UMAPRESS.com / MEGA
The operative name in Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “Kennedy.”
At his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, President Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services fielded countless questions about the countless views he’s articulated and actions he’s taken that make him uniquely unsuited for his position.
And, as you might expect of any Kennedy, his answers were full of obfuscations, half-truths, and outright lies.
In his opening statement, Kennedy tried to sidestep the single biggest cloud hanging over his nomination.
“I believe that vaccines play a critical role in health care,” he proclaimed.
“All of my kids are vaccinated, I’ve written many books on vaccines, my first book in 2014, the first line of it is ‘I am not anti-vaccine’ and the last line is ‘I am not anti-vaccine.’”
If only saying it made it so.
Kennedy has a decades-long record that reveals him to be exactly what he says he’s not.
While he touted his kids’ vaccination status at his hearing, he has previously said he would “do anything” and “pay anything” to go back in time and change that fact.
In 2021, he said that “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get them vaccinated.’”
And that’s to say nothing of him being the founder and former chairman of an anti-vaccine group going by the Orwellian name “Children’s Health Defense,” which is currently promoting afilm called “Vaxxed III: Authorized to Kill.”
In another notable moment, Kennedy was quizzed about his role in exacerbating a measles outbreak in Samoa that claimed the lives of more than 80 people – most of them young children – in 2019.
Kennedy traveled to the island nation in June of that year at the invitation of another anti-vaccine activist following the deaths of two babies improperly administered vaccines.
On Wednesday, Kennedy insisted his visit had “nothing to do with vaccines” and that he “never gave any public statement about vaccines.”
The Samoan Ministry of Health sees it differently.
“It is well documented that RFK Jr.’s visit to Samoa in 2019 coincided with increased anti-vaccine sentiment, particularly among certain groups,” it said in astatement.
Moreover, in the aftermath of the outbreak, Kennedy sought to exploit the tragedy to push the Samoan Government toward anti-vaccine policies.
“It is critical that the Samoan Health Ministry determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine,” wrote Kennedy in a letter to the prime minister.
There he was again, just asking questions.
Kennedy’s attempts to explain away his own words – nay, his life’s work – fell short in numerous other instances.
Asked about his suggestion that Covid-19 may have been genetically engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, Kennedy insisted that he was only quoting an NIH study.
The truth? That he said that the virus “is targeted to attack caucasians and black people,” while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese “are most immune.”
As to whether it had been engineered to do so, well, Kennedy thought that was an open question.
“We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not,” he added.
Asked about a series of overwrought, irresponsible comparisons he’s drawn while promoting his dangerous lies, he denied having ever made them.
Roll the tape, however, and you’ll find that he’s said that the CDC’s decision not to deem autism an epidemic was “like Nazi death camps,” and analogized the agency’s priorities to those of fascist regimes and the Catholic Church’s “pedophile scandal.”
And then there’s his cynical abortion flip-flop, which was addressed by senators of both parties on Wednesday.
“I agree with him [President Trump] that we cannot be a moral nation if we have 1.2 million abortions a year,” declared Kennedy at his hearing.
If that’s the case, why did he express support for full-term elective abortions on the campaign trail less than a year ago?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is many things that his famous family resents: A kook, an embarrassment, and, worst of all, in league with the Republican Party.
But his most ignoble trait – the one on full display on Wednesday – is one that he shares with the rest of his clan: He’s a power hungry charlatan willing to say anything to take the next step up the ladder.