Overview:
Despite his stance against vaccines and next to no expertise in population health, Kennedy is likely to become the next HHS secretary — even though it's likely to make health outcomes for Black people even worse.
Though he’s one step away from becoming the nation’s next Health and Human Services secretary, comments Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made around race have many experts warning his confirmation will be a setback for the health of Black people.
Despite lacking a medical degree and showing little knowledge of how the public health system works, Kennedy has thrown around a lot of opinions. Most of his suggested overhaul of the public health system could increase vaccine hesitancy among Black people and exacerbate differences in health outcomes between Black and white Americans.
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A key issue inflaming these concerns is Kennedy’s history as an opponent of vaccines — a position that helped him do quite well financially.
On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee pushed through Kennedy’s nomination on a 14-13 vote along party lines. An environmental attorney by training, Kennedy is known for his activism against vaccines and opposition to processed food. Beyond that, he has little experience in public health or managing a large organization.
Testifying before the committee, Republicans praised Kennedy’s zeal and dedication to health, but senators from both sides of the aisle spotlighted Kennedy’s record on vaccines, such as his changing stances on their safety and effectiveness.
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Race became a factor, however, in one of the more tense exchanges in an already heated confirmation hearing. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks — a Maryland Democrat and one of just two Black women in the Senate — grilled Kennedy about remarks he made in 2021 about Black folks and the series and timing of recommended vaccines, known as vaccine schedules.
A Different Vaccine Schedule?
Vaccine schedules refer to the recommended schedule for when children, adults, pregnant women, and people planning to travel internationally should be vaccinated against certain diseases. These include life-threatening diseases like measles, mumps, rubella, and polio.
Alsobrooks demanded Kennedy explain his claim that Black people have stronger immune systems than white people, so they should get vaccines on a different schedule.
“What different vaccine schedule would you say I should have received?” she asked.
Kennedy said a “series of studies” show Black people “have a much stronger reaction” to specific antigens,” substances that trigger the body’s immune system.
“I would not take any of that at face value,” says infectious disease expert Dr. Amesh Adalja, senior scholar, at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “When an anti-vaxxer like Kennedy says something like this, what he’s trying to do is to increase vaccine hesitancy. There can be some differences in terms of a person’s unique responses to a vaccination. But these differences are pretty subtle.”
Adalja compares any differences in most people’s reactions to vaccines to two people who have slightly different body temperatures.
Kennedy seems to be cherry-picking information from public health reports.
“There is no real-world difference,” he says, and the effect is to sow doubt.
“Because there’s already vaccine hesitancy [among Black people] he knows what this means, and he’s saying this on purpose to make it worse.”
Adalja points out that Kennedy seems to be cherry-picking information from public health reports that only reinforces his point of view, rather than drawing conclusions after reviewing all available scientific research.
Other experts say Kennedy’s response to Alsobrooks was based on a Mayo Clinic study that examined racial differences in the immune response to vaccinations. But the study’s author, Dr. Richard Kennedy — who is not related to the nominee — told NPR that the data doesn’t support changing the vaccine schedule based on race.
Doing so, he said, would be “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate.”
Adalja and other public health experts are concerned that if Robert Kennedy Jr. is confirmed, it could lead to more distrust of the public health authorities and the U.S. government — and the spreading of race-based falsehoods and health misinformation.
Race Is Not Biological
Kennedy’s claims have roots in the centuries-old myths about physiological differences in Black bodies — falsehoods that have long been used to justify racism and dehumanize Black people. Those blatantly wrong beliefs — for example, that Black skin is thicker so Black folks don’t feel pain or that they need different vaccine schedules — continue to influence modern medical practice, shaping how Black patients are treated or mistreated.
These biases aren’t true — and they have real, harmful consequences.
“Spreading false rhetoric that Black people have stronger immune systems recalls this notion of a super-humanization bias, which claims that Black people’s bodies function and endure pain differently,” Zoé Samudzi, a visiting assistant professor at Clark University, told The Guardian. “Race-based medicine should not be the means of addressing the disparities in health outcomes that fall on the lines of race,” she said.
Health Disparities Will Increase
Dr. Georges Benjamin, president and CEO of the American Public Health Association, says if Kennedy joins Trump’s cabinet as HHS secretary, the already stubborn health gap between Black and white people will likely get worse.
“Yeah, health disparities will increase,” he says. “No question about that.”
In fact, “our system is designed to create inequities,” he says. “Everything that [the Administration] done is the opposite of what we recommended — around data, communications, and engagement of more vulnerable populations, So we will see more people of underrepresented populations get sicker. More people will die.”