RFK Jr. Asked for “One Piece of Misinformation” He’s Ever Said. Here are 21.

(Just from the last week)

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1. LIE: “I’m not anti-vax, I’m pro-science” (April 17, before the House Education and Workforce Committee)

TRUTH: For years, RFK Jr. has spread anti-vaccine messaging. In 2023 on the Lex Friedman podcast, he said “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.” When questioned about polio, he said he couldn’t answer if the vaccine caused more deaths than it averted. But the polio vaccine is highly effective and safe. It has been eliminated in the US, and the vaccine has prevented an estimated 20 million cases of paralysis in children since 1988.

A 2019 study found that the majority of the Facebook ads spreading vaccine misinformation were coming from just two anti-vaccine groups. One of them was Children’s Health Defense, which at the time was founded and led by RFK Jr.

And in just the past year, as HHS secretary, RFK Jr. has made many anti-vax, anti-science moves, including:

1. Ended $500 million for mRNA vaccines

2. Removed 8,000+ public-facing federal health and science webpages, including datasets on youth risk behavior, reproductive health, and environmental hazards

3. Changed the pediatric vaccine schedule

4. Fired all ACIP members and replaced them with anti-vaxxers

5. Cut HIV vaccine research

6. Canceled a contract with Moderna to study bird flu vaccine

Saying “I’m not anti-vax, I’m pro-science” is a well-documented rhetorical strategy that’s been used in anti-vaccine movements for years to broaden appeal and avoid immediate dismissal. It’s used to make anti-vaccine positions sound credible and aligned with scientific values, while continuing to erode trust in the actual scientific consensus. And it provides cover. When called out, they can default to “I’m just asking questions” or “I never said don’t vaccinate,” despite a clear pattern of messaging that does exactly that.

2. LIE: “COVID is gone” (April 22, before the HELP Committee)

TRUTH: COVID is not gone. The pandemic is over, but SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, is here to stay. It is now an endemic virus, which means it will continue to circulate in our population, at times seasonally, but there’s no chance of eradication. Not only is the claim false, it’s also cruel, especially when you look at the data. COVID continues to sicken, disable, and kill people all over the world. In 2025, COVID resulted in 450,000 hospitalizations and up to 53,000 deaths in the US alone.

3. LIE: “The hepatitis B vaccine was tested for 4 days…there was no placebo in that, so we don’t know the risk factor of that” (April 21, before the Senate Committee on Appropriations)

TRUTH: This is a common anti-vaccine claim based on the misinterpretation of the vaccine insert information. Both Engerix-B and Recombivax HB were studied as 3-dose vaccines given over a 6-month period, with participants followed for 9–18 months. The 4–5 day window referenced in inserts is specifically for tracking acute adverse events, not the full duration of safety monitoring.

We also have decades of research showing the hepatitis B vaccine is safe and effective, including studies with placebo groups.

And we know the impacts of the hepatitis vaccine:

1. A dramatic reduction in infant hepatitis B following the universal birth dose, one of public health’s major successes

2. Prevention of serious illness and childhood deaths

4. LIE: “It [measles outbreak] has nothing to do with me” (April 22, before the Finance Committee)

TRUTH: As much as RFK Jr. wants to claim this outbreak began before his tenure as HHS Secretary, that ignores a much bigger reality. He has spent nearly two decades as one of the most visible figures in the anti-vaccine movement, repeatedly spreading misinformation about the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine.

The data show that over 4,000 measles cases have been confirmed since his confirmation. Most of those cases are unvaccinated individuals who believed his many lies about the MMR vaccine, such as:

1. The MMR vaccine leads to deaths every year–it doesn’t

2. The MMR vaccine causes “all the illnesses” of the disease–it doesn’t

3. The MMR vaccine “wanes about 4.5%” per year–it doesn’t

4. The MMR vaccine “does not appear to provide maternal immunity”-- if given before pregnancy–it does

5. LIE: “mRNA vaccines have limited efficacy against respiratory viruses” “I terminated the COVID vaccine because it didn’t make any sense” (April 22, before the HELP and Finance Committees)

TRUTH: Kennedy has repeatedly made the false claim that mRNA vaccines are not effective against respiratory viruses, but 6 years of vaccine effectiveness data prove him wrong. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines prevented millions of deaths.

In general, vaccines are designed to prevent severe illness, hospitalization, and death–the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 continue to do this very well. Vaccines that do not completely prevent infection are not “ineffective”--it’s important to remember we have these tools for harm reduction, not harm elimination. When we have high enough vaccination rates in populations, we can also see a reduction in infections and transmission.

Cutting funding for mRNA vaccines for respiratory viruses will set the US back, especially when it comes to the seasonal burden of viruses like flu and COVID-19 that mutate rapidly.

6. LIE: “Russ Vought doesn’t want to cut NIH programs” (April 21, before the House Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee)

TRUTH: Russel Vought was one of the key authors of Project 2025 where he created a blueprint to cut government programs and consolidate control under the President. He is an outspoken proponent of massive firings of career civil servants. At a conservative event talking about our federal employees, he said “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

Now he is in charge of the federal budget and between Vought and DOGE, the Trump administration has cut billions of dollars in NIH funding. Vought also withheld NIH spending for months into the fiscal year, leading to significantly less grants awarded this year at this point compared to previous years.

7. LIE: “We have done more for maternal health than any administration in our history” (April 17, before the House Committee on Education & Workforce)

TRUTH: The FY 2027 proposed budget does the opposite. It eliminates programs like Healthy Start and cuts the CDC’s safe motherhood and infant health portfolio, which supports Maternal Mortality Review Committees, Perinatal Quality Collaboratives, and the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. It also eliminates the Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health program at Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

At the same time, NIH grants focused on maternal health are being canceled, including research specifically on Black maternal health, despite the fact that Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white or Hispanic women, according to the CDC.

You cannot claim to prioritize maternal health while dismantling the very programs and research infrastructure designed to improve it.

8. LIE: “I never said that”…“I have no memory of saying anything like that” [on his comments about Re-parenting Black children] (April 16, before the Ways and Means Committee, and April 22, before the HELP committee)

TRUTH: In 2024, RFK Jr. appeared on the High Level Conversations podcast and said: “Psychiatric drugs, which every Black kid is now just standard put on—Adderall, SSRIs, benzos—which are known to induce violence… those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented; to live in a community where there’ll be no cell phones, no screens, you’ll actually have to talk to people.”

And this is part of a pattern with this man. RFK Jr. has a documented history of making race-based claims about health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he repeatedly promoted the false idea that the virus was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jewish and Chinese populations while specifically targeting Black and white individuals. He has also claimed that Black people have “better” immune systems than white people and, for that reason, should follow different vaccine schedules, along with other race-based pseudoscientific claims.

9. LIE: The rate of autism is increasing “Autism rates have gone from 1 in 10,000 in 1970 to 1 in every 31 today” (April 22, before the HELP Committee)

TRUTH: The rate of autism is not increasing, the diagnoses are–and that’s because we now have better tools and diagnostics to identify cases that went undetected for years, sometimes decades. RFK Jr. has repeatedly claimed that autism rates are increasing, and mischaracterized the prevalence as an “epidemic.” First, autism is not a disease, therefore it cannot be an epidemic. Second, we are better at identifying autism spectrum disorder. Many people who would today be diagnosed as autistic would have probably received insufficient and incorrect diagnoses such as “intellectual disability.” In fact, a correlated decline in diagnoses of “intellectual disability” or “learning disability” suggests that there is a bit of accurate substitution happening, rather than a true increase.

10. LIE: “The US had the highest death of any country on earth” (April 22, before the HELP Committee)

TRUTH: This lie is especially telling. In September 2025, during another congressional hearing, RFK Jr. claimed that no one actually knows how many Americans died from COVID-19 because of “data chaos” and “perverse incentives.”

So which is it? Do we have the highest death toll, or do we not know the number at all?

We know that at least 1.2 million people in the US died from COVID-19, and even that is considered a significant undercount.

We also know the US did not have the highest mortality rate in the world, despite him repeating that claim all week. When you look at deaths per million, multiple countries had higher rates, including Peru, Bulgaria, Croatia, and Hungary.

11. LIE: “There are no cuts to Medicaid” (April 22, before the Finance Committee)

TRUTH: Just like defending the idea that President Trump can invent his own way to calculate percentages, this claim only works if you ignore how basic math and budgeting actually function.

The Big Beautiful Bill cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid over the next decade compared to what the program would have received under current law, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That is, by definition, a cut.

Saying “there are no cuts” relies on pointing to the fact that total spending may still increase over time. But health policy experts say that the increase is driven by inflation, rising healthcare costs, and population changes, not expanded coverage or benefits.

In reality, spending will be reduced by close to $1 trillion over the next decade because of the cut compared with prior projections, even as absolute spending continues to rise. And as a result, nearly 7 to 8 million people are projected to lose Medicaid coverage, largely due to work requirements and new administrative barriers, not because of immigration status.

12. LIE: “The flu shot is an intervention that is often ineffective. It has a 20% efficacy rate. There are studies that show that getting a flu shot actually increases the chance of a non-flu infection” (aka non-specific effects) (April 22, before the HELP Committee)

TRUTH: RFK Jr. loves this made-up statistic. The problem is he’s turned his skepticism into policy, with the removal of CDC flu vaccine campaigns and the most recent move to no longer mandate it for US military personnel. Flu vaccines are designed to do two main things: reduce severe infections requiring hospitalization and deaths. Flu vaccines do not increase your chance of non-flu infections. RFK Jr’s claim is based on a pre-print study (not peer-reviewed) with significant limitations, including selection bias. The study did not show a causal link between vaccination and non-flu illnesses nor did it measure the risk of serious illness or new infections.

13. LIE: “[The study says] 80% in mortalities from chronic disease that took place in the 20th century – almost none of it was attributable to vaccines. (April 22, before the HELP Committee)

TRUTH: RFK Jr. referred to a “Johns Hopkins study” which he has referred to before to incorrectly claim that vaccines do not account for “impressive declines in mortality” in the first half of the century. Senator Cassidy, a board-certified physician, fact-checked him on the conveniently missing context from said study, which concludes the exact opposite. The paper notes “the reductions in vaccine-preventable diseases, however, are impressive.”

In the mid 1900s, vaccines, particularly for measles and diphtheria, were instrumental in reducing overall mortality in the US. Over a century of data has shown that the two largest contributing factors to our increased life expectancy (and reduced mortality) are vaccines and clean water. A landmark study led by the WHO shows that global immunization efforts have saved at least 154 million lives over the past 50 years.

RFK Jr., who for years has denied germ theory, continues to promote that deeply problematic and eugenic principles of terrain theory.

14. LIE: The Trump administration is delivering the “largest investment in rural health in our nation’s history” (April 16, before the Ways and Means committee)

TRUTH: This is the same logic as calling a cut an increase. You take something away, give a small portion back, and present it as a historic investment.

The Big Beautiful Bill cut more than $900 billion from Medicaid, a program that rural hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes rely on to stay open. As a result, nearly 880 hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes are at risk of closure or have already cut essential services.

Because of this, the bill also included roughly $50 billion in funding for rural healthcare to help offset some of the damage those Medicaid cuts are expected to cause. So, importantly, that funding is not a new investment on its own. It is there to respond to the consequences of the cuts themselves.

Framing that as a historic investment is highly misleading. You do not get to slash the foundation rural healthcare depends on and then call partial stabilization funding a major health victory.

15. LIE: TrumpRx is making a difference “Americans no longer pay more than people in other wealthy countries for the exact same medications” (April 22, before the Finance Committee)

TRUTH: Last month, the New York Times reported that Americans could pay nearly twice as much for prescription drugs through TrumpRx compared to other countries, including GLP-1s.

TrumpRx is essentially a discount card, similar to GoodRx. It doesn’t actually solve the problem of pricing since most insured individuals already get negotiated rates on drugs. For the uninsured, a discount card to pay out-of-pocket has not proven to be cheaper than the discount programs already available in the US.

And in some cases, it’s not even cheaper. During the hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren pointed out that a 30-day supply of Protonix costs about $200 on TrumpRx, while the exact same medication in generic form costs about $16 at Costco. That means patients using TrumpRx could end up paying significantly more for the same drug.

In fact, analysis presented in the hearing found people have more than a one-in-four chance of paying more through TrumpRx than they would through existing options. So no, Americans are not suddenly paying less than people in other countries. In some cases, they’re paying more than they need to.

16. LIE: “For the first time they [Dietary Guidelines] are not dogma-based guidelines, but science-based guidelines” (April 16, before the Ways and Means Committee)

TRUTH: The Dietary Guidelines have always been grounded in science and informed by an independent advisory committee that reviews the totality of nutrition evidence.

This past year, RFK Jr. rejected that committee’s evidence-based recommendations and instead relied on a newly selected group with ties to the meat and dairy industry, overriding the established scientific review process.

The resulting guidelines diverge from global nutrition consensus and contain inconsistencies and factual errors, including contradictions between the written recommendations and the consumer-facing visual guidance.

17. LIE: “All decisions that have been made at that agency [FDA] are made with the approvals of panels of career scientists” (April 21, before the House Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee)

TRUTH: Career scientists have faced layoffs and pressure under the Trump administration, leading to a wave of resignations across federal health agencies. At the same time, key decisions, like changes in drug approvals, have increasingly bypassed or overridden standard scientific review processes, with political appointees stepping in where career experts traditionally lead. This has included instances where career scientists’ recommendations on COVID-19 vaccines were overruled.

And former CDC Director Susan Monarez, who RFK Jr. fired, testified before Congress that she was instructed to not speak to or work with any career scientists at CDC, directly contradicting the claim that these decisions are driven by independent scientific panels.

18. LIE: “The food pyramid was written by food industry lobbyists for 50 years. And it reflected the mercantile impulses of those companies that put Fruit Loops at the top of the food pyramid” (April 22, before the HELP committee)

TRUTH: Fruit Loops have never been on the food pyramid. Federal ethics rules prohibit USDA officials from endorsing private brands in official guidance.

The 1992 Food Guide Pyramid, which was discontinued and replaced in 2005, recommended grains, fruits, vegetables, dairy, and a mix of plant and animal proteins, while emphasizing variety and moderation. It explicitly placed fats and added sugars at the top with a clear “use sparingly” label.

There is no evidence that the pyramid promoted or instructed people to eat products like sugary cereals. Quite the opposite.

19. LIE: “I authorized $500 million for cancer vaccines” (April 17, before the House Committee on Education & Workforce)

TRUTH: There is no evidence of a $500 million investment in cancer vaccines. If anything, this appears to be a reversal of what actually happened.

Last year, RFK Jr. canceled $500 million in mRNA vaccine research, a platform also being studied for cancer treatments like personalized cancer vaccines.

Cutting funding to this technology not only slows progress in areas like cancer, but also puts the US at a disadvantage as other countries continue investing in it.

20. LIE: “The Mennonites have not vaccinated since 1796” [while blaming the current measles outbreaks on Mennonites, Canadians, and Mexicans] (April 21, before the House Energy & Commerce Health Subcommittee)

TRUTH: This is historically and factually incorrect. There is no evidence that Mennonites have universally avoided vaccination for centuries. While some Mennonite and Amish communities have lower vaccination rates, this is not uniform and is largely a more recent trend, not something that dates back to the origins of vaccination. Framing an entire religious group this way is both inaccurate and misleading.

21. LIE “This [COVID] was not a disease that was killing healthy people. It was killing sick people” (April 22, before the HELP Committee)

TRUTH: COVID killed the young, the old, the healthy, and the sick. This has been documented for years. What RFK Jr. wants you to believe is the lie that comorbidities from chronic illnesses were WHY people died–this is based on a 6-year-old misinterpretation of a CDC death certificate chart data.

Many people, including children, without comorbidities have died from COVID-19. By far, the biggest risk factor for COVID mortality was age, and no chronic diseases came close to age as far as impact on COVID mortality outcomes go. RFK Jr. cannot accept the fact that at least 200,000 Americans needlessly died because they refused the life-saving COVID-19 vaccines.

Final Thoughts

RFK Jr. asked for “one piece of misinformation” he’s ever said. These are 21 examples from just the last week of hearings. At this point, the volume and consistency of these claims make it difficult to believe this is about confusion or misunderstanding. The line between fact and fiction in his messaging has become so blurred that it’s effectively meaningless.

And that would be concerning on its own, but it is especially dangerous given that he is leading HHS, where these views can directly shape policy, influence public behavior, and impact health outcomes.