-year-old has variously claimed that vaccines are connected to childhood autism, that the Covid-19 jab is the ‘deadliest vaccine ever made’, and that exposure to chemicals in the water are responsible for ‘gender confusion’. It doesn’t stop there. RFK Jr, as he’s commonly called, also believes HIV/AIDS was the result of the overuse of poppers, a recreational drug, and mused that Covid was manufactured to be ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. In short he believes and promotes a wide range of medical misinformation under the rubric of ‘health freedom’ – a Kool-Aid parts of the US have been eager to drink. This makes him a natural to head up Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services.
