The basement of the Dirksen Senate Office building was packed Wednesday morning with people lining up to watch Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee even though it was taking place on the first floor.
It was the first day of hearings for Kennedy in his attempt to become secretary of Health and Human Services. He will also testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the very committee his late Uncle Ted led as chairman before he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Supporters were decked out in Kennedy gear, and many of them referred to him as “Bobby,” the name used for his father when he roamed through these same halls as a senator from New York and US attorney general before his 1968 presidential campaign and assassination.
Sheri Gagnon and her granddaughter drove from South Carolina to take in the spectacle. “And so I thought, wow, we can go up and support Bobby because Bobby's been supporting us,” she told The Independent.
Kennedy has come under withering criticism for his use of debunked vaccine conspiracy theories. And I’m one of his critics as an autistic person who believes his anti-vaccine rhetoric has harmed the community.
For years, I have traveled around the country interviewing autistic people about their experiences, which are chronicled in my book We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation. In that capacity, I interviewed one young autistic person whose mother blamed herself for vaccinating her child.
In the years since the anti-vaccine panic that Kennedy elevated, we have seen an improvement in how society views autism. But Kennedy puts that progress at risk. By toying with the claim that vaccines cause autism, he is implying that autism is something to be feared and to be avoided and that not taking vaccines will help with that.
Kennedy’s hearing inspired me to go “stealth” to see what his most enthusiastic supporters think about him. One of the benefits of being an autistic person who can speak and hold a job — a luxury many don’t have — is that people don’t know immediately that I am autistic.
“I'm a sit-at-home-and-read kind of person,” Gagnon said. “And I don't like to bother the world, but the world is starting to bother us because the journalists aren't reading the science.”
To Gagnon, Kennedy is someone “lifting the veil” and “he's just like the middleman, and we keep shooting the middleman.”
It is true that the health system consistently fails plenty of people, especially women, with their health claims often discredited by professionals. Amy Macris came to the hearing from Durham, North Carolina, and mentioned how she worked for a biomedical research company when she was diagnosed with a complex illness.
“I went to every specialty and went to different states, and I went to different countries, and no one could help me,” she told me. “So I've put things together myself. I found a few doctors who were outside-of-the-box thinkers, and here I am after 13 years of thinking that I was dying.”
To her, Kennedy is the kind of shakeup needed in the department.
“They understand sickness, and they give you sort of band-aid treatments that really just keep you sick,” she said. “You don't actually heal. They're just putting a band-aid on the symptoms.”
During Kennedy’s hearing, many of his fans looked intently at their phones. During questioning from Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, one of RFK Jr.’s supporters called him “a piece of s**t.”
Some of Kennedy’s supporters were obviously disappointed at how Democrats handled him.
“You have people like Elizabeth Warren, who knows all about regulation with banks she comes from Massachusetts, with all the biotech and health companies,” Susan Labin told The Independent. During the hearing, Warren grilled Kennedy about how he profited from an arrangement from a law firm that specializes in suing drug companies.
Ironically, Andrew Wakefield, the British former physician who promoted the link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and autism, lost his medical license because he did not disclose that he had been paid by law firms suing vaccine manufacturers.
But Chris Devol said he decided to get behind Kennedy largely because of the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.
“I think if anybody truly wants peace, that Bobby is that kind of person, and the Democratic Party proved that they really weren’t interested in doing things,” he said. Devol said he collected signatures to get Kennedy on the ballot in Pennsylvania before Kennedy dropped out to endorse Trump.
“Obviously, we'd prefer him being president, but the team that Trump has put together is absolutely incredible, and I hope that everybody that is so scared to death that Trump will at least take one day at a time, and let's see how things play out,” he said.
Throughout his hearing, Kennedy tried to insist that he was not anti-vaccine, saying that his children were vaccinated, despite the fact, as Sen. Bernie Sanders flagged, his organization, the Children’s Health Defense sold onesies for babies bragging about unvaccinated status.
That does not seem to bother Kennedy’s fans.
“My favorite comparison is between just pure tobacco and Marlboro reds,” Macris said. “You know, the cigarette industry, they add all of these additives to make it more irritating to your lungs, so the tobacco gets in and makes it more addictive.”
The same, she said, is true for vaccines.
“People are talking about thimerosal, which is mercury is incredibly neurotoxic, and we're giving it to children and babies, and we're seeing all these diseases come up,” she said. This came despite the fact that thimerosal was removed from vaccines in 2001 as a precautionary measure.
Labin said she came to the hearing on behalf of her grandchildren and said that even though she did not have autistic grandchildren, her friends were worried about vaccines.
“Because anybody who reads the literature, not the government literature, but the independent peer-reviewed university literature, can see that there is a huge correlation,” she said. “And boys are even more susceptible.”
It’s true that boys are more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) than females. But that has largely been the case going back to initial research on autism. And diagnosis has largely been skewed by gendered perceptions of autism.
For years, autistic people, their families and loved ones have had to wrestle with these lies, the skewing of data, and misinformation. They had to contend with their feeling they did something wrong by vaccinating and failing their children. All the while, Kennedy gained credibility because of his famous name.
Kennedy could not have promoted his presidential campaign had it not been for his previous espousing of anti-vaccine views — views that Trump at a minimum toyed with before running for president and in the days since.
Now, thankfully, the idea that vaccines cause autism has been thoroughly discredited. But falsehoods cannot be untold. Like the viruses that vaccines inoculate against, the misinformation has permeated the bloodstream.
Except now, if he is confirmed, Kennedy will no longer be the problem of autistic people and their loved ones. He will be everyone’s problem. And none of us can go stealth to avoid that.
This article was amended on 29 January 2025. It originally stated that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s organization was called the Children's Defense Fund. But that was incorrect. His organization is called the Children's Health Defense.
