On September 9, 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s Minister of Health, published the MAHA (Make America Healty Again) strategy: “Make America Healthy Again.” However, his rhetoric seems to express something else: that of maintaining a permanent doubt.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr is not only a controversial politician. He is a personality who knew how to transform skepticism into a true political identity and who learned to use the discourse of transparency as a weapon of doubt towards public health itself.
His rise to the high position he occupies today is not just a story of denouncing the principle of vaccination. It is that of a production of doubt: sentence after sentence, metaphor after metaphor, until uncertainty intrudes into everyday life.
Kennedy’s biography begins with inherited authority. Born in 1954, he is the nephew of John F. Kennedy and the son of Robert F. Kennedy. Today, it bears a name that still resonates with American idealism. However, as pointed out the Worldhis name gradually became associated with activism tinged with conspiracy theories and vaccine skepticism – a delicate fusion of dynasty and dissidence.
For decades, Kennedy’s public career centered not on medicine but on the environment. It was through his work as a lawyer and environmental activist that he gained credibility, fighting against polluting companies and prosecuting industrial companies accused of poisoning rivers and communities.
This period of his life is important today because it provides the moral framework that continues to shape his discourse today: powerful industries oppress the innocent, regulatory authorities fail, and the vigilante alone exposes the truth.
Problem: Kennedy seems to have taken this model – specific to the environment – to apply it to the field of public health. According to him, vaccines are less medical tools than symbols of institutional corruption.
The making of a rhetoric
It was in the mid-2000s that Kennedy began to promote ideas questioning the safety of vaccines. In 2016, he co-founded one of the most influential anti-vax organizations in the country: the World Mercury Project, which became Children’s Health Defense in September 2018, of which he would later serve as chairman.
Some fact-checkers also note that he often establishes links between autism and vaccines, even though the non-existence of these links has been scientifically demonstrated.
Language of doubt: reading between the lines
But what sets Kennedy apart is above all his rhetorical method. Indeed, he rarely presents himself as an anti-vax. On the contrary, he moderates his speeches with well-chosen words, which offer him a sort of “linguistic shield”.
“I am for health safety. I am not anti-vaccine… all my children are vaccinated.”
This statement is not accidental. She is strategic. By rejecting this label while maintaining suspicion, Kennedy gives the impression that doubt is reasonable, even responsible. The result is a trivialization of mistrust without him ever having to assume the consequences.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, this rhetoric has significantly intensified. The scientific journal Nature called Kennedy one of the main spreaders of misinformation regarding vaccines in the United States. Similarly, NPR analyzed how it stoked distrust in public health institutions during the crisis.
During this period, his speech was characterized by constant populist rhetoric, pitting ordinary citizens against corrupt elites. Vaccination is no longer presented as a medical intervention, but as a symbol of coercion. “Submit to the government, do what you are told,” he denounces, deploring that there is “no debate possible.”
Opposer la science à la « queste de la vérité »
This speech is politically effective, precisely because it changes the situation. The debate no longer focuses on epidemiological aspects, but on concepts such as freedom, betrayal and moral integrity. Science is presented not as a method but as an institution that must be distrusted.
Kennedy’s remarks are based on a careful discussion of doubt.
“There is no proof,” he concedes, before turning around: “We don’t yet know what is the cause, so shouldn’t we keep an open mind?” The maneuver is subtle: consensus is presented as a hasty conclusion, skepticism as an intellectual virtue.
Kennedy goes further by redefining science itself. “Science says nothing,” he says. “Science is a debate.” This epistemic posture has serious consequences: if science is just an endless argument, then no amount of evidence can ever definitively settle a disagreement. The doubt therefore becomes structural.
To legitimize his distrust, Kennedy relies more on moral stories than on rigorous methodology. He readily invokes Francis Kelsey (1914-2015), the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientist who opposed the authorization of thalidomide, and hails her because she “questioned science”. The implicit suggestion is clear: today’s dissenting voice could be tomorrow’s hero. But the analogy is misleading. Questioning regulatory negligence is in no way the same as calling into question decades of vaccine data.
When directly contradicted, Kennedy counters the scientific consensus with “alternative” studies, promising that if he is wrong, he “will issue a public apology,” insisting that “there are other studies as well.” The conclusion is thus constantly postponed and the discussion is designed to never come to fruition.
Even more significantly, Kennedy’s rhetoric began to reshape the institutions themselves after he joined the Department of Health. Lawmakers accused him of destabilizing vaccine governance after he fired the 17 members of an important advisory committee, calling the decision unprecedented and irresponsible.
The American Public Health Association warned that its track record demonstrated a clear penchant for misinformation and a lack of scientific rigor. The medical review The Lancet went further, saying its influence could increase global vaccine hesitancy, citing the measles outbreak in Samoa as a tragic example of mistrust amplified to the point of catastrophe.
Kennedy does not act alone. He is supported by an entire ecosystem which presents him as a persecuted defender of the truth. The report devoted to him by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren also describes his leadership as the implementation of a strategy of anti-vaccine destabilization. What emerges is not simply individual skepticism, but a movement whose distrust is the foundation and where the demand for transparency becomes a political weapon.
The real question that RFK Jr imposes on public life is not whether vaccines are safe – a question repeatedly answered by scientific evidence – but whether democratic societies can survive the deliberate erosion of a common reality.
A public health dissident
At a certain point, the subject goes beyond the simple person of the Minister of Health, and questions the culture which allows such assertions to flourish.
How does doubt become an identity? How does questioning transform into a form of power?
And what happens when the language of science becomes a battlefield rather than a method?
In such a world, science ceases to function as a common fact-finding tool. On the contrary, it becomes a rhetorical jousting ground: rival actors claim the authority of science, each presenting their own version of it. The result is not clarity, but a permanent conflict, where the word itself becomes a weapon in the struggle over who has the right to define reality.
Although Kennedy began his career as an environmental activist, he became a public health dissident. Now he is something more worrying: a political actor whose influence lies not in resolving uncertainty, but in maintaining it.
The most pressing question may not be what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes; it’s what his rhetoric makes possible.
