How Americans' changing views on health paved the way for RFK Jr.

If you've been on social media over the past few years, odds are you've come across ads or social media influencers peddling products that make dubious medical claims. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many Americans, particularly conservatives, have become more skeptical of science, vaccines and the government's role in health and food policy more broadly — and this has gone hand in hand with a proliferation of misinformation about those same topics. Now, with the probable confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of health and human services, some of these unsupported theories may soon have their loudest megaphone ever.

Kennedy has become one of the leading voices for skepticism of the government's role in medicine and in our food system. Throughout his career as a lawyer, anti-vaccine activist and presidential candidate, Kennedy repeatedly questioned the efficacy and safety of many vaccines despite overwhelming evidence that they're safe. And even during Senate hearings for his pending nomination, he repeated or failed to refute previous controversial statements, including misleading claims about the incidence of chronic diseases and government funding for related research, and made unsupported claims that anti-depressants are addictive and may cause school shootings. As some lawmakers have pointed out, Kennedy also has a personal history of financially benefiting from unsupported health-related claims against companies that would fall under his regulatory purview as HHS: He stands to make money from ongoing lawsuits against vaccine manufacturer Merck and earlier was involved in lawsuits over the safety of chemicals regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, like those found in some pesticides.

The department Kennedy would lead is responsible for approvals, medical research and health guidelines related to vaccines and other drugs through agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health — as well as a significant share of food safety regulations under the FDA. In light of this sweeping purview, infectious disease experts worry that under his leadership, access to vaccinations could be more difficult and funding might be cut for critical research on infectious diseases, like COVID-19 or the ongoing avian flu, while some health and nutrition experts see Kennedy's push to ban certain food additives and ingredients as misdirected, especially in light of other health threats. Beyond this, it's unclear just how Kennedy, who has a long history of spreading public health misinformation, may use his new platform to amplify his own, often unsupported, views.

Many of the ideas Kennedy espouses have their roots in anti-establishment movements that first gained traction among groups along the fringes of politics (like vaccine skepticism among libertarians) or even on the left (like the push toward organic foods and unproven "natural" health remedies). But now, especially with Kennedy's elevation, these ideas have moved further into the mainstream of President Donald Trump's Republican Party — a shift that seems to dovetail with the administration's ongoing efforts to channel mistrust of institutions to dismantle governmental institutions.

Mistrust of science and vaccine skepticism is nothing new, but it saw a major resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator, partly blames the lack of a communications effort from the federal government as they were developing Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership spearheaded by Trump's first administration to rapidly develop a vaccine for the new coronavirus. In the wake of the pandemic, Malaty Rivera's work has focused not just on epidemics, but infodemics, or the proliferation of information that accompanies a disease outbreak — including false information that can negatively impact health outcomes.

"A vaccine [itself] doesn't save a life, a vaccination does," Malaty Rivera said, meaning that the vaccines themselves won't do any good if people won't take them. "To turn a vaccine into a vaccination, you need trust, and you need messages, and you need trusted messengers to share those messages." Without that messaging coming from government health officials, "grifters and snake oil people" filled the gap, she said. "It was a chance to kind of pull from the playbook of misinformation."

Changes in the social media landscape in recent years, with the ubiquity of apps like X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, made it easier than ever for people to claim a platform and purport to share knowledge about potentially harmful foods, medicines and chemicals in ways that resonated with people looking for information. On social media, conspiracies and misinformation about COVID-19 and how to treat it proliferated — including some that were directly amplified by President Trump and his allies. And of course, Kennedy himself reentered the public sphere during the pandemic as a critic of health and governmental institutions, with some social media platforms even banning him at the time for spreading misinformation about COVID-19.

Widespread misinformation surrounding vaccines during the pandemic seemed to have a quick and meaningful impact on Americans' faith in vaccines rates writ large. As fewer Americans, particularly Republicans, believe vaccines are important, childhood vaccination rates have continued to decline for routine childhood illnesses, like the vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella. (A KFF survey from last year found that almost 1 in 5 adults had heard misinformation claiming that the vaccine itself was more dangerous than measles.) Now, 54 percent of adults are concerned that the decline in childhood vaccination rates will lead to more disease outbreaks, according to a January AP-NORC poll.

Frustration over the way public health officials handled the pandemic helped fuel rising mistrust in not just vaccines, but science in general, especially on the right. In a recent PerryUndem/YouGov survey, 65 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that "The whole health system in this country, including public health workers and organizations, is corrupt and doesn't tell the truth."

Pandemic-related misinformation and distrust in institutions also became entwined with other health-adjacent movements online, as these messages were adopted by the wellness influencers that had been growing their social media followings by peddling misinformation about the ingredients in everything from food to cosmetics, or using their platform to sell potential remedies.

Dr. Jessica Knurick, a nutritionist and scientific research consultant, began pushing back against the rise in misinformation she saw online from around 2019 to 2022, making her own TikTok and Instagram videos. "Post-COVID, there was just this huge skepticism about science and traditional medicine, and so I think that that skepticism kind of helped the [predatory side of the] wellness industry … which is using fear-based, conspiratorial marketing to then get you to distrust scientists and then only trust them, so that they can then sell you supplements and other wellness solutions," she said.

Knurick pointed to a specific trend of food influencers finding an item like Froot Loops cereal in the grocery store, pointing out chemical names for ingredients and making false or exaggerated claims that the product has been banned in other countries. (Kennedy himself has made similar claims about Froot Loops.) These types of claims, paired with an increasing awareness about the dangers of ultra-processed foods (an inexact category that sometimes refers to junk food) and heightened concerns about food safety in America, has led to a focus on "bad" foods.

Knurick said many wooed by "Make America Healthy Again," a Kennedy-affiliated political group and political action committee advocating for the removal of certain ingredients from foods and changes to the pharmaceutical industry, have diagnosed some of the correct problems with nutrient-poor foods, but they are wrong about the solutions.

Figures like Kennedy and many wellness influencers tend to place the blame for these bad foods on corporations or government regulators — and Americans seem to agree. In the PerryUndem survey, 86 percent of Americans thought it was very or somewhat likely that "the food Americans eat contribute to the development of chronic illnesses like cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure and depression." And last year, a Gallup poll found that Americans' confidence in the government to ensure food safety is at an all-time low since Gallup began asking the question over 20 years ago.

Plus, experts say Kennedy's focus on banning certain ingredients may be a bit of a red herring. To take the example of food dyes, Knurick noted that there's no evidence that Red Dye 40 contributes to chronic disease in humans. "So you switch Red Dye 40 out with, let's say, beet juice in Skittles. Well, that doesn't improve the health quality of Skittles," she said. Instead, Kennedy's targeted bans are likely to lead to minor reformulations of unhealthy foods, and even mask a broader agenda supporting the longstanding corporate desire to deregulate the food and drug industries and overall gutting of related research and regulatory agencies.

Knurick said she and other experts would rather see the government focus on the bigger picture, like changing the way it subsidizes the food system so that fruits and vegetables are more affordable for families. "There are a bunch of … systemic factors that go into making food accessible for people," she said. "You can't just tell somebody to eat healthy and then put a bunch of policies in place that make it difficult for them to eat healthy."

In light of all this, it makes sense that some of these elements of the "health foods" trend have found a home in the Republican Party, which espouses a kind of rugged individualism that may lend itself to people seeking out unique solutions to feel like they're taking care of themselves and their families — sometimes at the expense of, or in rebellion against, broader governmental regulations or guidance related to public health.

All of that means that experts may have less trust in the public health agencies going forward, and so might everyday people looking for accurate information on everything from vaccinations to food safety. "We're now actually going to be getting mis- and disinformation from those agencies because of these nominations and confirmations," Malaty Rivera said. "That is setting us up for a really, really dangerous … unprecedented issue of the government becoming the proliferator. It's not just going to be, you know, this woman who is a wellness guru on Instagram, it's going to be dot-gov websites."