In 2014, by his own account, delivered on video to a friend’s camera and later to the world, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was driving through upstate New York when he encountered a bear cub that had been struck by a car. He put it in the back of his vehicle. His stated plan was to skin it and eat it, which is legal in New York with the proper permit, and which he did not have, and which is the kind of detail that would trouble a man who was troubled by details.
He then got busy, because there was a dinner in the city, and the bear rode along. Rather than transport a decomposing bear back home, he and a companion drove it to Central Park, arranged it beside a bicycle to suggest a collision, and left, with the specific confidence of a man who has decided that the correct response to having a bear in the car is to make it look like the bicycle’s fault.
The city investigated the mysterious dead bear for days. The mystery was solved a decade later, by the bear’s own chauffeur, who told the story as a charming anecdote.
The whale.
His daughter has told the story of the family driving back from Cape Cod after her father found a dead whale on the beach and removed its head with a chainsaw. The head went on the roof of the minivan. The minivan drove to New York. The family sat beneath it for the length of the trip, and she has described the fluids that came in through the windows in language I will not improve on.
The National Marine Fisheries Service opened an inquiry after this came to light, because taking parts of a marine mammal is a federal offense. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is, as far as the public record shows, the only cabinet official in American history to have been investigated for whale head.
The creek.
On Mother’s Day 2025, three months into the job, the Secretary posted photographs of himself fully submerged in Rock Creek, in Washington, with his grandchildren swimming beside him.
Rock Creek is closed to swimming. It has been closed to swimming since 1971. The National Park Service maintains a standing advisory warning the public to stay out of it, including pets, on account of the high levels of bacteria and infectious pathogens, which come from the sewage that the District of Columbia’s combined sewer system deposits into the creek whenever it rains. A 2022 city report found what it called chronic elevated levels of E. coli.
So the man responsible for the nation’s public health took two small children swimming in a body of water that the government he serves has spent fifty-four years telling people not to touch, and then published the photographs, on purpose, as a wholesome family moment, in the manner of a fire marshal posting vacation pictures from inside a burning house.
A Fox News host defended him on the grounds that the water looked clean in the pictures. That is the standard now. If it looks clean, it is clean. The E. coli is not visible to the naked eye, which is a point in its favor.
The interior.
He has disclosed, under oath in a deposition, that a doctor once told him a parasitic worm had entered his brain, eaten a portion of it, and died there. He has described the brain fog and memory trouble that followed. He has separately disclosed mercury levels in his blood that his own doctors described as very high, and a course of chelation therapy to remove it.
None of that is a joke, and I am not making one. It is simply the case that the Secretary of Health and Human Services has more documented personal experience with parasites and heavy metals than any predecessor in the department’s history, and that this experience has informed his views on what is dangerous in ways that do not track the usual list.
The list.
He opposes fluoride in water. He promotes raw milk, which the FDA he oversees has spent decades warning against because it carries the pathogens pasteurization was invented to kill. He has waged a public campaign against seed oils, with such success that a restaurant chain announced it would “RFK” its french fries by switching to beef tallow, which is the first time in American history a cabinet secretary’s name has been used as a verb meaning to fry things in animal fat.
He pulled a flu vaccine campaign in February 2025 during the worst flu season in decades. He fired all seventeen members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee in June 2025. He cancelled twenty-two mRNA vaccine development projects at the nation’s biodefense agency in August 2025, including the avian flu vaccine, on the stated grounds that the platform does not work against upper respiratory infections. The childhood vaccine schedule has been cut from eighteen diseases to eleven. On August 10 of this year he stood beside the president while the president signed an executive order calling for the MMR vaccine to be split into three separate shots, which is a proposal with no scientific basis and a long history in the movement he used to run.
Taken as a whole, the inventory has an unmistakable shape. Sewage was fine, roadkill was fine, raw milk was encouraged, and the whale was transported. The measles vaccine was to be questioned, split, delayed, and quietly removed from the schedule.
Where the comedy stops.
On February 13, 2025, the Senate confirmed him. On February 14, Texas reported a case of measles in an unvaccinated child. On February 26, an eight-year-old girl in that outbreak died, the first American child to die of measles in more than twenty years. The next day, at a White House meeting, he said measles outbreaks were not unusual.
In the twenty years from 2000 to 2020, the United States recorded three measles deaths total. Since he took office there have been at least four: two unvaccinated children in Texas in 2025, and in August of this year an adult and an infant in Pennsylvania, both unvaccinated, the state’s first measles-associated deaths in thirty-five years. The county coroner has disputed the infant’s cause of death, and the state health department uses the term measles-associated for exactly that reason. The dispute belongs in the record. So does the arithmetic. The national vaccination rate has fallen from 95 percent in 2019 to 92.4 percent, which is below the threshold at which measles stops finding new hosts.
The Pennsylvania deaths were in Lancaster County. In 2021, when he was still chairman of an anti-vaccine organization, he gave a speech in Lancaster in which he told the audience that the cure for measles was chicken soup and vitamin A.
When the governor announced the deaths, the Secretary accused him on social media of gaslighting. He suggested the MMR vaccine contains fetal tissue, which it does not. As of the NPR report that followed, he had not offered condolences to the families, and had not urged unvaccinated people in the outbreak area to get the shot.
What the inventory actually shows.
A man’s tolerance for risk in his own body is his own affair. He can eat the bear, swim in the creek, and drive a whale to Manhattan. Every one of those choices lands on him, and the comedy in them is real, and I have not resisted it.
The office changes the arithmetic. The Secretary of Health and Human Services does not get to hold personal risk tolerances, because the decisions are not personal. They are made once and applied to 340 million people, most of whom did not sign up for the creek, and some of whom are eight years old.
That is the whole finding, and it is not funny at all. The man who will put anything in his body has been placed in charge of what goes into everyone else’s, and he has used the position to remove the one thing on the list that was ever proven to work.
The bear was a bear, and the whale was a whale. The girl in Texas was eight.
This man is a bonafide fucking idiot. A match made in heaven with his commander-in-chief.
He’s insane, but the responsible parties are every senator who voted for his confirmation. They have violated their oath of office and the public trust.