In a week of chaos at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has continued to make questionable medical and health claims – and has been slammed for them by experts and lawmakers alike.
In recent days, Kennedy has been facing increasing calls for his resignation following the Trump administration’s firing of the CDC director, Susan Monarez, which in turn prompted four other top officials to quit the agency. The chaos across US health agencies also comes as Kennedy released a slew of controversial and contradictory rules surrounding Covid-19 vaccines.
On top of all this turmoil, Kennedy has also met with significant backlash for a handful of outlandish remarks and revelations, which have only fueled the controversy surrounding his leadership at the health department.
After the deadly mass school shooting in Minneapolis this week where two children were killed and 17 others injured, Kennedy suggested that psychiatric drugs may be contributing to the rise in gun violence across the country.
During an appearance on Fox & Friends, the host Brian Kilmeade asked Kennedy if the health department was investigating whether medications used to treat gender dysphoria might be linked to school shootings.
According to court documents reviewed by the Guardian, the 23-year-old shooter, Robin Westman, had changed their birth name from Robert to Robin because they identified as a woman.
In response to Kilmeade’s question, Kennedy, without acknowledging the prevalence and easy accessibility of firearms across the US – said that his department was “launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence”.
Kennedy’s comments triggered criticism from the Minnesota senator Tina Smith, who took to X and wrote: “I dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do. Just shut up. Stop peddling bullshit. You should be fired.”
This week, Kennedy also suggested that he could identify “mitochondrial challenges” in children at airports just by looking at them.
Speaking at an event in Texas alongside the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, Kennedy claimed: “I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation. You can tell from their faces, from their body movements, and from their lack of social connection. And I know that that’s not how our children are supposed to look.”
In response, Ashish Jha, former White House Covid-19 response coordinator under the Biden administration, said: “I’m sorry but what?”
“This is wacky, flat-earth, voodoo stuff, people. This is not normal,” Jha added on X.
Then, in a revelation on Thursday, Demetre Daskalakis – who recently resigned as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases in protest of Monarez’s firing – revealed that Kennedy had never been briefed by CDC experts before making major public health decisions.
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Speaking to CNN, Daskalakis said: “I think that another important thing to ask the secretary is, has he been briefed by a CDC expert on anything, specifically measles, Covid-19, flu? I think that people should ask him that in that hearing,” referring to Kennedy’s upcoming hearing before the Senate finance committee.
Upon being asked what Kennedy’s answer would be, Daskalakis said: “The answer is ‘no’. No one from my center has ever briefed him on any of those topics … He’s getting information from somewhere, but that information is not coming from CDC experts.”
In a separate statement to the Daily Beast, Daskalakis said: “It’s not just that he hasn’t asked us. I asked for us to be able to do briefings, and I was told by his office of the secretary officials, some of whom are now fired, that they would be happy to have us do briefings, that they would reach out to be able to set them up. They’ve never done so.”
Since he assumed leadership over the health department, Kennedy – a longtime anti-vaccine advocate – has fired health agency workers and entertained conspiracy theories. Last week, more than 750 current and former employees at US health agencies signed a letter in which they criticized Kennedy as an “existential threat to public health”.
The health agency workers went on to accuse Kennedy of being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information”.
The letter comes after a deadly shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta earlier this month, when a 30-year-old gunman fired more than 180 rounds into the buildings, killing a police officer before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to the gunman’s father, the shooter had been struggling with mental health issues and was influenced by misinformation that led him to believe the Covid-19 vaccine was making him sick.
