RFK Jr. told us not to take his medical advice. Don't take his word, either. | Opinion

There was a moment during Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s contentious testimony on Sept. 4 before the U.S. Senate's Finance Committee that deserved more attention than it received. It focused on honesty, and why Kennedy is the face of how that's devalued by President Donald Trump's administration.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, the committee's ranking Democrat from Oregon, called early on for Kennedy, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to be formally sworn in for his testimony. Wyden justified that by citing the many promises Kennedy made back in January to senators to be confirmed to his post, followed by the many ways he has abandoned those pledges.

U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, the Republican chair of the committee from Idaho, rejected Wyden's request, saying, "We will treat this witness as we treat all of the other administration witnesses who come before us."

That was Crapo attempting to normalize Kennedy's notorious predilection for making controversial statements and then, when accurately quoted later, acting flabbergasted while insisting that he never said what he clearly said.

This isn't new. Kennedy has been doing this for years.

RFK Jr.'s storied history of never having said what he said

He did it back when he was a Democrat running a doomed campaign for president. He kept at it when he attempted an equally doomed independent campaign in 2024. He stayed with it as he drifted into an alliance with Trump. And he's still doing it at HHS.

The one safe bet you can make – as Kennedy endeavors to make all Americans less safe – is that if you hear him make a startling comment, it is only a matter of time before he acts startled to hear his own words repeated back to him.

Consider what Kennedy said when U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, a Democrat from Minnesota, pressed him on comments he made in a Fox News interview linking a horrific school shooting in her state the day before to certain prescription drugs.

"You're just making stuff up," Kennedy stammered. "I never said that. You're making it up. You are being dishonest right now."

Here's what Kennedy told Fox News on Aug. 28 about that school shooting: “We’re launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence. ... We can’t exclude those as a culprit.”

Kennedy wants to rewrite history both ways on vaccines

Kennedy, who spent years before arriving at HHS spreading all sorts of conspiracy theories about immunizations, tried to have it both ways in his testimony when it came to the COVID-19 vaccines developed under Trump's orders in his first term.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, cornered Kennedy by noting that Trump in 2020 had called the vaccines "one of the greatest miracles in the history of modern-day medicine." Sanders contrasted that with Kennedy calling them "the deadliest vaccine ever made."

Again, the nation's health chief insisted he never said that. But then he waffled and said he made those comments a while ago.

Kennedy said exactly that during a December 2021 hearing in the Louisiana House of Representatives – a solid year after Trump praised himself for the "miracle" of his administration's development of the vaccines.

Nobody in the Senate should have been surprised at how shifty he is about truth and his own record of controversial comments. CNN, after his Senate confirmation hearing in January, compiled a list of claims Kennedy denied making, along with the proof that he really said many of those things.

Here's an example: Kennedy was asked in January about comparing the work of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “Nazi death camps.” Kennedy, of course, denied ever saying that about an agency he is now mismanaging into chaos.

And, of course, he said exactly that while speaking at a 2013 conference about autism.

Kennedy has no instinct or incentive to tell us the truth.

Trump, the politician who installed him in a job that impacts the health of every American, has no use for truth if it doesn't bring a political advantage. Trump cast Kennedy as a victim of the Senate hearing in an email to his supporters, and then reframed all that as an attack on himself, while asking for donations.

The HHS chief is on board with that messaging because it is dishonest. Kennedy was on Fox & Friends on Sept. 7 denouncing the Senate hearing as "performative ... theater" and "not the kind of debate or open conversation that democracy would give us at its ideal."

Speaking of conversations, Kennedy had one in May during a House hearing in which he dodged a question about vaccinating children this way: “I don’t want to seem like I am being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me."

We should expand that.

Don't just avoid medical advice from the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, a federal agency that cites this as part of its mission: "fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services."

Don't take Kennedy's word for anything he says on any topic at any time. Ever.