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From COVID-19 conspiracy theories to confusion on the facts about Medicare and Medicaid to refusing to say that vaccines aren’t linked to autism, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings this week on Capitol Hill were anything but smooth for someone who is hoping to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
While his history of anti-vaccine remarks was a major talking point throughout the hearings, his beliefs were also front and center during a heated exchange in which Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) brought up a comment that Kennedy once made about vaccinations and the Black community.
In 2021, Kennedy had said, “We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites, because their immune system is better than ours.”
Alsobrooks asked Kennedy to explain what he meant by that remark, and he went on to reference a “series of studies” while saying research shows that “Blacks need fewer antigens.” (For the record, experts say that this is not true.)
“Right now, how vaccine schedules are tailored is based on things like your age, your exposure risk, if you have other chronic underlying health conditions ― but race isn’t one of them, and there isn’t research that suggests that it should be,” Joel Bervell, a recent medical graduate and medical myth-buster on social media, told HuffPost.
What especially bothered Bervell about Kennedy’s exchange with Alsobrooks was the fact that he doubled down on his comment from 2021.
Kennedy could have used this as an opportunity to admit that he needs to do more research and understand the vaccine schedule, “but instead, he defended what he said, which I think, for me, that’s where the problem lies in,” Bervell told HuffPost. “Not necessarily the fact of the misinformation is out there, but the fact that he wasn’t willing to at least confront it or admit that onstage.”
Below, experts like Bervell share their concerns about Kennedy’s statement and how it reflects a larger problematic picture:
Kennedy’s comment can be considered ‘scientific racism,’ experts say.
“In medicine, in science, we know that race is a social construct, meaning that you can’t look at someone’s genes and identify what race they are,” Bervell said.
That means differences in vaccine timelines just don’t make scientific sense.
“The comment that [Kennedy] made about the vaccine schedule, it’s basically scientific racism, which has been debunked,” Dr. Oni Blackstock, a primary care and HIV physician who is the founder and executive director of Health Justice, a racial and health equity consulting company, told HuffPost.
“He’s really perpetuating this false belief that Black people are somehow biologically different from white people and, in that way, justifying differential and ultimately unequal treatment for Black people versus white people,” Blackstock added.
“By saying that, he was putting on one of the larger stages in health care this notion that race-based medicine should still exist, when that’s actually what many scientists recently have been trying to root out,” Bervell said.
Race-based medicine and scientific racism has led to undertreatment of Black patients, dismissal of pain and even death, Blackstock stressed.
Both experts pointed to real-life examples of this, like the false belief that Black people have better-functioning kidneys than white people. This made it harder for Black people to get the treatment they needed, like kidney transplants, according to Bervell. And this thought pattern isn’t from some faraway time ― a medical equation that reinforced this bias wasn’t changed until 2021, Bervell said.
What’s more, during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia, Black people were believed to be resistant to yellow fever, which was not true and led to high mortality rates among Black people, Blackstock explained.
“The importance of understanding the problem with the myths is that they can literally lead to regulations being written into medicine that treat populations differently just based on race,” Bervell said. “It can actually change the care that people receive.”
While it’s easy to look at a particular viewpoint as a one-off, medical racism has real-world consequences that irresponsible comments can make worse. Promoting debunked beliefs “distracts us from really doing the work that we need to do, which is dismantling systemic racism in health care and ensuring that everyone has equitable access to preventive care and treatments that they need,” Blackstock added.
Anna Moneymaker via Getty Images
Such stances may lead to more mistrust in the health care system.
“One thing that is also kind of strange about him [Kennedy] is he’s someone who for a long time has said that he doesn’t support vaccines,” Bervell said. “Apparently, now he’s changed his mind, but for a long time he said he hasn’t supported vaccines, and then he’s also saying that Black people should get a different vaccine schedule. So you have to wonder, what is your goal in saying that if you don’t even believe in vaccines?”
Bervell said comments like those from Kennedy can sow vaccine hesitancy in the Black population, which is dangerous and can erode trust in evidence-based medicine.
It’s not the first time that this has happened, either, Blackstock added. In 2021, Kennedy produced a documentary called “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid,” which Blackstock said promoted misinformation about health and vaccines to the Black community, along with other marginalized groups.
“It’s interesting how some of his efforts have been focused on taking advantage of [and] exploiting the mistrust that some in the Black community have around vaccines and the health care system because of structural racism and medical racism,” Blackstock said.
With misinformation and scare tactics rampant on social media, misinformation from government leaders will only make it harder to tell what’s real and what’s fake in medicine. Trust needs to be paramount for health care as an institution, Bervell said.
“The trust is already eroded in health care,” Bervell explained. “We need to have someone that is going to work with scientists, researchers, doctors that are on the ground seeing these problems every day, not someone that’s in an ivory tower watching from above without understanding of what’s actually happening on the ground.”
Experts say this rhetoric aligns with messaging from Donald Trump.
Blackstock stressed that while such false beliefs are very problematic, they track with much of the messaging from Donald Trump and his new presidential administration.
“It echoes some of the rhetoric that [Trump] has shared around eugenics and immigrants,” Blackstock said. “He’s talked about immigrants having ‘bad genes’ or ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ It just speaks to this idea of racial purity or genetic purity, and this false idea that certain groups of people are inherently inferior or predisposed to certain behaviors because of their genetics.”
And, again, race is a social construct and does not equal genetic differences. “It’s just really shocking that in the year 2025 we are still dealing with these beliefs being propagated that have been around for several centuries that have been used to justify slavery, used to justify inequitable treatment, used to justify forced sterilization,” Blackstock said.
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Blackstock added that she thinks individuals get away with this kind of rhetoric because people become accustomed to outlandish comments and bad behavior.
“But we need to really flag this and say this is really dangerous and really concerning rhetoric that can have real health implications,” Blackstock said.