Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman: RFK Jr.'s immunity to scientific evidence is dangerous

As a physician with a long career in alternative medicine and who opposes pharmaceutical marketing, you might think I have a lot in common with Robert F Kennedy Jr. You’d be wrong.

I’d be the first to argue that there are plenty of evidence-based alternative therapies. For example, chiropractic or osteopathic spinal manipulation helps back pain, ginger or vitamin B6 are effective treatments for morning sickness, s-adenosylmethionine (SAM-e) can help depression, and biofeedback training is effective for migraine.

Somehow, RFK Jr. avoids supporting any alternative therapy that works and instead supports only disproven, dangerous or quack therapies. Chelation therapy is effective for reducing lead or iron levels in people with toxic levels of those metals, but there is no evidence that supports RFK Jr’s claim that it can treat autism.

While it was worthwhile studying hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin for covid, multiple randomized controlled trials have proven that both treatments are ineffective; also, both can cause significant harms. Nonetheless, RFK Jr continues to support these disproven therapies.

And therein lies the main reason he shouldn’t be confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services: He appears to be immune to scientific evidence.

Dangerous vaccine views aside, there’s more than enough other evidence to disqualify Kennedy from being appointed to any government position. Despite pasteurization being one of the most important public health measures ever invented, RFK Jr. supports raw milk, which has sickened people with various bacteria, including Salmonella, Listeria, E. coli and Campylobacter. And since 20% of tested raw milk samples contains genetic material from H5N1 viruses, pasteurization may be the only thing standing between milk and an epidemic of bird flu.

There’s certainly a grain of truth in some of what RFK says. For example, vitamin A supplementation in low- and middle-income countries decreases the incidence of measles and may even be a helpful treatment, but that’s because vitamin A deficiency is rampant in those countries, and vitamin A is necessary for normal immune functioning. RFK’s claim that “it’s almost impossible” for a child to die of measles if given vitamin A is wrong even in countries where vitamin A deficiency is endemic, but it is both wrong and irrelevant in countries where people consume plenty of vitamin A. The incidence of vitamin A deficiency in the US is close to 0%; rare cases are reported only in a few people with disordered eating.

What prevents measles, in the United States or abroad, is vaccination, which we all know RFK Jr. opposes, despite his weak and recent protestations. Before the measles vaccine, 48,000 people a year in the U.S. got measles; 400-500 died. Besides killing people, measles can cause pneumonia, brain swelling and deafness. Vaccination campaigns resulted in measles being officially considered eliminated in the U.S. in 2000. Now, measles is back. In 2024, there were 284 measles cases in the country; almost all among the unvaccinated. That number is sure to rise exponentially if RFK Jr. is confirmed.

RFK Jr. has also claimed that Prozac and other antidepressants are related to school shootings. Certainly school shootings have increased during the same time period that modern antidepressants have become popular, but linking the two is absurd. The difference between correlation and causation is one of the first thing we teach health care professional students in courses in epidemiology or evidence-based medicine. Popularity of the first name Stevie correlates with the stock price of Netflix, but that doesn’t mean one causes the other (see more fun spurious correlations here).

Of course, RFK Jr. isn’t a health care professional, or a scientist, or a researcher, so perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect him to have a basic understanding of scientific evidence. Lack of expertise isn’t the only problem, though. Arguably, RFK Jr.’s most radical rift from reality is his denial of germ theory: he is on record claiming that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Surely even those who support him believe that viruses and bacteria can cause disease.

There are non-scientists who have learned to evaluate clinical trials, and who are aware of both principles of evidence and the limits of their own expertise. RFK Jr. is not one of them.

Conflict of interest declaration: I am a paid expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs (mainly government) in litigation regarding unethical pharmaceutical promotion. I receive royalties on books on alternative medicine I have written and have a patent on a mint mask.

Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman is a professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Physiology at Georgetown University Medical Center.