RFK Jr. Has Made False and Dangerous Claims About AIDS. That Could Become a Global Problem.
Mother Jones illustration; Lev Radin/Zuma
Of the many absurd things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said over the years—about vaccines, about 5G technology as a tool of mass surveillance, about Covid being an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people—his claims about HIV and AIDS have been some of the most fact-free.
Kennedy has suggested there are questions about whether HIV causes AIDS. (There are not, and it does.) His book The Real Anthony Fauci heavily quoted the work of Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg, an infamous first-wave AIDS denialist. Kennedy has also promoted the idea, debunked since the late 1980s, that the party drug poppers might cause AIDS. All of which has led experts to ask a simple question: what will become of the United States’ policies towards HIV/AIDS if Kennedy is confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services?
Donald Trump announced his plans to nominate Kennedy to lead HHS last week, generating immediate concern among scientists and public health experts. Given the extraordinary scope of HHS, one told Mother Jones, him taking charge of the agency would be “a genuine catastrophe.” In the case of HIV/AIDS, the damage could be global, if Kennedy’s previously-stated beliefs about the disease and its treatments still hold true.
Along with the State Department, HHS helps implement the President’s Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief, which was created by George W. Bush in 2003. The PEPFAR program has been an incredible success, spending about $100 billion to save millions of lives in the developing world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, by helping people access antiretroviral medication, testing, and prevention.
While AIDS denialism and revisionism take many different forms, one of the most common is suggesting that HIV may not be the true cause of AIDS. By that metric, Kennedy has engaged in overt denialism, writing in his Fauci book that he “takes no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS. In an video clip unearthed by the Twitter account Patriot Takes, he falsely told an audience that “a hundred percent of” the earliest AIDS deaths “were people who were addicted to poppers…people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends.” He went on to claim that some government scientists involved in early AIDS research believed the disease was environmental, but, RFK explained, “for Tony Fauci it was really important to call it a virus” because it “allowed him to take control of it.”
The idea that AIDS is “environmental,” rather than being caused by a virus, is a clear reference to the roundly and repeatedly discredited Duesberg hypothesis. Duesberg—who was a biologist, but not an AIDS researcher—claimed that HIV was a harmless “passenger virus” and that the true cause of HIV/AIDS was drug use. In citing Duesberg, Kennedy took part in a small but noticeable resurgence of AIDS denialism, with people like Joe Rogan parroting Duesberg’s ideas, and NFL superstar Aaron Rodgers suggesting that Fauci used the AIDS crisis for personal gain and recklessly promoted the first-wave antiretroviral drug AZT. (Rogers wrongly suggested the drug was “killing people.”)
When I wrote about this resurgence in AIDS denialism earlier this year, Seth Kalichman, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, expressed relief that nobody in a position of power in the US government had yet taken up the cause.
Now, he says, “it’s hard to believe we’re having this conversation.” Kalichman predicts the danger of a Kennedy-controlled HHS is not that Kennedy will directly target AIDS studies, but that he’ll preside over a general reduction in science funding which will impact HIV research. Kennedy has already laid out a plan to radically reshape the National Institutes of Health, which is a division of HHS. Cuts to the NIH could mean, Kalichman says, that “the Office of AIDS Research, which is at the forefront of AIDS research globally, could easily go away.”
“PEPFAR won’t be a priority,” in a new Trump administration, Kalichman adds, explaining that with Marco Rubio as the likely Secretary of State, he predicts “more isolationism” and “a real pulling-in of our resources across the board.”
For Kalichman, Trump’s selection of Kennedy brings the United States closer to a “worst-case scenario” akin to what “they had in South Africa, where you now have AIDS denialism at the highest levels.” Thabo Mbeki, who became South Africa’s president in 1999, was persuaded by the denialist arguments of his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, as well as by American AIDS denialists who he hosted while he was in office. Tshabalala-Msimang argued that AIDS could be cured with beetroot and garlic while dismissing antiretroviral medications as toxic; her role was, Kalichman points out, “really the parallel position in government to the secretary of HHS.”
Major AIDS research and philanthropy groups have made their opposition to a Kennedy nomination clear. The nonprofit amFAR, which has donated some $635 million to AIDS research over the years, released a statement citing “the many controversial and false statements made by RFK Jr in relation to HIV and AIDS.”
“Sadly, he repeats disproven and debunked theories. It is amfAR’s intent to refute these statements and to vigorously oppose his nomination to lead HHS—a position for which he is entirely unqualified,” it adds. (Kennedy could not be reached for comment. An email sent to his campaign press team bounced back; one sent to group set up to promote his Make America Healthy Again movement went unreturned.)
Emory professor of medicine Dr. Carlos del Rio is a widely recognized HIV and infectious disease expert who once chaired PEPFAR’s scientific advisory board. He declined to comment on what Kennedy might do at HHS, other than to say that “all of us would hope that any nominee will be committed to evidence-based decisionmaking.”
Rio also pointed out that Trump’s first term featured a surprisingly robust focus on AIDS. His 2019 State of the Union address called for more funding to end AIDS in the United States, although congressional Republicans subsequently attacked that allocation. “Say what you want,” del Rio says, “but he did good with PEPFAR.”
As one of the most effective public health interventions ever, del Rio says that Americans “should be very proud of PEPFAR.” If the program were to end, he points out, “30 million people currently in antiretroviral therapy would potentially die. Would you want to be the president who’s responsible for killing 30 million people globally?”
“The one thing you don’t want to become, is the laughingstock of the world,” del Rio says. “I don’t think anybody in this administration would like that.”