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robert f. kennedy jr
'These People Are Shameless': RFK Jr.'s Son Launches Healthcare Investment Fund
"The festering swamp of corruption and self-dealing surrounding the Trump White House just got even deeper."
Apr 25, 2026
US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s son, Finn Kennedy, is reportedly seeking to raise $100 million for a new healthcare industry investment fund that will seek to capitalize on "policy initiatives in government"—including RFK Jr.'s so-called Make America Healthy Again agenda.
The Financial Times reported Friday that Finn Kennedy's fund, Victura Ventures, has already secured roughly $70 million in commitments. The fund is "targeting early-stage growth companies involved in healthcare AI, consumer health, and other health technologies," FT reported, citing an offering document.
"Kennedy’s foray into healthcare investing marks the latest example of the cozy relationship between the Trump administration and close associates who have sought to capitalize on it," the newspaper added. "Sons of President Donald Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have invested in cryptocurrency businesses as Trump has promoted alternative currencies. Donald Trump Jr. has joined the board of 1789 Capital, a fund founded by pro-Trump donors in 2023. At least four of 1789’s portfolio companies have won contracts from the Trump administration. 1789 has also invested in big government contractors, such as Anduril and Elon Musk’s SpaceX."
Additionally, as Common Dreams reported on Thursday, Eric Trump appeared on Fox Business to brag about a $24 million Pentagon contract secured by Foundation Future Industries, where the president's son serves as chief strategy adviser.
"These people are shameless," journalist Doug Henwood wrote in response to the reporting on Finn Kennedy's new fund.
The advocacy group Protect Our Care said the FT reporting and a Friday story in The New York Times—which detailed how a top Kennedy aide "was advising on changes to the American health system while running a rapidly growing wellness company poised to benefit from Trump administration health policies"—show that "the festering swamp of corruption and self-dealing surrounding the Trump White House just got even deeper."
According to the Times, Kennedy aide Calley Means "held between $25 million and $50 million in stock in the company, Truemed, through November, as he continued to serve as its president."
"For months, Mr. Means has ignored questions from Democrats in Congress about his finances, including the extent of his stake in Truemed, and how they related to federal policy," the Times added.
Kayla Hancock, the director of Protect Our Care’s Public Health Project, said in a statement Friday that "it’s perhaps easy for RFK Jr. to look at Donald Trump and Commerce Secretary Lutnick blatantly abuse the power of the White House to enrich themselves, family members, and big donors, and say, ‘Why not me?’"
"Kennedy claims he’s following ethics rules, but why did he keep the barn door open for his son and close associates to profit off his policy decisions?" asked Hancock. "It follows a corrupt pattern of Trump administration officials exploiting loopholes to steer money into their family and friends’ pockets at the same time they rip away healthcare from millions of Americans and push policies that hike costs on everything from insurance premiums, gas, to groceries.”
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Defending TrumpRx Scam, RFK Jr. Absurdly Claims Trump 'Has His Own Way of Calculating' Percentages
"You can't just redefine how you calculate percentages," said one mathematician in response to Kennedy's claims.
Apr 22, 2026
US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday tried to defend President Donald Trump's mathematically absurd claims about prescription drug prices by saying the president has his own unique method of calculating percentages.
During a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) grilled Kennedy about the president's repeated false claims that he has slashed the prices of prescription drugs by as much as 600%, which would mean that pharmaceutical companies are paying consumers to take their medications.
"President Trump has his own way of calculating," Kennedy replied. "There's two ways of calculating percentages. If you have a $600 drug, and you reduce it to $10, that's a 600% reduction."
RFK Jr: "President Trump has a different way of calculating percentages. If you have a $600 drug and you reduce it to $10, that's a 600% reduction." pic.twitter.com/MjDNADqc8p
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 22, 2026
In fact, such a drop in price would represent a 98.3% reduction, less than one-sixth the size of the president's claims. A 600% reduction in the price of a $600 drug would mean that drug manufacturer paid consumers $3,000 every time they picked up their prescription.
Kit Yates, a mathematician at the University of Bath, marveled at Kennedy's attempts to create an alternate version of arithmetic.
"We've known for a while that the USA's current regime have been out for science, but I never thought they would try to mess with math!" Yates wrote in a social media post. "You can't just redefine how you calculate percentages."
In addition to exposing Kennedy's apparent ignorance of elementary mathematics, Warren shined a light on how the TrumpRx website misleads consumers into thinking they're being offered bargains on prescription drugs that are available elsewhere in generic varieties.
In once instance, Warren noted that TrumpRx is selling a brand-name heartburn medication for $200, whereas a generic version of the same drug is available at Costco for $16. Warren also highlighted a heart arrhythmia drug for sale on TrumpRx for $336, even though a generic version of the drug is available at Costco for $12.
Warren added that, in exchange for making select brand-name drugs available on the TrumpRx website, pharmaceutical companies have gotten exemptions from the president's 100% tariffs on imported patented medicines.
"Think about that: Big Pharma makes billions of dollars in tariff relief by listing their drugs on TrumpRx, and then they don't even lower the costs on many of these drugs," she said. "That is a great deal for Big Pharma."
Warren's analysis of TrumpRx's pricing scheme echoes a March report from the Center for American Progress (CAP), which found that the president's prescription drug website offered genuinely lower prices on “exactly one” of the 54 medications listed.
CAP also found that nearly one-third of the drugs available on the TrumpRx website have generic alternatives that were cheaper than what was being offered, and that the website made no mention of this.
Reuters reported in December that at least 350 branded medications are set for price hikes in 2026, including “vaccines against Covid, RSV, and shingles,” as well as the “blockbuster cancer treatment Ibrance.”
Later in the Senate Finance Committee hearing, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) ridiculed Kennedy for claiming that, under Trump's leadership, "the American people are now paying the lowest costs in the world rather than the highest for prescription drugs."
"That is an absurd statement," Sanders said. "Nobody in the world believes that."
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Peer-Reviewed Health Study Warns of Trump's 'Silent But Deadly Assault' on Health of Americans
“This is not just a policy shift—it’s a wholesale abandonment of government commitments to the American public," said one advocate.
Mar 31, 2026
The so-called "Make America Healthy Again" movement encapsulated a key campaign promise ahead of President Donald Trump's second term in office, with Trump telling one Pennsylvania crowd in 2024, "We’re going to get toxic chemicals out of our environment, and we’re going to get them out of our food supply."
But the Trump administration has gradually announced a slew of public health-related policies and proposals since the president took office—pushing to loosen emissions rules for the cancer-causing gas ethylene oxide; suggesting the polio vaccine should be optional; and mandating the production of carcinogenic glyphosate—and a peer-reviewed study has now cataloged the "grave threat to America's health" that Trump's policies present.
"During the first administration of President Donald Trump, nearly 100 environmental and occupational protections, including air-quality safeguards, were rescinded," reads the study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on March 25. "Although many of those rescissions were delayed by litigation or reversed by President Joe Biden, they inflicted considerable harm on Americans’ health. The second Trump administration’s actions have been even more aggressive, portending greater harm."
Weeks after the US Senate confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy in February 2025—a confirmation that he secured after making the baseless claim that Americans would prefer the for-profit insurance system over universal healthcare and refusing to reject debunked claims about vaccines—the administration appeared to make clear its true views on public health when it announced 31 climate regulation rollbacks.
"Those initiatives and other administration actions are set to reverse progress on pollution, make workplaces more dangerous, and (in Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin’s words) drive 'a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion,'" reads the study.
The proposals swiftly introduced by the administration included:
- Loosening standards for particulate matter 2.5 pollution, which killed approximately 460,000 people in the US from 1999 to 2020;
- Ending subsidies for clean energy production under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act;
- Weakening tailpipe emissions standards, putting Americans at greater risk for cardiopulmonary mortality and climate crisis risks; and
- Delaying implementation of stronger silica rules for coal miners—putting them at risk for black lung disease—while also demanding that coal plants continue production.
Ken Cook, co-founder of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), said the study described "a deliberate dismantling of safeguards that protect the air, water, and health of nearly every person in this country—all in the service of polluters."
“This is not just a policy shift—it’s a wholesale abandonment of government commitments to the American public and the MAHA movement that helped propel Trump into office,” said Cook, who did not contribute to the study.
Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and public health physician who directs the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College and is the lead author of the paper, told EWG that the “impacts of these rollbacks will fall most heavily on the most vulnerable among us—including infants—resulting in brain injury, neurodevelopmental disorders, increased preterm births, and elevated lifelong risk of chronic disease.”
Children and other vulnerable populations, including those in low-income communities situated close to petrochemical industrial areas, are likely to have increased mercury, benzene, and arsenic exposures—raising their risk of developing cancers and other diseases—due to the Trump administration's rollbacks, according to the study.
"Several proposed policies would weaken water-quality standards, reducing drinking-water safety for millions of people," reads the paper. "For example, the EPA seeks to weaken regulations governing effluent discharges from coal-fired power plants. The resulting increase in waterborne lead, mercury, and arsenic will increase the incidence of bladder cancers and adversely affect children’s cognitive function."
The study's authors emphasized that "statistics and documentation are not enough" to protect the public from the White House's harmfiul policies.
"Unless health professionals speak up, and unless we put a human face on the tragic consequences of these environmental rollbacks, the connection between these seemingly abstract policy changes and the real health harms they cause may remain invisible," reads the study. "We health professionals must call urgent attention to this silent but deadly assault on Americans’ health, work with broad coalitions to halt it, and ultimately rebuild the agencies, protections, and shared sense of trust and responsibility that have given us clean air and water and enabled us and our children to live longer, healthier lives."
Cook noted that the NEJM itself has been a target of the administration, with Kennedy calling highly respected, science-based journals "corrupt" and the Department of Justice questioning the publication's editorial integrity.
“No amount of political pressure or intimidation should silence independent science or the experts working to protect public health,” Cook said. “The NEJM and the study’s authors rightly ignore those threats and lay bare the real-world consequences of the Trump administration’s actions—and the American people deserve to hear it.”
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