Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump‘s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is well known for his anti-vaccine stance and dabbling in junk science. But ahead of his potential confirmation, more details of his conspiracist views on Covid-19 have come to light — including the fact that Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit he helped found, financed one of the most viral misinformation campaigns of the pandemic.
“We have a film division at Children’s Health Defense,” Kennedy said in a clip from a virtual interview shared by the anti-extremism social media account PatriotTakes on Wednesday. A major source of vaccine misinformation, CHD is an activist nonprofit that was chaired by Kennedy until he took leave in 2023 to run for president. “We produced two films. One of them is Vaxxed II, which was, you know, a huge success,” Kennedy continued. “And then Plandemic, which we financed, which is now — by some metrics — the most successful documentary in history.”
Kennedy has yet to directly address the clip in a public statement or on social media, and the CHD website provides no information about its involvement in the film. Neither Kennedy nor CHD immediately responded to request for comment.
Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda Behind COVID-19 is a 26-minute propaganda film that gained wide attention in mid-2020, significantly contributing to the movement against health safety measures, including vaccination. Produced by Mikki Willis, a California filmmaker known for new age and conspiracist content, it features an uncritical interview with discredited former medical researcher and anti-vaxxer Judy Mikovits, and presents many false claims about Covid-19, including that wearing a face mask “activates your own virus” and that the flu vaccine contains coronaviruses. Plandemic also contends, without evidence, that the Covid-19 virus was artificially “manipulated,” and that vaccination programs are harmful for-profit schemes orchestrated by wealthy elites.
Playing on fear and paranoia in the early depths of the pandemic, the video was, as Kennedy said, a massive hit, racking up untold millions of views: Alex Jones promoted it on Infowars, and whenever a social media platform removed it for misinformation, Plandemic would be re-uploaded by someone else. The success of the film across far-right MAGA and QAnon communities seeded mistrust in public health officials and the mistaken belief that Covid-19 lockdowns had set the stage for an authoritarian repeal of constitutional freedoms.
Willis would go on to make two more conspiracist Plandemic films, and then Plandemic: The Musical, which he debuted at an anti-vax convention in Las Vegas earlier this year — an event that saw low attendance after Kennedy dropped out as a speaker. While the Children’s Health Defense website doesn’t appear to have any information about their involvement in the Plandemic franchise, it did promote Willis’ 2021 book Plandemic: Fear Is the Virus. Truth Is the Cure, and noted how “tech giants and mainstream media are doing their utmost to silence and suppress” the bogus claims put forward in the films.”
Kennedy himself used the term “plandemic” in recently unearthed remarks he made to a newly created European chapter of CHD in August 2020, according to a report by The Bulwark published on Tuesday. “Many people argue that this pandemic was a ‘plandemic,’ that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme,” he said. “I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me.”
He went on to express the notion at the core of the Plandemic series, saying, “If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.” In the same press conference, Kennedy likened government guidelines on combating Covid to Nazis testing “vaccines on Gypsies and Jews,” warning that these would “enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.”
Kennedy ran an unsuccessful third-party campaign for president before dropping out to endorse Trump. His plans for Health and Human Services, should he be confirmed to the president-elect’s extreme Cabinet, include the removal of fluoride from public water. He would also have oversight of the Food and Drug Administration, which he has blasted for the “suppression” of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, two drugs promoted on the right as treatments for Covid-19 despite their ineffectiveness against the coronavirus. And Kennedy has advocated for greater access to raw milk, which may expose people to E. coli, listeria, and bird flu virus.
But none of these proposed policies may be enough to cost Kennedy the job, seeing as the Senate that will vote on his confirmation is Republican-controlled — and some in that majority have similarly backward ideas about public health. In the meantime, if Kennedy still has questions about whether the U.S. government deliberately unleashed Covid on its own citizens, he can always ask the man who was president at the time: Donald Trump.