RFK, Jr. and 'Following the Science' with Chronic Disease

My new book 'Follow the $cience' exposes the medical establishment corruption Kennedy is targeting

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If there is a major political figure that sends the greatest shivers down the timbers of pharmaceutical interests, it has to be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nephew of President John F. Kennedy (in office January 20, 1961, through November 22, 1963) and son of former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (in office January 21, 1961, through September 3, 1964).

On April 19, 2023, when RFK Jr. announced at age 69 that he was running for the Democrat nomination for president, those interests had to be more than a little concerned. Kennedy has proven to be a fearsome and fearless adversary of the chemical, pesticide, and pharmaceutical industries. An attorney, he comes armed with incredible legal acumen and such a thorough read of the facts that there’s virtually no match for him on these topics when it comes to the debate stage.

Read on for details

Kennedy spent his career not as a politician, but as an environmental attorney originally representing commercial fishermen on the Hudson River in New York who filed epic and game-changing lawsuits against polluters. He helped create the group “Riverkeeper,” which played a big part in cleaning up the once-filthy Hudson River. Around 2014, Kennedy co-founded a group called the “World Mercury Project,” which later became “Children's Health Defense,” designed to address the very thing our public health officials seem to give the least attention to in terms of finding root causes: the chronic disease epidemic in children. Children’s Health Defense has worked tirelessly to identify the combination of toxic exposures to blame for the explosion of chronic disease around the world.

Order Sharyl’s news bestseller: Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails

“Fifty-four percent of American children are now debilitated by lifetime chronic diseases including neurotoxic, neurological disease, neurological injuries, neurodevelopmental diseases like ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, tics, Tourette syndrome, ASD, autism, narcolepsy,” Kennedy tells me when we speak shortly after he launches his run for president. “Autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and juvenile diabetes, and then allergic diseases like peanut allergies, food allergies, anaphylaxis, eczema, asthma, et cetera.” All horribly damaging illnesses that have exploded in frequency under the watch of the well-funded National Institutes of Health, Dr. Fauci, CDC, and public health establishment. As these entities have grown more powerful, more influential, and richer; as we’ve come to spend the most of any nation on doctors, medicine, insurance, and health care, we’ve grown into the sickest wealthy nation on the planet. And health officials and politicians calling the shots pretend not to notice.

“Chronic diseases…are much more debilitating and much more devastating to the American public than infectious diseases,” says Kennedy. “Far, far more. In fact, we had the highest death rate in the world from Covid. We have 4.2% of the globe's population, we had 16% of the Covid deaths with the highest body count of any country in the world. Part of the reason for that is that we have the highest chronic disease rate. So the question is: Was it Covid killing those people or was it chronic disease? I would argue that it was chronic disease. CDC itself says that the average death from Covid was in Americans that had on average 3.8 chronic diseases that were all potentially fatal. So we need to solve our chronic disease issue. If we do that, the infectious disease issue will solve itself.” To pharmaceutical interests, them’s fightin’ words.

Kennedy continues. “NIH, it has turned itself into an incubator for pharmaceutical products. It's supposed to be asking questions like, ‘Where is the autism epidemic coming from? Where is the peanut allergy coming from? Where are all these autoimmune disease like rheumatoid arthritis,—where are they coming from?’ Why is NIH not doing those studies? Well, we know it's an environmental toxin in each case..If you start pulling on those strings, at the end of that string…it’s going to be the chemical industry, it's going to be the pesticide industry, it's going to be the pharmaceutical industry. Those are all the industries that have captured NIH. So they don't want to know the answers to those questions.”

Boldly stated in today’s environment, but I’m not surprised. From a professional standpoint, Kennedy and I go back a ways. Nearly 20 years ago, CBS News and other national news organizations were aggressively covering many emerging pharmaceutical safety issues. Accelerated approval of prescription drugs. FDA-approved medicine yanked from the market at an alarming pace for safety reasons. Drugmakers caught hiding risks. Vaccine-autism links coming to light. Congressional hearings about cover-ups and payoffs.

Around the same time, one of the most profitable business arrangements that can be imagined was being solidified between pharmaceutical companies and the media. They joined to successfully lobby the FDA and Congress to relax restrictions on prescription drug marketing known as “direct to consumer” ads. The pharmaceutical-media alliance argued it’s a free speech issue, and that drug ads help people access important therapies they might not otherwise know about. Opponents say such ads encourage people to seek medicine that don’t really need or shouldn’t take, could be misleading, and might tend to play on emotion rather than science. In the end, the Pharma-media alliance won. Today, the United States remains one of only two developed countries on God’s green Earth (New Zealand is the other) that allows prescription drugs to be advertised directly to consumers on TV and practically everywhere else you look.

Some people underestimate the significance of this dynamic. Think of it this way. Let’s say you’re a documentary maker, and a pesticide company offers you a million dollars to let you create. You can’t believe your good luck! But as you start filming, you realize that to keep the money, you must avoid any narratives that shine an unflattering light on the company sponsoring you. You quickly learn from the sponsor that you are to avoid mentioning the pesticide industry in general. And to play it safe, it’s probably best not to implicate anything about the larger chemical industry. No big deal if I have to avoid a few topics, you think. After all, there are plenty of other stories to choose to document in your film. But pretty soon your sponsor goes a bit further. He suggests you find a way to insert something positive about pesticides somewhere into your script. You squeamishly comply—a million dollars is at stake. While they’re at it, the sponsor mentions the fact that your spouse does volunteer work for an organic food advocacy group and suggests you find a way to put a stop to that…

The Pharma-media alliance largely closed the door on aggressive and fair reporting about the drug industry. Stories about prescription drugs receded into the realm of occasional and apologetic. Members of Congress who allowed the loosened ad restrictions continue to profit from lucrative donations from the pharmaceutical industry. The media gets billions a year in advertising dollars. The pharmaceutical industry gets a pass for sometimes-misleading ads to convince millions of men, women, and children that they need countless pills and potions. And the industry is ensured kid glove treatment by the press. Everybody wins—except regular Americans and reporters like me. After spending some years unearthing uncomfortable truths, we reporters working the pharmaceutical fraud beat suddenly began experiencing a seismic shift within our news corporations. Some traditional news managers were still thirsty for the stories affecting so many people. But somewhere in a shadowy netherworld beyond them, complaints were made, strings were pulled, meetings were held, and news coverage of these things became slanted, trimmed down, and eventually all but disappeared.

Vaccines and Autism

Before all of that, in July of 2005, a news story crosses the wire services at CBS. It seems a “Kennedy” is weighing in on the heated vaccine-autism discussion. CBS Evening News Executive Producer Jim Murphy wants me to ask that Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for an on-camera interview, and, if he says yes, immediately book a flight from Washington, D.C., to the northeast to interview him, and fly right back to report the story on that night’s broadcast. Kennedy agrees to the interview. I’m on such a tight deadline that when I rush to Reagan National Airport to catch my flight and find all the parking lots full, I pull into the Hertz drop-off lane, hand my car keys and $50 to a guy wearing a Hertz shirt and tell him to find a spot to park my car. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” I tell him as I dash off. (Thankfully, my car is waiting for me when I return.)

In the resulting story on that night’s CBS Evening News, Kennedy discusses his belief that the mercury preservative used in many vaccines, thimerosal, is triggering the autism and ADD epidemics. Autism and ADD are names we give for a variety of brain damage and other illnesses. Mercury is a known neurotoxin. I ask Kennedy what he thought when he initially heard of the theoretical link between autism and childhood vaccines. "I was skeptical but sympathetic," he says. Referring to parents of kids who are left brain-damaged or with other injuries after vaccination, he says ”These are people who have been through hell, literally.” Kennedy says he became a believer after researching studies on both sides. "The science connecting brain damage to thimerosal is absolutely overwhelming,” he says.

Ready to dispel Kennedy’s claim is CDC Associate Director of Science (soon-to-become Chief Science Officer) Dr. Tanja Popovic. She claims that research shows mercury in vaccines doesn't trigger autism. "Based on what we know right now, we don't think there's an association," says Popovic.

In my story, Kennedy mentions a suspicious, private strategy meeting the government convened in 2000 at the Simpsonwood Methodist retreat and conference center in Norcross, Georgia. It was called after alarming findings emerged in a key study. They revealed a strong connection between vaccines and autism, ADD, tics, stuttering, and the entire range of neurodisorders. Public health officials who were dialed in were stunned. Vaccine industry advocates were in panic.

We know this because vaccine safety advocates later obtained minutes of the controversial Simpsonwood event through a Freedom of Information Act request. No public advocates or press were told about the gathering. But vaccine makers were invited. At the meeting, one health official said that without more research, "we are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits” over vaccine injuries. Another official said that based on the emerging science, he wasn’t comfortable letting anybody in his family get a thimerosal-containing vaccine. Attendees concluded their meeting, keeping news of the study, the autism link, and their concerns, hidden from the rest of us. Today, many people, including Kennedy, consider it a cover-up. "Quite to the contrary," insists CDC’s Dr. Popovic, in my story. “We've always been open about all of our activities."

In the years after that CBS News interview, Kennedy continued to lend his famous name to environmental and medical causes, litigating in court on some of them, and becoming among the most-informed public figures on these controversies. Now, nearly 18 years after our first encounter, Kennedy has even more facts in his arsenal as he eyes the White House. He’s unlikely to draw any big money contributions from Pharma. They won’t be extending to him a sweetheart deal for a high-paying gig like they gave Congressman Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Democrat-turned-Republican.

Money Game

Tauzin became a fierce pharmaceutical industry ally from 2001-2004 while leading the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a powerful Congressional committee with power to oversee drug industry issues. During that time period, Tauzin reportedly collected about $1 million in campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry. Then, in 2005, as the pharmaceutical industry heightened its campaigns to dispel vaccine-autism links and defend drug safety, Tauzin was hired as President and CEO of the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbying arm, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). His salary kicked up from the Congressional rate of $162,100 a year to a reported $2 million. The watchdog group Public Citizen complained that Tauzin may have been negotiating for the lobby job while in Congress and writing important Medicare legislation that benefited pharmaceutical companies. The resulting law eliminated important provisions that would have saved consumers billions of dollars by allowing the government to negotiate lower prices for drugs prescribed to the elderly under Medicare. Tauzin went on to play a major role in negotiating favorable terms for pharmaceutical companies in the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. And his giant $2 million paycheck turned out to be pretty small potatoes compared to the $11.6 million in payments he reportedly got during his final months at his PhRMA job in 2010.

But the pharmaceutical industry can’t expect any favors under a hypothetical Kennedy administration.

“I’m not going to get any quarter from the mainstream media,” Kennedy tells me. “[T]he corporate media is going to be opposed to my candidacy, which they should be, because I'm going to do things when I get in the office that are probably going to hurt their business model, including getting pharmaceutical advertisements off of television.”

“That’s a very big one,” I interject.

“Yeah,” says Kennedy. “So I expect them to resist with every molecule of energy that they can summon. I don't expect fair play from them and I don't expect honesty from them.”

Applying the Kennedy Factor

On issues like pharmaceutical profits Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, acknowledges he sounds a lot like Trump, the Republican. Trump faced similar smears, in part because, unlike most Republican leaders, his political ascendancy didn’t rest on pharmaceutical industry donations and promises. Only those free of pharmaceutical influence dare say the obvious parts out loud.

“We should be funding a national research on alternative medicine, on integrative medicine, on ways to strengthen the immune system,” says Kennedy. “[O]n dietary changes, on exercise, and even osteopathic solutions, chiropractic solutions, naturopathic solutions. Let's look at them. Let's apply science to them. Let's not just look at molecules that may be profitable for the drug companies.”

Under that category, Kennedy raises the case of the anti-malaria drug ivermectin, which is off-patent or “expired,” meaning it’s available in generic formulations, meaning it’s cheap, meaning it’s not very profitable for any single company.

“[I]vermectin—its patent expired—costs 5 cents a pill,” Kennedy says. “It had a miraculous curative impact on Covid, but it had to be suppressed because it was competing with high value medications that represented big profit centers for the pharmaceutical companies.”

But perhaps Kennedy’s biggest threat to the establishment medicine industrial complex is his promise to clean house without mercy.

“I look so forward to going to Atlanta myself and supervising the overhaul of CDC. I know exactly what to do and I will unravel the corruption there. I know the individuals who need to leave and need to be transferred out of powerful positions,” he tells me. “I'm going to put the people in those positions who are actually concerned with public health rather than pharmaceutical industry profits. I'm going to change the mission of CDC and NIH, by the way, and FDA, and direct them toward the problem of solving our chronic diseases…The way that NIH relates to the universities is going to change. I'm going to bring in these scientific journals to the Justice Department. I'm going to tell them that we're going to file racketeering cases against them if they don't stop pushing pharmaceutical lies…stop being a vessel for mercantile propaganda of the pharmaceutical industry because they're lying to the public, they're lying to physicians. They're causing enormous harm.”

I’m intrigued by Kennedy’s frankness and willingness to be a target of one of the most powerful propaganda forces known to man. He says the entire way vaccines are tested for safety and effectiveness must be revamped. Right now, the government typically allows them to be approved without testing how they interact with each other, even though there are few circumstances in which a single dose of a childhood vaccine is given in isolation. Also, the government allows vaccines to be tested on people unlike the patients who will be getting them. That, too, should change, he says.

“Unfortunately, in the [Covid vaccine] clinical trials, they excluded people who had chronic diseases. So they weren't testing the vaccine on the American public. They were testing it on basically a population of the Avengers, of people who were completely well. And that's what they do with all vaccines. They don't test them on a group that actually looks like the population. Then they seem surprised when the vaccine kills people with chronic disease like, ‘We had no knowledge of this. How would we know?’ Well, of course you wouldn't know because you didn't test it on those people.”

Kennedy says he’d put a halt to the use of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a personal profit center for government and university scientists partnering with the pharmaceutical industry.

“[NIH] develops drugs, they find molecules in their lab, that will kill certain viruses. Then, they farm that out to a university, to a researcher, what they call a principal investigator, who's usually the head of a medical school department,” Kennedy says. When the drug gets to human trials, the money starts rolling in. “You could pay as much as $20,000 per recruit to the principal investigator. Well, the university takes at least half of that money, and sometimes 75%…Then, phase three, you test it on thousands of people. Say, for that, they bring in a pharmaceutical company and they sell the drug to that pharmaceutical company. They give half the patent to them, NIH keeps some of the patent, the university keeps some of the patent,  the university researcher keeps some of the patent, and the individuals in NIH who worked on the initial drug also get margin rights for the royalties in the patent. Individual regulators at NIH who are supposed to be regulating this drug, actually, can collect $150,000 a year for the rest of their lives, and their children collect, and their children, as long as that drug's on the market. They're paying for their boat, their kids' education, their car, their house by creating new drugs, and they do not want to find problems with those drugs. The entire regulatory function has been subsumed by these mercantile ambitions of the people who work for these agencies. It's an extraordinarily corrupt system. It is agency capture on steroids. We shouldn't have regulators making money from the drugs they regulate.”

It wasn’t long after Kennedy’s announcement as a Democrat presidential candidate that his party’s establishment began scheming against him. On top of that, the Biden administration refused Kennedy’s requests for Secret Service protection.

“We’ve made multiple applications for Secret Service Protection and the Biden administration has denied me,” says Kennedy, whose father and uncle were assassinated.

“What reason are they giving you?” I ask.

“They don't really give a reason,” says Kennedy. “They just say that the White House has determined that it's unnecessary. So it's a very vague reason… [W]e gave a 68 page report on the threats, multiple threats to me…I think the Biden administration has decided to play hardball. They know that 30% of the money that we raise from my campaign, I have to spend on private security. And I think they would rather me spend it on private security.”

On Fox News, Democrat money man Jim Messina writes off Kennedy as a “kook” and a “joke.” When asked about Kennedy’s impact as a possible third party candidate, Messina says he doesn’t care what Kennedy calls himself, “Just get out of my party.” Messina’s reactions reveal a sense of desperation. At a town hall I moderated in 2016, Messina and Republican money man Karl Rove had said much the same about Donald Trump. At the time, Messina headed a political action committee for Hillary Clinton and insisted Hillary would easily beat Trump.

“I wake up every morning and drop to my knees and pray, “Please, God, give me Donald Trump [as the Republican nominee and Hillary’s opponent],” said Messina.

On October 9, 2023, Kennedy leaves the Democrat party and officially announces his run for president as an independent.

In August 2024, he suspends his independent campaign and endorses Donald Trump for president, promising to focus on childhood health.

Order Sharyl’s news bestseller: Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails