RFK Jr is Asking to Be Proven Wrong Again So Here Are 40 Examples From Just One CNN Interview

He's just creating work for us at this point

Yesterday Americans woke up to US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appeared on CNN State of the Union to croak at Dana Bash like the ghost in The Grudge, death rattling off a laundry list of nonsense that remains highly lethal despite its absolute implausibility.

As usual, Kennedy took America on a shambling journey through the wonderful, backwards world of MAHA revisionist history. In this world—which, to be clear, never existed or happened at all—we were all brought to our knees by totalitarian dictator Joe Biden and his sinister freedom-hating henchman, dangerous gain of function virologist Anthony S. Fauci. From his lofty perch at the deep state National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) communist headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, Fauci pulled the strings of the entire federal government like the master marionette that he became after nearly fifty years of public service. With a fistful of viruses and experimental gene therapy shots, he decreed the public be locked down over a fake pandemic so that Big Brother Biden could seize control and take away our constitutional rights!

Kennedy covered his full routine, from autism to vaccines, and even threw in some new material. It was news to me that one of my colleagues cooked up RSV in a lab at some point!

This is Kennedy’s favorite method: show up and hit the interviewer with a firehose of bullshit so forceful it throws them off. Bash did correct a few of his most egregious lies, which put Kennedy in a very vexed state. He does not like it when his lies are exposed. So I decided to do that comprehensively.

The tyranny that wasn’t

Most of what Kennedy is able to get away with comes from the public’s willingness to accept the lie that the pandemic was both Biden’s fault and intention, because it was a communist plot to impose dictatorship on America by exploiting public health law, vaccination, and virology research could to tear up the Constitution and crush liberty. Remember when we were locked up in our homes while ICUs were empty because COVID was made up? Me neither.

1. “We have the highest death rate from COVID of any nation on Earth.”

False. That would be Peru. With a big chunk of eastern Europe and the Balkans in between. The US is all the way down at number 16 when this is calculated at the same rate Kennedy himself described. These are cumulative deaths since the pandemic started, so they show all deaths from COVID-19 ever recorded. I made a figure.

Source data here

2. Lockdowns “shut down 3.5 million businesses in our country with no due process, no just compensation. All of our churches closed, our schools, and our children are still paying the price for that.”

False. An analysis by the Federal Reserve found that, although there were upward of a million temporary business closures, fewer than 200,000 business closed up shop for good in 2020. And new business applications eventually surged. Although an analysis of Census bureau data found that active business owners dropped by 22%— about 3.3 million business owners—from February to April 2020, this doesn’t equate to 3.5 million businesses being shut down.

Furthermore, the “lockdowns” in question were endorsed wholeheartedly by Trump, who took full credit for the idea and bragged that it was the best pandemic response in the world. American lockdowns were “The President’s Coronavirus Guidelines for America.” Trump was proud to close schools, churches, restaurants, and plenty of businesses.

Trump was also very proud of the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) and unemployment relief funds he set up to offset the economic impact of these closures. These programs since been looted shamelessly by millions of fraudsters. Naturally, that includes Trump’s friends and family members.

3. “The president was trying to reopen the country. When he left, the country was kept closed for another year — almost a year and a half after that.”

False. Kennedy would like people to forget how time works and who shut things down. The peak of restrictions occurred in the second quarter of 2020, right around the same time that Trump was convening daily progressively more insane COVID update press conferences. I’ll never forget how I yelped on April 23, 2020, when he said that injecting Lysol or UV light would be “almost a cleaning.”

The liberty-ruining “lockdowns” Kennedy hates were Donald Trump’s idea, not Joe Biden’s. Do you remember 15 Days to Slow the Spread? On March 16, 2020, Trump complimented the White House press pool on their social distancing skills and told all Americans to stay home, avoid gathering, avoid travel, avoid going out to restaurants, and close schools. Let me refresh your memory:

Most restrictions ended by June 2021, although this varied from state to state. Big Brother Biden was only able to dispense absolute public health authoritarianism for about four months, not a full year after Trump left office.

4. “There were ICUs that were empty all over the country, including in New York at the height.”

False. This is a Plandemic conspiracy theory dogwhistle meant to suggest that the pandemic was actually a hoax. That is admittedly inconsistent with Kennedy’s assertion that the US had more COVID deaths than any other country, but the conspiracy theories invariably conflict with one another. Consistency of belief is one way to assess trustworthiness, especially on scientific topics. People who hold conflicting views—like the pandemic was the worst thing ever and also it was made up—often do not provide reliable or evidence-based information.

This is also a demonstrable lie. In New York, “the height” of the first big pandemic surge occurred in spring 2020. The ICUs—and hospitals in general—were so overwhelmed that Trump dispatched the USNS Comfort to float like a plague ship under the stern gaze of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor. A friend and colleague at Columbia, a physician at New York Presbyterian, described their workplace in April 2020 to me as “the fucking apocalypse.”

ICU and hospital capacity changes during epidemics and COVID cases surge in waves geographically, so during that period, ICUs and hospital beds were likely empty in other parts of the country. But that doesn’t mean the pandemic was a fictional excuse for locking Americans down in their homes.

5. “During covid, we completely dismantled our constitutional rights.”

False. At no point during the pandemic under either Trump or Biden were constitutional rights violated. The government didn’t force people to stay in their homes. The police didn’t arrest people for going for a walk or going to the grocery store. Nobody was detained because they weren’t wearing a mask. Joe Biden’s COVID policies never deprived Americans of their constitutional rights.

What did happen under both Biden and Trump was that state and local leaders enforced different policies around the country. Businesses and schools elected whether or not to impose vaccine requirements or mask policies. State and local governments passed laws and enforced regulations governing these things in various ways. There was no dismantling of our constitutional freedoms.

6. “We began censoring people in violation.”

False. Nobody was censored, especially Kennedy.

I wonder if Kennedy and I speak the same language sometimes, because he has a completely different understanding of what “censorship” means than I do. He has previously claimed that he was “deplatformed everywhere”. In reality, his Instagram account was removed in 2021. Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vax organization he founded, had their YouTube channel suspended in 2021 and their Meta accounts permanently removed in August 2022. All were fully restored by 2023.

He also wrote four books: The Real Anthony Fauci, A Letter to Liberals, Vax-Unvax (with the Johnny Appleseed of measles, CHD’s “Chief Scientific Officer” Brian Hooker), and The Wuhan Cover-Up. His publisher claims that they have sold more than a million copies and lasted weeks on the New York Times bestseller lists.

He appeared more than fifty times on cable news, although that number is much higher if you include the fringe right wing and anti-vax news ecosystems. He also wrote five op-eds for Newsweek. He wrote almost fifty pieces for The Defender, CHD’s newsletter. He appeared on every major MAGA/MAHA influencer podcast: Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, and Jordan Peterson.

He ran for President. When he dropped out of the election and endorsed Trump, his MAHA base arguably was what gave Trump the votes to win. He was rewarded for this with a position that will allow him to put millions of Americans at risk of an early preventable death.

None of that seems like “censorship” to me.

Lockdown Bobby

Fair to say Bobby isn’t 100% objective on this topic?

7. “Anthony Fauci was mismanaging the COVID pandemic, and was doing it under the Biden administration. President Trump wanted to end the lockdowns.”

False. Fauci was not in charge of the US response and there were never federal lockdowns. Trump didn’t want to end the lockdowns. He recommended them! Actual restrictions on gatherings and businesses were imposed by state and local government officials (usually governors).

They were recommended by the White House Coronavirus Task Force chaired by Kennedy’s predecessor, HHS Secretary Alex Azar. Fauci was one of many government advisors including CDC Director Robert Redfield, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, Task Force Response Coordinator Deborah Birx, Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brett Giroir, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, and CMS Administrator Seema Verma. Fauci was not the only guy in the room offering advice. He wasn’t even in charge of the advice task force.

It’s important to remember that no matter how much he distances himself now, at the time, Trump said all of these recommendations were his idea. Trump was not trying to end the lockdowns. He was taking credit for them.

8. “They were doing it because Anthony Fauci was telling them from the top, ‘you need to lock down.’”

False. Fauci had no such authority and there was never a federal lockdown.

9. “Now we know that Anthony Fauci, who was the expert, was lying about everything, about masks, about the social distancing, about natural immunity, about the transmission from the vaccine, about the source of COVID. He was lying.”

False. Fauci is an expert, but he was not “lying about everything.” Fauci did say, incorrectly, that masks did not work early on. It’s also true that social distancing was implemented without much data to back it up. That’s the thing about pandemics and crises in general: even experts are faced with vast knowledge gaps, and have to do the best they can.

Fauci did not lie about “natural immunity.” This complaint is that vaccines were still recommended (and required at some workplaces) for people who already had COVID. This wasn’t Fauci’s idea; it was recommended because we didn’t know how protective infection-acquired immunity would be and it would be much more variable than vaccine-induced immunity. The vaccines were demonstrably safe and effective, so there was minimal risk and significant benefit from that recommendation. Studies since then have shown that so-called “hybrid immunity” (vaccinating people who previously had COVID) produces the broadest and most durable protection.

Fauci also did not lie about transmission from the vaccine. At no point did Fauci claim that vaccination prevents transmission, because that’s not a statement most competent virologists or vaccine researchers would make. Most vaccines do not completely prevent transmission. Vaccines stop epidemics when enough people are immune that sustained transmission becomes impossible because there aren’t enough susceptible hosts around.

Finally, Fauci did not lie about the source of COVID. My own published research demonstrates that, but here’s more information about that:

Freedom of quackery

10. “There are 15 million frontline physicians around the world.” Partly true — about 14.8 million physicians, but not “frontline.”

False premise, true fact. Although there are about 15 million people with a degree that bestows the title of physician, it is absurd to suggest that every single one of them cried out for ivermectin and…ignored themselves, I guess? I am not sure how every physician in the world can be silenced when they are also the medical establishment. Also, this counts people like NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and rejected Surgeon General nominee Casey Means who have never been board certified or maintained a serious clinical practice, so “frontline” is an essentially meaningless term.

11. “There were therapeutics out there that were working. There were doctors that were having no deaths from COVID and treating, in some cases, thousands of patients. And we weren't listening to them. Instead, we were doing the opposite — we were shutting them down.”

False. The drugs were tested and failed. A mountain of studies now show that neither ivermectin nor hydroxychlorine work to treat COVID-19. And it’s not as though drug discovery, repurposing, and development weren’t successful. Monoclonal antibodies were available in months. When dexamethasone was shown to improve clinical outcomes for severe COVID-19, it was implemented into clinical practice right away. Paxlovid was also made available under an emergency use authorization and rolled out quickly. No therapeutics that actually worked were suppressed.

12. “And one of the mistakes we made in the last time was suppressing those rights so people weren't being heard. Doctors who were saying you're doing it wrong or being marginalized and vilified.”

False. The supposedly marginalized and vilified doctors he’s referring to have made millions with ivermectin scamming. Trump pardoned one of them for her crimes on January 6, 2021, giving her extra credibility with her more pro-fascist marks.

13. “You are scaring people. Because that was the job of CNN.”

False. I’m all for having a discussion about the mainstream media’s many failures to meet the moment, both during the pandemic and now. But it is plainly stupid to say that CNN’s job is “scaring people.” This is Kennedy’s attempt to downplay the pandemic and further tilt America’s ability to understand reality by denigrating the free press.

14. Studies showing that COVID disinformation cost as many as 200,000 American lives are “nonsense” and “actually don’t exist.”

False. Here are two studies, in their full existential glory.

15. The media was “punishing people for not trusting the experts.”

False. Time for your daily lesson in Orwellian doublespeak. In this context, “punishment” means grifters losing their medical licenses for selling unproven or ineffective treatments for COVID, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and anything that ails you and can be prescribed via telemedicine or compounded.

The DGOF virologists are at it again

16. “People have been trying to put guardrails around it for generations and it hasn’t worked.”

False. I realize that “generation” may be a somewhat flexible unit of measurement, but I don’t know that we’ve been struggling for generations to specifically regulate so-called “dangerous gain of function” (DGOF) research when most of the serious discussion about virology regulation and oversight started in the late 2000s. DGOF used to mean making viruses more transmissible and/or pathogenic through engineering. Now DGOF means anything involving viruses that the administration can weaponize politically.

If we are talking human generations, I suppose that we’ve now been grappling with this for a single generation, assuming a teen pregnancy.

17. “And clearly, [the] COVID-19 pandemic and many other global pandemics that we have have come from gain-of-function research.”

False. No pandemic in recorded history has been traced to gain-of-function research. The 1918 H1N1, 1957 H2N2, 1968 H3N2 and 2009 pH1N1 flu pandemics were all zoonotic. HIV-1 can be traced back to viruses that infected people at the turn of the 20th century.

The only research-related pandemic is 1977 H1N1 “Russian flu,” which was nearly identical to frozen strains from the 1950s. Although the circumstances are not well-known, it is likely that this was either a vaccine trial or human challenge study gone wrong. However, it was not the result of DGOF research. This was a naturally occurring flu strain that leaked from a lab, not something that had been engineered or selected.

18. RSV is “the biggest killer of kids in this country today.”

False. The biggest killer of kids in America is gun violence, which takes nearly 5000 children’s lives every year. RSV causes 100-300 deaths per year in children under five, according to CDC.

19. “The RSV epidemic that we have…came from these kind of experiments.”

False. RSV was first isolated from sick monkeys in 1956, which is when they discovered that a whole bunch of babies and people had antibodies to it. That means it was already a widespread human pathogen, so if it was the result of DGOF, the virologists who did it must have been time travelers or exceptionally gifted clairvoyants. What lab was doing cloning and molecular virology before we worked out the central dogma of molecular biology?

RSV is also not an epidemic. It is an endemic pathogen that recurs seasonally. That has nothing to do with its origin, but it speaks to how poorly Kennedy understands the terminology he uses.

20. “The Lyme disease almost certainly came from this kind of research.”

False. This is a conspiracy theory that suggests the CIA rescued Nazi scientists from Nuremberg and brought them to Plum Island, a USDA animal disease research facility in New York. Once there, they made the bacteria that causes Lyme disease and lab leaked it by releasing ticks around Long Island and Connecticut. This requires said Nazis to have mastered synthetic biology methods so advanced they don’t exist now, except in the early 1950s. Evidently they were so secretive the methods they use elude us to this day…which makes sense, considering it’s all made up. Despite the stupidity of this conspiracy theory, it is widespread within HHS. Former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary appeared on a right-wing podcast promoting it and Kennedy has incorporated it into policy.

Lyme disease is caused by bacteria transmitted through tick bites, mostly Borrelia burgdorferi (and some other Borrelia species as well). B. burgdorferi DNA has been amplified from museum samples (Ixodes ticks collected on Long Island in 1945 and Peromyscus leucopus deer mouse museum skins from the 1890s). Genomic studies show that North American Borrelia species evolved over tens of thousands of years. In Europe, clinical cases of Lyme disease were first observed in 1909. These bacteria have been around for a long time. They weren’t cooked up by secret Nazis in a deep state government lab.

21. Kennedy thinks that there is not “one instance in history where research that came out of this kind of experimentation has actually provided us something beneficial.”

False. Virology research, including studies that qualify as DGOF, is the reason why Operation Warp Speed succeeded. If there hadn’t been twenty years of fundamental studies of SARS-related coronaviruses—many of which were funded by NIAID and carried out by my colleagues facing persecution today—we would not have known to target the prefusion spike protein or that mRNA vaccines were likely to be safe and effective. This work made COVID vaccines possible in 10 months. It saved millions of American lives.

Measles manipulation

22. “This is an international outbreak.”

False. While it is true that measles is spreading around the world, the outbreak in America is hardly “international.” Of this year’s more than 2300 measles cases, CDC reports that only 16 cases were imported from abroad.

23. “The reason we're having a measles outbreak because of the COVID lockdowns, because…children during that period did not get vaccinated.”

False. One fifth of the US cases in 2026 are under age five and were born 2021–2026, entirely after the lockdown window. A third of the US cases are adults over the age of 20. Neither group are the right age to have missed MMR vaccination due to Trump’s COVID lockdowns, which primarily occurred in 2020.

In 2019-2020, kindergarten MMR coverage was 95.2%. It has fallen every year since schools reopened: 93% (2022-23), 92.7% (2023-24), 92.5% (2024-25), with exemptions at a record 3.6%. Exemptions are up in 36 states and above 5% in 17 states. Non-medical exemptions are >93% of all exemptions. Outbreak epicenters track with decreased vaccination rates: Gaines County, TX is at 77% kindergarten MMR, Spartanburg County, SC is at 88.9%, and Utah’s tricounty region is more than 16% unvaccinated.

24. “Mexico has 15 times the amount of measles per capita that we have. Canada has four times the amount of measles. England has two times the amount of measles.”

False premise, true statistics. Per PAHO and UKHSA: Mexico has 14.4X, Canada has 4.2X, and the UK has 2X the cases that the US has. These numbers don’t tell the true story if you look at them as a snapshot in time.

Canada logged 5,162 cases in 2025 and is down ~80% this year, due to the Public Health Agency of Canada’s immunization efforts in response to Canada’s loss of elimination status last November. The UK is currently tracking below its own 2025 total of 959. The US is the only one of the four setting a 35-year record for the second consecutive year.

25. “Doing better at handling it than any country in the world.”

False. Japan, Australia, South Korea and most of Western Europe are far below the US in cases per capita. The US can barely manage to conduct basic genomic sequencing. The 2026 US elimination review was postponed to the Pan American Health Organization's (PAHO) November meeting, partly because CDC's measles lab lacks the staff and funding to carry out genomic sequencing and epidemiology. CDC has had to lean heavily on the Broad Institute and Utah's state lab just to keep up. By “keep up” I mean deposit whole genome sequences to NCBI GenBank…eventually.

26. “Did I cause 137,000 cases?”

False (?). Hard to call this “false” because this isn’t anything intelligible. There’s no obvious figure that correlates with 137,000 cases. I couldn’t find any measles statistic in the ballpark of 137,000 cases that he might be referring to. WHO's most recent global estimates are for 2024, during which measles caused 11 million cases and 95,000 deaths.

27. “That age group that should have gotten the MMR when they were 18 months and didn't get it, they're the ones being infected.”

False. Kennedy evidently doesn’t even read the recommended vaccine schedules he is always trying to cancel. There is no recommended 18-month MMR dose. CDC recommends primary immunization at 12–15 months, with the booster dose at 4–6 years.

28. “We have stopped the outbreaks at record speed in South Carolina, in Texas, in Utah, in Virginia.”

False. The South Carolina outbreak lasted six months, as CDC’s own modeling projected. The 2025 outbreak in West Texas was not contained until August, in part due to the fact that Kennedy’s CDC sometimes didn’t even answer the phone. The outbreak in Utah has lasted more than a year with “no clear end in sight.” The outbreak in Virginia is still ongoing. Here is CDC’s own measles map showing 2026 cases:

Source: CDC

29. “I dispatch immediately the epidemic intelligence services to those states.”

False. It’s hard to dispatch EIS officers who no longer work at CDC. The EIS was hard-hit by the reductions in force (RIF) that Kennedy carried out upon being confirmed as HHS Secretary. While some were reinstated, the program is a shadow of its former self. And all the evidence to date shows that Kennedy’s definition of “immediate” is highly context-dependent.

30. “The Mennonites have not vaccinated since 1796, since Edward Jenner invented this smallpox vaccine.”

False. Mennonites do not oppose vaccination as a matter of religious doctrine and never have. Some communities hold anti-vaccine views, but this is not obligatory to Mennonite spiritual beliefs. As far as I am aware, there is no historical significance for Mennonites regarding Jenner’s discovery or use of vaccination as a public health practice in the 1790s.

31. “I’ve never questioned the efficacy of the MMR vaccine.”

False. He has repeatedly questioned the MMR vaccine. For years. Here are just a few examples:

June 2019: he visited Samoa in June 2019 and corresponded with local anti-vaccine activists to exploit a recent accident with contaminated MMR vaccines to discourage vaccination. The outbreak that followed killed 83 people, mostly children under age five. Kennedy reportedly did this to conduct a “natural experiment” without the consent or knowledge of the Samoan people.

September 10, 2019: Kennedy wrote an article for CHD claiming that MMR vaccination has “an unconscionably high injury rate.”

June 2023: Kennedy tells Joe Rogan that “if you look at the kids in Africa who die from measles, or these other infectious diseases, they’re all malnourished. It’s hard for a disease to kill a healthy person. It’s hard for an infectious disease to kill a healthy person with a rugged immune system.” This is false. Viruses kill healthy people regardless of how “rugged” their immune systems are. COVID killed millions of them.

March 7, 2025: Kennedy encouraged unproven or ineffective treatments for measles instead of the MMR.

March 11, 2025: Kennedy told Sean Hannity that the MMR “does cause deaths every year,” as well as encephalitis and blindness.

April 9, 2025: “We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the vaccine wanes very quickly.” The US could not have eliminated measles in 2000 if this were true. MMR durability is exceptional with two doses. More than thirty years after my second MMR dose, I still have protective titers against all three viruses.

The MMR is a great vaccine. It is 97% effective at preventing measles (Kennedy did begrudgingly note that). It is very safe. Billions of doses have been administered. The only reason that measles is spreading in the US today is that Kennedy’s lies have worked, and he has convinced people to refuse something that provides lifelong protection against truly terrible diseases.

Autism and vaccines

32. “There's 73 studies out there and link Tylenol exposure during later pregnancy and during the perinatal period to to autism onset.”

False. There is no published review of 73 such studies, because 73 such studies do not exist. He’s likely pumping up a review of 27 reported positive associations that is a favorite for cherry-picking. This review has been heavily critiqued for its failures to include adequate controls and adjust for confounding variables. Serious conflict of interest allegations have also been made toward its senior author, Andrea Baccarelli. Baccarelli did not fully disclose that he testified as a paid expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs in lawsuits alleging that Tylenol caused autism. He further did not disclose that the judge in that case ruled his testimony “unreliable” due to his “cherry-picked and misrepresented study results.”

You may recall that the Tylenol-autism issue was brought to the forefront last September in one of the most deranged press conferences I’ve ever seen. At the time, I thought it was going to be a back door to descheduling the MMR by recommending it as a series of monovalent doses.

Even HHS’s own announcement conceded that there was no clear causal evidence.

33. The Institute of Medicine “says that none of the eight vaccines that are administered during the first six months of life have ever been studied for a relationship to autism.”

False. In 2013, IOM published The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety, a report that concluded there is “no evidence base suggesting that the childhood immunization schedule is linked to… child developmental disorders.”

34. The Institute of Medicine “found two studies on the DTP vaccine and showed that it does cause autism and one on the hepatitis B vaccine that again, suggests that it does cause autism.”

False. The report says the opposite. It found one study on the diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP vaccine) and one on hepatitis B. The DTaP study was discounted because it only used unverifiable self-reported data (and was by a father-son duo of anti-vaxxers who have faced charges of practicing medicine without a license for prescribing puberty blockers to cure vaccine injuries). The hepatitis B paper was retracted in May 2026 for fundamental methodological flaws, a "critically small" sample size, and an overstated causal conclusion, which prompted Kennedy to attack the journal. Neither showed any relationship between vaccines and autism.

35. “The studies that (show no relationship between vaccines and autism) are all for one vaccine, the MMR vaccine or one ingredient, thimerosal.”

False. Whole-schedule and aluminium-adjuvanted vaccines have been studied in millions of people over decades and no link to autism has been found.

36. “Show me one of the studies that's been done on the first eight vaccines during the first six months of life. You will not find them.”

False. I found them quickly. Here you go. This search yielded 315 studies but I bet you would find more if you removed “infant” and replaced it with “baby.”

37. “Genes don’t cause epidemics.”

False. Autism isn’t an epidemic, it isn’t one condition, and it isn’t one gene. However, genes most certainly do cause epidemics, since they determine susceptibility to disease.

38. “What we were doing in Covid and and still with regard to these vaccines is getting the best information, the best science that we can. And putting it out there.”

False. This is literally an exhaustive list of Kennedy’s lies, so it is definitionally not “the best information” or “the best science.”

BONUS MAHA Misogyny

39. “I know you're flustered now.”

When Kennedy said this he was spluttering like a venting Instant Pot, so it’s safe to say he might have been projecting a bit. I’m sure it was frustrating that Kennedy continued to make shit up and refuse to answer Bash’s questions. However, he seemed more upset that she even asked him any questions or stated any facts at all. Out of Dana Bash and the human equivalent of an autoclave that’s about to go critical, I did not think Bash deserved the title of Most Flustered.

40. “Dana, you probably don't understand this because you're not a scientist.”

Kennedy isn’t a scientist either. I am a scientist and Kennedy demonstrably does not understand anything that he’s saying, nor does he intend to. He does not care about science because he is a self-interested liar who wants to put as many Americans at risk as possible. That’s how he will seize and exercise power.

Why does this matter

Last week I attended the annual meeting of the American Society for Virology (ASV 2026!!!) in Minneapolis and it was wonderful but harrowing at the same time. My professional field is under attack. Many of my colleagues have already lost their funding. Many have lost their jobs or labs for being politically opposed or sometimes convenient. Some may be prosecuted for simply doing their jobs. It is the scariest thing I’ve ever faced. I am not alone in feeling this way.

Right now it is virology. Tomorrow it will be cancer research. Or pain research. Or nutrition research. Eventually it will be Alzheimer’s research. Mental health research. Diabetes research. All clinical research. All science.

“But wait a minute, Angie. If that happened, a lot of people would probably get sick. A lot of people would probably die!”

Yes, I know. And that’s the idea. It’s hard to accept. The reason the HHS Secretary seems to think that the path to Make America Healthy Again is to get everyone sick again is because that is his goal. He wants everyone to be sick. Or dead. Whatever. Just not healthy.

Sick people are less likely to resist new, gradually more authoritarian measures as they are implemented by faceless bureaucrats that nobody pays attention to. Sick people are more likely to focus their energy on trying to keep themselves and their families alive than on fighting back against authoritarian rule. Sick people won’t complain when Fauci is sent to prison for the crime of public service. Sick people might not feel well enough to make it out to the polls to vote. Sick people are easier to subdue. Sick people can’t fight back. Dead people are even worse at all of these things.

This is why Kennedy’s lies are more than just lies. They are a mechanism to destroy our democracy. It’s important to recognize them for what they are. And that’s why it continues to be important to remove Kennedy from his position. If your current Congressperson will not, then in November you should vote for someone who will.