Robert F. Kennedy jnr hasn't just been promoting conspiracy theories and vaccine scepticism in the US, he has also spent years working abroad to undermine policies that have been pillars of global health policy for a half-century. Photo / Uli Seit / The New York Times
Robert F. Kennedy jnr, who is in line to lead the Department of Health and Human Services in the next Trump administration, is well-known for promoting conspiracy theories and vaccine scepticism in the United States.
But Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has also spent years working abroad to undermine policies that have been pillars of global health policy for a half-century, records show.
He has done this by lending his celebrity, and the name of his non-profit group, Children’s Health Defense, to a network of overseas chapters that sow distrust in vaccine safety and spread misinformation far and wide.
He, his organisations and their officials have interfered with vaccination efforts, undermined sex education campaigns meant to stem the spread of Aids in Africa, and railed against global organisations like the World Health Organisation (WHO) that are in charge of health initiatives.
Along the way, Kennedy has partnered with, financed or promoted fringe figures – people who claim that 5G cellphone towers cause cancer, that homosexuality and contraceptive education are part of a global conspiracy to reduce African fertility and that the WHO is trying to steal countries’ sovereignty.
One of his group’s advisers, in Uganda, suggested using “supernatural insight” and a man she calls Prophet Elvis to guide policymaking. “We do well to embrace ethereal means to get ahead as a nation,” she wrote on a Ugandan news site this year.
These people, more than leading scientists and experienced public health professionals, have existed in Kennedy’s orbit for years. The ideas spread by him and his associates abroad highlight the unorthodox, sometimes conspiratorial nature of the world occupied by a man who stands to lead America’s health department, its 80,000 employees and its US$1.8 trillion ($3.04t) budget.
Kennedy did not respond to a list of questions about his organisation’s work abroad. His personal email automatically replied with a link to a Google form for people to apply to work with him in government – and name their own job titles. Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense, said Kennedy was the group’s “chairman on leave” and had not been involved in the day-to-day operations in over a year.
As health secretary, Kennedy would have the opportunity to reshape health policy. The department has a hand in negotiations for an international pandemic-response treaty, is the parent agency of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and finances global projects like vaccine campaigns.
Kennedy visited the Pacific island of Samoa in June 2019 in the aftermath of a public health tragedy.
During routine measles immunisations a year earlier, nurses had mistakenly mixed the vaccine with a muscle relaxant, leading to the death of two infants.
Measles, a highly contagious disease, is preventable, thanks to vaccines that have been proven safe since the 1960s.
But vaccine sceptics seized on the death of the two children as evidence that the vaccines should not be trusted. The Samoan Government temporarily suspended its immunisation programme.
Kennedy arrived in Samoa, on the invitation of a local anti-vaccine activist, and amplified doubts about the vaccine’s safety. It was a crucial moment. Vaccination rates had plummeted and the WHO called for Samoa to ramp up immunisation as soon as possible.
Kennedy met with the Prime Minister and other officials. He told activists that vaccines shipped to Samoa might be of a lower quality than those sent to developed countries.
“With his last name, and the status attached to it, people will believe him,” said Dr Take Naseri, who met with Kennedy at the time as Samoa’s director general of health.
A measles outbreak began a few months after his visit. Eighty-three people died, most of them children, a staggering loss in a nation of about 200,000 people.
During the outbreak, Kennedy falsely suggested that defective vaccines could have caused the deaths. He later dismissed the outbreak as “mild” and denied any connection to it. “I never told anybody not to vaccinate,” he said last year.
When Edwin Tamasese, the anti-vaccine campaigner who arranged Kennedy’s visit, was arrested and charged with incitement for interfering with vaccinations, Children’s Health Defense helped him obtain legal advice and paid for his lawyers, according to Tamasese.
The measles outbreak in Samoa ended after 95% of the eligible population received vaccinations, according to the WHO.
Sex education has been central to the global fight against the spread of Aids in Africa for decades.
But officials with Children’s Health Defense Africa, one of Kennedy’s non-profit groups, see a conspiracy at play.
Wahome Ngare, a Kenyan physician who sits on the group’s advisory board, argued at a conference in Uganda this year that contraception and health education were part of a global plot to reduce Africans’ fertility. He attended the conference alongside the head of the Children’s Health Defense Africa, who presented slides bearing the organisation’s logo and web address.
Kennedy has questioned the accepted science behind Aids. He falsely said Aids may have been caused by the recreational use among gay people of the drug amyl nitrite. It is caused by the human immunodeficiency virus.
Last year, Children’s Health Defense posted a video promoting a book that questions the link between HIV and Aids. Another of the group’s interview subjects this year said that former US government scientist Anthony Fauci should be imprisoned or “taken off this Earth”.
Ngare is among the many people in Kennedy’s orbit whose views conflict sharply with those of the health agency that Kennedy stands to lead.
In an interview with NPR in 2015 before joining Children’s Health Defense Africa, Ngare mused about stories that “vaccines have been used for spread of HIV” and called for a boycott of polio vaccines. The US Government is a major sponsor of polio vaccine campaigns worldwide. Ngare did not respond to requests for comment.
Holland said those were Ngare’s personal views, not those of Kennedy’s organisation.
At the conference in Uganda, Ngare spoke to far-right lawmakers and activists who support draconian punishments, including life in prison, for people convicted of having gay sex.
The United States has imposed sanctions on Ugandan officials over that law.
When Kennedy started his non-profit group’s European chapter in August 2020, he floated questions about whether the Covid-19 pandemic was part of “a sinister game” played by governments to control people.
“A lot of it feels very planned to me,” he said in Berlin.
The next day, he rallied about 38,000 people at a protest over Covid measures. The protest was organised by a German group called Querdenken. Its leaders have since ended up on a government watch list for fomenting anti-government sentiment.
Promoters used Kennedy’s name to drum up attendance, saying he wanted people to take to the streets and fight back. After the event, hundreds of protesters tried to storm the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament.
Kennedy was not in attendance at the parliament. “That whole Reichstag thing was completely unrelated to the demonstration,” Holland said.
Kennedy’s influence in Germany lives on, at least in online forums. Recent data from CeMAS, a research group that monitors conspiracy movements, shows that his name is often invoked on conspiracy-focused German Telegram channels, coming up more than 6000 times this year alone.
Children’s Health Defense’s chapter in Europe has cultivated relationships with members of the European Parliament.
In January 2022, the organisation held a news conference in Brussels demanding a “moratorium on health restrictions”. An anti-vaccine rally that followed the event turned violent, with protesters smashing windows at the European Union’s diplomatic headquarters.
In April 2023, Children’s Health Defense Europe helped organise a conference on the grounds of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. At the conference, lawmakers criticised a proposed pandemic treaty being considered at the WHO.
The chapter has hosted press events with European lawmakers and encouraged Parliament to reject vaccination certificate rules.
In 2023, the European chapter paid a member of Britain’s Parliament, Andrew Bridgen, to speak at a conference it had helped organise. The conference discussed opposition to government pandemic measures and promoted vaccine scepticism. The sum was small, at just under US$800, according to Bridgen’s financial disclosures. Such payments are legal in Britain.
Bridgen has repeatedly compared the Covid vaccine rollout to the Holocaust, including in an interview with the Children’s Health Defense online television station.
Children’s Health Defense spent US$315,000 in Europe last year, including in Iceland and Greenland, its US tax filings show. Holland said that as of this year, the European chapter was run by volunteers and no longer funded by the US operation.
In 2021, a South African herbalist named Toren Wing reached out to Kennedy about his effort to ban 5G cellphone towers over health concerns.
In an email, Wing recalled in an interview, he invoked a rousing speech about liberty that Kennedy’s father had delivered as a senator visiting apartheid South Africa in 1966.
“This is so cool,” Kennedy responded, according to a copy of the email. He looped in a Children’s Health Defense lawyer. The anti-5G effort fizzled, Wing said, but it laid the groundwork for a Children’s Health Defense chapter in Africa.
At the chapter’s launch, Kennedy said the continent was “a testing and clinical trial laboratory for multinational pharmaceutical companies that see African people as commodities”. His group sent just over US$15,000 for “set-up expenses” in 2022, US tax filings show.
Shabnam Palesa Mohamed, who leads the chapter, is a frequent host of the non-profit’s online show. She interviews doctors promoting unproven Covid remedies and rails against vaccines.
After a measles outbreak started in Cape Town, South Africa, Mohamed appeared in a video discussing supposed negative effects of “alleged measles injections” in South Africa.
In 2023, Unicef reported a 30% decline in confidence in childhood vaccines in South Africa after the Covid pandemic, coming amid the world’s “largest sustained backslide in childhood immunisation in 30 years”. The group cited factors including “growing access to misleading information”.
Mohamed and others affiliated with Children’s Health Defense Africa pushed the discredited theory that the drug ivermectin will treat Covid. They also sued the South African Government, unsuccessfully, to stop Covid vaccinations. Mohamed thanked Children’s Health Defense for supporting the case.
Mohamed has promoted conspiracy theories against the WHO, Bill Gates and two of the world’s biggest money managers, BlackRock and Vanguard. Mohamed declined to answer questions about her work.
“I don’t think she was speaking on behalf of CHD,” said Holland, who said the Africa chapter was a volunteer organisation. “She’s an individual. She has her own views.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Selam Gebrekidan, Justin Scheck, Sarah Hurtes and Pete McKenzie
Photographs by: Uli Seit
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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