RFK Jr. is not a serious person. Don't take him seriously.

Well, president-elect Trump has announced that he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), putting him in charge of most of the nation's public health and medical research.

I can't say strongly enough how unqualified RFK Jr. is for this job. He isn't qualified to come anywhere within a thousand miles of any medical or science-related issue, much less to be in charge of health policy for the whole country. Virtually everything RFK says about science is wrong–actually, it's worse than that, because he speaks with such absolutely certainty, despite being wrong, that he convinces people to take actions that end up hurting themselves. To a normal person, someone not accustomed to lying so boldly, these claims can be convincing.

Since Trump's announcement of the nomination, I've been seeing columns in major media outlets (I'm looking at you, New York Times and Washington Post) saying things like "hey, some of RFK's ideas aren't entirely wrong." 

Just. Stop. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Don't take RFK Jr., or his nomination, seriously.

I don't want to try to list all of RFK's mistaken views, which would require a book-length column, but here are a few. Just last year he said, on the Lix Fridman podcast, that "there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective," and that the polio vaccine did more harm than good. (Both of those statements are wildly wrong.) In 2005, he wrote a long essay for Rolling Stone and Salon which claimed that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism (they don't), and that the government knew about it and had been covering it up:

“The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed.” [quote from RFK Jr.]

The article was full of dramatic claims like this one. The only problem was, all of them were false. Rolling Stone and Salon eventually retracted the article and deleted it from their websites. 

In 2019, Kennedy visited the island nation of Samoa to spread his anti-vaccine message, sponsored in part by his anti-vaccine organization, Children's Health Defense. (The name is highly misleading.) Vaccination rates plummeted, and just a few months later a tragic measles outbreak began, causing 83 deaths and 1,867 hospitalizations. Kennedy published an article afterwards calling it a "mild measles outbreak," and in the same article claims (falsely) that vaccines themselves, rather than measles, caused the deaths.

RFK Jr. is someone who never admits he was wrong, even (or especially) when his mistakes cause the deaths of innocent children. Instead, his conspiracy-addled brain blames someone else.

And that's only a tiny sample of RFK's misinformation. He also loves raw milk, which I wrote about in 2014 and again in 2023. Raw milk sometimes contains nasty bacteria and viruses, but fortunately Louis Pasteur solved this problem in the 1860s, when he invented what we now call pasteurization. As I pointed out in my 2023 piece, bacteria just love raw milk. And you know what else is in raw milk but not pasteurized milk? Cow poop. Just don't tell this to RFK Jr. 

By writing columns saying "RFK Jr. has some good ideas" (which I won't link to, since that's just feeding the beast), media organizations are falling into a trap: they're taking RFK seriously. I'd like to ask these journalists: if Trump nominated a first-grader instead, would you write similar stories? Maybe something like "hey, this nominee has some good ideas about nutrition!" 

Don't do it. This nomination deserves ridicule and scorn, nothing more.

I've written multiple columns (both on this site and at Forbes, my former site) warning about RFK Jr. and his dangerous anti-vaccine craziness, starting with this 2014 piece where I called him out for his efforts to lobby Congress against vaccines. His primary obsession then–and he still has this obsession–was the mistaken notion that thimerosal, a harmless preservative that isn't even used in vaccines today, causes autism. This claim has been thoroughly debunked in multiple studies. 

In 2017, I wrote about "Trump's lovefest with anti-vaxxer RFK Jr." – a lovefest that apparently still continues, seven years later. That column was about Trump's promise to put RFK in charge of a commission on vaccines. Fortunately, that vaccine commission never happened, but today we face a much more dangerous threat, if RFK Jr. is confirmed as Secretary of HHS.

I've also pointed out that Kennedy is one of the "Disinformation Dozen," a group of twelve people who, as reported by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, was responsible for 65% of all the anti-vaccine disinformation online. And earlier this year I asked how he could possibly be so arrogant as to think he's qualified to be President, given that his only claims to fame are his name, which he inherited, and his anti-vaccine notoriety.

My problem with RFK Jr. is not just that he is wrong about vaccines, although that is the most immediate threat to public health. But he's also an idealogue, someone who holds onto his mistaken ideas despite mountains of contradictory evidence, and someone who simply makes up things to "prove" his points. 

And in that quote from him above, where he uses the phrase "institutional arrogance," highlights another danger: RFK Jr. is the one who is arrogant. He believes that he can substitute his own unsubstantiated beliefs for the knowledge of genuine experts, and why? Because he's a Kennedy, a man who has lived a life of great privilege, getting into Harvard as a "legacy" despite being expelled from prep school over his drug use, all the while pretending to be fighting against the system. He is too arrogant to listen to others, or to admit his mistakes.  

So no, I cannot take this nomination seriously. Children will die if RFK Jr. is put in charge of HHS. There are tens of thousands of people who are far, far more qualified than Kennedy, and I hope the Senate will refuse to confirm him. I'm not optimistic, but I hope a few Senators will look at the man's record and treat him with the scorn he deserves.

Let the 2010s be the end of the post-truth era

The 2010s are over, and the double-20s are about to begin. One phrase that I'd like to never hear again is "post-truth era," an idea that has gained prominence during the past decade, especially the last few years.

One dominant theme of post-truthery is that every person has a right to his/her own interpretation of the facts, and that these alternative interpretations–or "alternative facts," as Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway famously called them–deserve to be taken seriously. They don't.

And yet, like most of the pseudoscience that I've been writing about for years now, we have to continue calling out nonsense for what it is, because some of it is harmful, and even deadly. Politics is a never-ending font of post-truthery (or truthiness, as Stephen Colbert defined it in 2005), but here I'm concerned about science. Today I'll highlight three anti-truth campaigns that have caused great harm over the past decades, in the hope that they will soon fade away.

Among serious scientists, truth is not being questioned. Indeed, the essence of science is the search for objective truth. Sometimes, though, a scientific discovery threatens to undermine the power or profits of an influential industry, and that's when industry resorts to denialism (which is essentially the same thing as post-truthiness).

Perhaps the most well-documented example of organized science denialism dates back to the 1950s, when accumulating evidence made it clear that smoking causes cancer. The tobacco industry didn't want to admit this, even though their own internal research supported it, because it meant that their main product was killing their customers, which in turn was terrible news for their business. In response,

"the tobacco companies helped manufacture the smoking controversy by funding scientific research that was intended to obfuscate and prolong the debate about smoking and health." (Cummings et al. 2007).

Eventually, after decades of lawsuits and literally millions of smoking-related deaths, the industry was forced to admit the truth and pay out billions of dollars in settlements in the U.S. Nonetheless, many people still smoke, and even as recently as 2016, the largest tobacco company in the U.S., Philip Morris, was still trying to deny the science about cigarettes.

My second example is more recent, and potentially even more harmful to the human species. You might have already guessed it: I'm talking about climate change denialism. For several decades, the evidence has been building that the planet is getting warmer. A series of reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned, in increasingly confident terms, that humans were the primary cause of recent warming, mostly due to our use of fossil fuels and the carbon they emit into the atmosphere.

The current IPCC report states unequivocally that humans have already caused 1° C of warming, and that the warming will increase rapidly over the next several decades.

Scientifically, these facts are not in dispute. The world is already experiencing more severe storms, unprecedented floods and droughts, and die-offs due to warming oceans (such as the massive and tragic die-off of coral in Great Barrier Reef).

However, the fossil fuel industry sees global warming as a threat to their profits. Rather than invest in new, cleaner forms of energy, large companies such as Exxon-Mobil and billionaire coal magnates such as the Koch brothers have poured countless millions of dollars into disinformation campaigns to cast doubt on the science of climate change. Prominent among these efforts is The Heartland Institute, a fossil-fuel-funded organization whose main mission is to cast doubt on the science of climate change. (Heartland has also worked to cast doubt on the link between smoking and cancer.)

Climate change denialists learned from the tobacco companies that it was possible to delay government action by decades, simply by casting doubt on the science. Unfortunately, their campaigns have been working. For years, many U.S. politicians denied that the planet was getting warmer. As that argument has become increasingly harder to make with a straight face, they've changed their strategy, and now they might admit that the planet is heating up, but deny that human activities are responsible. They're still wrong.

The goal of this denialism is, simply put, to protect the profits of fossil fuel industries. However, truth doesn't care if you believe it or not. The world is getting hotter. Australia just had its four hottest days in recorded history. The unprecedented heat wave has led to hundreds of fires through much of the country, threatening every major city on the continent. There's no reason to think this won't keep happening.

Climate change denialists are only fooling themselves–after being duped by oil and coal companies.

My third and final example is one that has frustrated me for 15 years now, and it's one that just won't go away: the anti-vaccination movement. This is one of the most frustrating examples of post-truth wrongheadedness, in part it seems so unnecessary, and because so many children have been harmed as a result.

First, let's be clear about the facts: vaccines are one of the greatest boons to human health in the history of science and medicine. People used to die by the millions from smallpox, polio, and a dozen other infections that are now almost completely preventable by vaccines.

Smallpox was 100% eliminated from the planet in 1980, in one of humankind's greatest public health triumphs. Polio has now been eradicated from nearly all countries, and a campaign that started in 1988 has now reduced polio to just a few countries and fewer than 100 cases worldwide. Both of these successes are due to vaccines.

Many other diseases, including measles, chicken pox, and bacterial meningitis, have been reduced so dramatically by vaccines that physicians in the U.S. and Europe almost never see a case. This graph shows the dramatic effect of the measles vaccine, which was introduced in the U.S. in the early 1960s:

Measles cases in the United States by year, 1954-2008. Source: CDC.

The graph shows the number of reported cases, but actual cases were much higher, likely around 4 million cases per year by one estimate. These are the facts.

So what happened? The modern anti-vax movement, led by a small number of extremely vocal, extremely self-confident individuals, began in 1998 with the publication of a fraudulent study (later retracted when the fraud was uncovered) claiming that vaccines caused autism. The study was led by former physician Andrew Wakefield, who later lost his medical license because of his fraud, which included misleading his co-authors and mistreating patients.

Nonetheless, this study was picked up and amplified by several celebrities with large followings, including former Playboy model and MTV host Jenny McCarthy and political activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the nephew of former US President John Kennedy. RFK Jr.

Anti-vax activism is all over the web today, despite many efforts to quash it. Countless claims of "my child got sick after his vaccine jab" are presented as proof that vaccines cause harm, and under post-truthism, we're supposed to take such claims seriously.

These stories can be especially difficult to respond to, because many parents are dealing with children who have genuine health problems–including autism–and the parents often truly believe what they are saying. Thus it won't do to tell them to be quiet and go away: their children really do need medical care. They're simply wrong in believing that vaccines have anything to do with their childrens' problems. Their beliefs are amplified by Facebook groups and websites whose sole purpose is to echo and amplify the mistaken claims of anti-vaxxers.

Even though there was never any good evidence that vaccines cause autism, scientists have conducted dozens of studies involving literally millions of children to answer precisely that question, and the evidence is very, very clear: vaccines do not cause autism, nor do they cause any other systematic neurological or behavioral problems. Vaccines do prevent diseases, though, and unvaccinated children can and will get sick. Recent experience has also given us, tragically, many examples of children who died from entirely preventable infections, because their parents didn't vaccinate them. These tragedies didn't have to happen.

Every era is the age of truth. The idea that we're in a "post-truth era," despite being repeated thousands of times in articles, essays, and op-eds over the past decade, is a commentary on people's ability to fool themselves, not on the state of the world. Truth describes the world as it is, and those who choose to deny it might win a short-term argument, but in the long term, they will always lose.

Finally, on a more positive note, I'm somewhat heartened by efforts to educate college students on how to recognize and counter bogus ideas, such as the University of Washington course, Calling Bullshit, created by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West. (Yes, that really is its title.) As the professors wrote,

"The world is awash in bullshit.... We're sick of it. It's time to do something, and as educators, one constructive thing we know how to do is to teach people." 

If you're interested, they've made the lectures available as free videos on YouTube.

Labelling an era as post-anything has always, to me, suggested a lack of substance, as if the era is defined only by what came before it. The use of "post-" also ignores that fact that the next era will need a name too. Should we expect "post-post-truth" to come next, and what would that look like? Let's hope that the 2020s will give us a return to simple respect for truth. The future of civilization might very well depend on it.