Recently, the head of the US Department of Health, Robert Kennedy Jr., announced that he is firing all 17 current members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory committee. According to him, he plans to replace them with new people—allegedly to “restore public trust.” In its press release, the Department of Health and Human Services stated that all 17 current committee members were appointed by the Biden administration, with 13 of those appointments made in 2024. Thus, the Trump administration would have had to wait until 2028 for their terms to officially expire. The new secretary obviously didn’t want to wait that long.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is responsible for recommendations on the safety, effectiveness, and clinical necessity of vaccine use. American media note that Kennedy had previously promised not to change the ACIP composition, which earned him votes from some hesitant Republican senators. Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and member of the FDA’s independent vaccine advisory committee, stated that he considers this decision extremely dangerous, and that ACIP members, in his words, deserve awards for reducing child mortality, not dismissal.
In the last election, Robert Kennedy Jr. was one of the US presidential candidates but then withdrew his candidacy, supporting Donald Trump. During his campaign, he established himself as an anti-vaxxer, HIV dissident, and conspiracy theorist. For many years, Kennedy led an organization called Children’s Health Defense. This organization promoted vaccine refusal on the grounds that a preservative contained in vaccines supposedly causes autism and other severe congenital diseases in children.
Kennedy Jr. called COVID vaccines “the deadliest ever created.” He also said that “there is not a single safe and effective vaccine.”
Besides claims that vaccines cause autism, Kennedy at various times stated that Wi-Fi and 5G cause cancer and that AIDS is not linked to HIV. In 2022, Children’s Health Defense pages were removed from Facebook and Instagram for spreading medical misinformation, and Robert Kennedy somewhat softened his anti-vaccine rhetoric, but his views apparently did not change.
In December 2024, Nobel laureates spoke out against Robert Kennedy Jr.’s appointment as health secretary. Their letter noted that the candidate had criticized respected agencies, the CDC, and the US National Institutes of Health.
Apparently, scientists’ concerns were justified. Even before taking office, Robert Kennedy promised to fire 600 staff at the National Institutes of Health responsible for biomedical research, calling their focus on infectious diseases and vaccine and drug development misguided. At the end of May, under Kennedy’s leadership, the Department of Health excluded the COVID vaccine from the list recommended for healthy children and pregnant women.
Interestingly, besides radical anti-vaccine (and often simply unscientific) statements, the new head of the US Department of Health is known for political statements made in line with Russian propaganda. For example, he said that “US sanctions do not work but only strengthen the Russian economy,” and that the US “started attacking Russia.” In November 2023, Robert Kennedy stated that “weakening Russia is a mistake of US policy because it does not serve national interests.”
There is no direct evidence of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s ties to Moscow, but many narratives of the current health secretary and the Kremlin suspiciously coincide. Moscow also actively intensified anti-COVID propaganda in the West during the pandemic.
It is telling that amid the supposedly relentless fight by Russian authorities against “COVID fake news,” the Kremlin not only did not persecute radical conspiracy theorists but also provided them with quite broad platforms to express their views, for example, on the federal news agency REGNUM.
As became clear upon closer examination, most of these theories were based solely on American materials, skillfully selected and translated into Russian, including references to the anonymous Q—one of the main American authors of myths about the occult nature of the “Deep State.”
Their general meaning boiled down to the idea that America has been ruled for over a hundred years by a satanist cult of pedophiles and cannibals, representing a supranational “World Government” and the American “Deep State” in one. According to the authors, this cult created the coronavirus as a pretext for chip implantation. The only hero opposing this cult was proclaimed to be the then (and current) US president, Donald Trump.
It is clear that official Russian propaganda did not seek to create a cult of the American president in the eyes of Russians. It seems these videos were primarily aimed at Russian-speaking immigrants in the US and American right-wing radicals who maintain close ties with Russian right-wing organizations.
It can be noted that at that time this operation to destabilize the West, combined with the efforts of American conspiracy theorists, had some success.
In May 2020, American media noted a rise in the wildest conspiracy theories about the origin of the coronavirus, primarily coming from the previously less active QAnon movement. Alongside this, American media recorded a rise in the number of politicians supporting such theories.
Even more actively, stories about “pedophiles, cannibals, and chip implantation” were picked up in the Russian-speaking religious community, most likely helped by the careful translation of conspiracy myths into Russian. The consequences were not long in coming. Local media, citing the Sacramento Department of Health, reported that a third of coronavirus cases were linked to local churches, and one church, founded by Russian-speaking immigrants, became an epicenter of the dangerous disease’s spread.
In the same vein was a similar but less mystically tinged myth that the American “Deep State,” consisting of Democrats, waged war against “Trump’s America,” including deliberately trying to cause the most destructive consequences of the coronavirus pandemic and increased mortality among American citizens. This theory was quite actively disseminated on a website linked, according to Associated Press information, to Russian military intelligence.
Thus, willingly or not, Robert Kennedy then fell into harmony with Moscow’s actions. It is clear that, as health secretary, he is unlikely to influence America’s foreign policy. However, his unscientific theories can cause serious harm not only to the development of new drugs and vaccines but also to the use of existing ones, which will directly affect the health of Americans.
In the photo — Robert Kennedy Jr. assumes office as US health secretary on February 13, 2025. Source: White House website
