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Bobby Kennedy Jr. Makes Eugenics Great Again at Health and Human Services
RFK Jr. has embarked on policies that frighteningly resemble those of eugenicists: They seek to identify and disempower the underprivileged, they serve anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, and they embrace pseudoscience.
May 17, 2025
Charles Fremont Dight has been reincarnated in the worm-gnawed brain of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. A medical professor at the University of Minnesota, Dight hoped to rid society of its unfit members. Dight, an eccentric who lived for a time in a treehouse, wrote about these unfit people in such publications as "Increase of the Unfit, A Social Menace," and "A Proper Function of Society is to Control Reproduction." Like other eugenicists, Dight believed in stronger immigration laws to keep the unfit aliens, but emphatically not people of Anglo-Saxon "stock," out of the country. In 1933, Dight wrote a letter to Adolf Hitler praising the Fuhrer's efforts to "stamp out mental inferiority."
Eugenics, a mainstream science in the early 20th century, sought restrictive marriage laws, isolation of the "unfit" in special colonies for the "feeble minded," and forced sterilization to shield society from the cost of caring for its most vulnerable citizens. Recent immigrants with poor English, children who had what are now recognized as learning disabilities, Down syndrome Americans, and many others were at risk of being paraded before eugenics courts for summary judgment and sent off to isolation colonies. Once removed from society, the eugenicists claimed, those with better bloodlines would be freed of their burden to care for them.
A Registry of Eugenic Discrimination
Bobby Kennedy, Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has embarked on policies that frighteningly resemble those of eugenicists: They seek to identify and disempower the underprivileged, they serve anti-immigrant and racist sentiment, and they embrace pseudoscience. Bobby Jr. wants to identify citizens with autism and place them in some kind of registry. He ordered the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to build "a real-world data platform enabling advanced research across claims data, electronic medical records, and consumer wearables," to determine the root causes of autism spectrum disorder, and to give Bobby and his team of autism falsifiers data drawn from public and private sources in violation of federal privacy and security rules. (Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently signed an executive order to block the federal government from collecting these data related to autism and to protect "dignity, privacy, and the freedom to live without fear of surveillance or discrimination" of Illinois residents.
Bobby's eugenics registry will succeed in stigmatizing people, especially young people, the way that eugenics surveyors stigmatized the "feeble-minded."
The HSS database, like those of the eugenicists, will be subjective and impressionistic. U.S. eugenicists built a registry for the unfit at the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, New York under director Harry Laughlin. Laughlin and his poorly trained minions assembled index cards about American families, often from a cursory glance at a person's face and carriage, to create genetic family trees. The ERO believed they had proved a huge number of people carrying hereditary disease who could be identified to be isolated or sterilized; 80,000 Americans were sterilized.
Racism and Pseudoscience in HHS
Bobby Jr. shares the eccentricities and racism of the eugenists. He cut up whale skull found on the beach near the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, apparently because he likes to study animal skulls and skeletons, tied it to the roof of the family car, and drove it back to New York, while the rank "whale juice" poured into the car and onto his children. Bobby's interest in skulls may have been kindled by the work of craniologist Samuel Morton (1799-1851). In his Crania Americana Morton set forth a hierarchy of intelligence with Native Americans and Blacks at the bottom to justify their enslavement, removal, and other disturbing acts of violence against them.
Building on Morton's thesis, racist scientists and eugenicists documented lack of mental acuity among African Americans. They assigned Blacks special diseases and susceptibilities, one of which, drapetomania, led slaves to run away from cruel owners; another ordained syphilis as a "Negro disease." These racists believed that Blacks have a higher pain tolerance and weaker lungs that could be strengthened through hard labor (slavery). Bobby Jr. claims that Black people have a stronger immune system than white people and thus should receive vaccines on a different schedule. He observed that "to particular antigens, Blacks have a much stronger reaction." Bobby Jr. has said that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS, and he reiterates the fiction that HIV does not cause AIDS.
Another leg in the eugenicists' program was anti-immigration laws. ERO director Laughlin testified before the U.S. Congress in support of the Immigration Act of 1924 and its restrictions on admission to the U.S. of "races" considered inferior to the Anglo stock. On the basis of flawed data, Laughlin told Congress that recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were "socially inadequate," and tended to "degeneracy, shiftlessness, alcoholism, and insubordination," all of which were supposedly genetic traits. The 1924 act was easily passed signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge who believed that "America must be kept American" and that "biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races."
No wonder Donald Trump selected Bobby Jr. to head HHS. Trump began his first presidential campaign commenting with conviction that Mexican immigrants were drug dealers and rapists. Trump draws on the work of criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and the racial hygienists of Nazi Germany where a person's genes or bloodline determine his or her capacity for success or violence. Trump said, "You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes." But the Trump family has good genes, although his convictions for sex and financial crimes might offer counter evidence: "We're smart people… We're like racehorses." During his ongoing campaign against undocumented aliens and citizens with foreign-sounding names, Trump ordered white South Africans to be given asylum in the U.S., but pointedly not Afghans who fought for freedom against the Taliban, Mexicans, or any other "races."
The Pseudoscience of Mercury-Caused Autism
The entire premise of Bobby's registry is the fully discredited assertion that vaccinations cause autism which is based on a retracted and discredited 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that linked the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. Wakefield combed his data, weeded out some children who didn't fit, and carefully included others. Further, his research was funded by lawyers acting for parents who were involved in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers.
Like Dight, Laughlin, and other eugenicists, Bobby lies and misinterprets data to fit his predetermined and erroneous conclusions that vaccines cause autism. In one article Bobby "claimed that the amount of ethyl mercury in vaccines was 187 times greater than the recommended limit, when it was only 1.4 times greater." He cited one study to contend that tuna sandwiches laced with mercury being fed to two-month-old babies. There is nothing of the sort in the study.
Eugenics and the Decline of Public Health
Bobby's strange mix of false science will exacerbate such public health crises as the ongoing measles epidemic as confused parents deny their children life-saving vaccinations. Bobby Jr. hates vaccines. He referred to the Covid-19 vaccine as "the deadliest vaccine ever made." The vaccine saved perhaps as many as 20 million lives. Kennedy has said that he only drinks raw milk. Doing so puts people at risk of foodborne illness, since pasteurization kills off pathogens. Drinking it may increase the risk of the spread of bird flu. Bobby wants to remove fluoride from drinking water and claims bone cancer, IQ loss, thyroid disease, and other things may result from its use. This is untrue. Fluoride prevents cavities.
Kennedy's fabrications about autism, mercury, and other topics recall the misguided work of eugenicist Henry Goddard. Goodard was the director of research at New Jersey's Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys. He opened an early clinical laboratory to study intellectual disabilities. Tracing the lineage of one of his young patients and building her family tree back to the Revolutionary War, Goddard concluded that intelligence, sanity, and morality were hereditary, and every effort should be undertaken to keep the "feeble-minded" from procreating to eliminate them from the breeding pool. His study on the "Kallikaks" (1912) used touched-up photos to show the Kallikaks as inferior creatures.
Always lurking in the minds of this MAGA government are racist scientific ideas about breeding and innate intelligence; about the evils of immigrants; and about the need to revitalize science away from rigorous hypothesis and testing toward conspiracy, pseudoscience, and eugenics. Bobby's eugenics registry will succeed in stigmatizing people, especially young people, the way that eugenics surveyors stigmatized the "feeble-minded." Perhaps the registry will confirm what is well known: that increasing numbers of people identified with autism is largely to do with increased screening for and greater identification of people with autism. There is no epidemic. But, like a good eugenicist, he has determined his conclusions before the study begins.
Happy measles, everyone! Or, as Donald Trump says, he only hires the best people.
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The Lessons of Covid-19 and Its Long Haul: We Need Community Care
As Trump further weakens public health infrastructure, let us renew our attention to keeping each other safe, supporting the most vulnerable among us, and preventing more mass disablement.
Apr 10, 2025
The Trump administration’s decision to close the Heath and Human Services Office of Long COVID Research and Practice deals yet another blow to our already embattled public health system. This initiative, like the recently terminated Advisory Committee on Long COVID, had signaled much-needed attention to infection-associated chronic diseases, largely overlooked by the U.S. medical establishment.
An estimated 7.5% of adults in the United States suffer from Long Covid, which can affect multiple organ systems with over 200 symptoms from brain fog and sleep problems to joint pain and bedridden fatigue. A diagnosis of Long Covid describes symptoms that continue at least three months after contracting Covid-19. For some, symptoms eventually go away. But for others, symptoms get worse and, frighteningly, new symptoms appear—with no end in sight. Long Covid is variable and unpredictable. I know this because it happened to me.
Covid-19 laid bare our fragile health systems and the necessity of caring for one another.
After escaping Covid-19 for over three years, I developed a moderate case, with fever, cough, body ache, and fatigue. Four months later, when I had almost complete recovered, I suddenly took a turn for the worse. Over the past 15 months I have steadily improved, yet my life remains significantly changed. Aches and pains, post-exertional malaise, and a weakened immune system circumscribe my daily activities. Alongside the challenges of navigating the health conditions themselves is my limited ability to keep Covid-safe amid waning attention to Covid-19—as our government and institutions have abandoned Covid precautions. This puts us all at higher risk of Covid-19 infection, and for those of us with Long Covid this risk is exacerbated—each additional reinfection with Covid exposes us to further complications with Long Covid.
In such a climate of pandemic abandonment, punctuated as early as 2022 when then-President Joe Biden issued his dangerously delusional statement that we were post-pandemic, we can rely even less than before on our government and institutions to save us from either Covid-19 or Long Covid. We must prioritize cultivating our own spaces of care—focusing on prevention, mutual aid, and accommodations for the sick and disabled.
We Need to Cultivate Spaces of Collective Care
The earliest lessons of the pandemic remain true today—we can lower transmission rates through masking, physical distancing, and meeting online, among other precautions. While workplaces, businesses, and public spaces have varied in their implementation of Covid-19 safety, social justice groups, led by disability justice, have led the way from the start.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, my racial justice collective applied our principles of care and justice to Covid-19 safety. We pivoted meetings and gatherings online to Zoom, made use of its breakout rooms for one-on-one debriefs, the chat box for running insights and snark, and the emoji feature for added interpersonal expressiveness. As we learned new ways to build community, it made us more inclusive: Folks who otherwise had barriers to attending in-person—whether that be due to illness and disability or just being out-of-town—could now attend remotely. When gatherings needed to be in-person, like the summer 2020 protests for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we still prioritized Covid-19 precautions. Actions either followed traditional modes of large gatherings but required (and provided) masks, or were smaller so that activists could maintain physical distance. For those who couldn’t participate safely due to Covid-19 or physical disability, remote action was possible, such as handling back-end prep work or coordinating check-ins.
These community care practices remain important even during periods of low community transmission—they make spaces accessible to all.
We Must Hold Ourselves Accountable
Five years into the pandemic, even progressive activist groups have moved away from these lessons. Many no longer require masks at meetings and gatherings, or prioritize online options. This leaves each of us to fend for ourselves individually, abandoning the principles of collective care and disability justice—from access intimacy to “we keep us safe”—that had made such in-roads in our communities. If we cannot collectively learn from this “mass disabling event” of our lifetime, when will we? And if progressive activist groups whose common mission it is to make a world free from oppression—where caring for one another is the dominant ethos—ditch pandemic precautions, what hope is there?
To be sure, we still need to push institutions at the local and federal levels to make available personal protective equipment and resources for frontline workers, better access to healthcare, more research on Long Covid and other underfunded chronic conditions such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). These actions would certainly help support the many biomedical doctors who toil tirelessly for treatments despite biomedicine’s limited approaches to chronic illness, as well as the Chinese medicine and other non-biomedicine doctors, not to mention the patient advocacy groups, who have arguably carried the bulk of the care and treatment for Long Covid sufferers.
I believe we have the most control over our small communities of care. Covid-19 laid bare our fragile health systems and the necessity of caring for one another—and for a time many of us heeded that call. Let us renew our attention to keeping each other safe, supporting the most vulnerable among us, and preventing more mass disablement. And for us activists who say we want to create better worlds, let’s model for everyone else how it’s done.
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Our Covid Reichstag Moment: How Eugenic Interpretations Fuel Authoritarianism
The retroactive calculus of whose lives are worth sacrificing for economic metrics is eerily reminiscent of early 20th-century eugenic practices that sorted humans into categories of "fit" and "unfit," determining whose lives were expendable.
Mar 21, 2025
In a recent episode of The New York Times' "The Daily" podcast, host Michael Barbaro interviewed two Princeton political scientists about their new book examining Covid-19 policy failures. Instead of contextualizing the pandemic response within our current democratic crisis, the episode introduced a troubling revisionist narrative: that public health officials who prioritized saving lives were somehow wrong.
Shrouded under the protective guise of political scientist academics presenting "objective" analysis, a politically biased argument was offered as necessary news for the day—an editorial choice made even more striking given the sheer volume of immediate, existential threats to our democracy that warranted urgent coverage instead. This was the necessary deep dive audience needed to know according to The New York Times to better understand the news of the day on the exact same day when U.S. President Donald Trump was expected to announce the closure of the Department of Education and days after Chief Justice Roberts issued a rare public rebuke of Trump for threatening to impeach a federal judge over a migration ruling. While our judiciary's independence was under direct assault and educational access for millions of Americans hung in the balance, The "Daily" chose to relitigate pandemic policies through the lens of economic grievance—a choice that speaks volumes about which narratives powerful media institutions consider worthy of amplification.
Public health officials who refused to accept this calculus—who insisted that every life deserved protection—were vilified by those who preferred simpler narratives about individual freedom over collective responsibility.
This shift in narrative about Covid-19 and the deliberately limiting analysis of this complex issue is not just provocative but dangerous given the coordinated assault on public health happening across the country. As multiple Republican-led states advance legislation to ban masks—tools proven to save lives and reduce symptom severity—and as the Trump administration threatens academic freedom by pressuring Columbia University to comply with a list of harrowing demands including criminalizing masking on campus, major media platforms are inexplicably amplifying critiques of the very experts who risked their careers and safety to protect the public during a deeply uncertain time. These public health officials have already endured death threats and targeted harassment campaigns from right-wing extremists, including Elon Musk who tweeted one early Sunday morning in 2022 "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci." Now, The New York Times lends its institutional credibility to the same dangerous narratives, effectively mainstreaming the delegitimization of scientific expertise—a classic precursor to authoritarian control.
What's most striking about this conversation isn't just its timing, but what it omits. Throughout history, crises have been exploited by authoritarian forces to dismantle democratic institutions and consolidate power. Covid-19 represents our generation's Reichstag fire moment—a crisis that has been weaponized to erode democratic norms worldwide.
Crisis as Opportunity for Authoritarianism
The historical pattern is clear. After the 1933 Reichstag fire, Hitler immediately blamed communists, enacted emergency powers, suspended civil liberties, and used propaganda to create fear among the German population. Similarly, Russian President Vladimir Putin exploited the 1999 Russian apartment bombings to blame Chechen separatists, launch military campaigns, restrict civil liberties, control media, and crack down on political opposition.
Covid-19 has followed the same authoritarian playbook globally. Governments worldwide enacted emergency powers, increased surveillance, eroded democratic norms, and exploited societal fears. Myanmar's military used the pandemic to justify their 2021 coup. Right-wing extremist groups weaponized misinformation to promote xenophobic rhetoric.
But what's uniquely dangerous about The New York Times' framing is how it subtly reinforces the authoritarian narrative by questioning the very public health experts who refused to calculate human life against economic metrics. When the voices of Dr. Anthony Fauci and others are played alongside criticism from political scientists—not public health experts—who make clear that they measure success beyond the saving of lives, we're witnessing the normalization of disposability. This calculus of whose lives are worth sacrificing for economic metrics is eerily reminiscent of early 20th-century eugenic practices that sorted humans into categories of "fit" and "unfit," determining whose lives were expendable—a ideology that was once condemned by civilized society but now finds subtle—rolling back Medicaid and cutting special education impact disabled people the most—and terribly overt resurrection in our public sphere.
The Real Covid-19 Story Is About Who We Choose to Save
The pandemic revealed which communities our society deemed worthy of protection and which were considered sacrificial for economic priorities. Public health officials who refused to accept this calculus—who insisted that every life deserved protection—were vilified by those who preferred simpler narratives about individual freedom over collective responsibility.
We cannot separate our understanding of the pandemic from the broader context of growing authoritarianism. The forces threatening democracy today are not single-issue problems but interconnected crises: white supremacy, media fragmentation as social media algorithms feed us visions of worlds comprised of binaries instead of nuances, attacks on gender and racial equity, and ludicrously widening wealth inequality. The rich are getting richer while essential workers—disproportionately the economically marginalized and people of color—were sacrificed during the pandemic. And we have lost our shared reality as social media oligarchs make billions from our mistrust of one another—the same oligarchs who now fund the politicians seeking to rewrite pandemic history, who now have metaphorically repaved the front lawn of the White House as a used car lot. These aren't coincidences but a coherent authoritarian strategy: fragment the population, erase collective memory, pit communities against each other, and dismantle faith in expertise and shared facts. And, as The New York Times demonstrated on March 20, you can do this all under the guise of objective reporting.
Covid-19 was successfully exploited by authoritarian leaders worldwide precisely because they offered simple explanations where reality required nuance. They promised quick returns to normalcy when responsible leadership demanded difficult truths. They divided communities into the essential and non-essential, the worthy and unworthy.
Responsible Media Must Connect the Dots
When major media outlets like The New York Times allow political scientists to critique public health experts without this broader context, they become unwitting accomplices in the authoritarian project. By focusing narrowly on whether lockdowns were "effective" without examining how authoritarians exploited both the crisis and the response, they miss the forest for the trees. They become complicit in emboldening authoritarians.
The question isn't whether public health officials made perfect decisions with imperfect information during an unprecedented global emergency. The question is: Who benefits from undermining trust in the institutions and experts who tried to save as many lives as possible, regardless of economic cost? The answer should trouble us: the same authoritarian forces that have weaponized every crisis throughout history to dismantle democratic institutions and consolidate power.
As we approach the fifth anniversary of the Covid-19 crisis, we will inevitably see more attempts to understand and reframe that era—but these analyses must be conducted responsibly.
As we reflect on Covid-19's impact, responsible journalism must place these conversations within our broader democratic crisis. The political scientists at Princeton should know better. The New York Times should know better. And those of us who lived through the pandemic—who witnessed firsthand how extremist politicians like Trump weaponized confusion and suffering to stoke fear, cultivate rage, and deepen divisions—we certainly do know better. We watched as misinformation about masks, vaccines, and public health measures was deliberately spread to fracture communities and undermine institutions. We saw how this manufactured outrage directly fueled the violence at the Capitol and created the fertile ground for today's authoritarian resurgence. Our lived experience of this cynical exploitation demands more from our media than revisionist narratives that conveniently forget this deliberate destabilization.
We must ask ourselves why certain narratives are amplified at specific moments in our national conversation. As we approach the fifth anniversary of the Covid-19 crisis, we will inevitably see more attempts to understand and reframe that era—but these analyses must be conducted responsibly, with full awareness of how limiting narratives can embolden authoritarians and reinforce eugenic hierarchies. The New York Times chose to revisit Covid-19 policies on the same day the Department of Education faced potential elimination—yet they failed to connect how disabled students, already disproportionately harmed during the pandemic, would lose critical protections and supports if this department disappeared. This is not coincidental. It is part of a pattern where eugenic ideology infiltrates mainstream discourse precisely when vulnerable communities need protection most. Media institutions that claim to help us make sense of the world instead reinforce the disposability of certain lives—whether by advocating economic metrics over human survival, by giving platforms to those who see the disabled as acceptable collateral damage, or by simply choosing which crises deserve attention and which can be ignored.
Our responsibility is clear: We must identify these eugenic patterns whenever they appear, name them for what they are, and refuse to accept any worldview that sorts human beings into categories of those worth saving and those not worth saving. When media fails in this moral obligation, we must hold them accountable—not just for the stories they choose to tell, but for the future they help create through those choices. The lessons of history demand nothing less.
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