Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has argued that Lyme disease was cooked up by the American military in a Long Island laboratory in the 1950s.
It’s a debunked conspiracy theory that Kennedy has repeated in campaign events and on his podcast in the months before being named by President-elect Donald Trump to oversee national health policy.
In his telling, the tick-borne illness, which can cause debilitating pain and facial paralysis if untreated, was created as a military bioweapon at the Department of Homeland Security’s Plum Island Animal Disease Center. The facility opened in 1954 and is situated across Long Island Sound from the area of Connecticut where Lyme was discovered in the 1970s.
“We do know they were experimenting with ticks, and the ticks are an epidemic because of what happened in Plum Island,” Kennedy said on his podcast in January.
In reality, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease has been circulating in North American forests for at least 60,000 years. And the ticks that carry the disease today have been around for at least 99 million years, according to specimens that were preserved in amber when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.
“Clearly this disease was not created by even the most evil genius military biologists in 1954,” said Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. “It is easy to refute with 100 percent certainty.”
Kennedy has spread misinformation about the origins of some of the deadliest and most debilitating diseases of the modern era through his popular podcast and in speeches when he was running for president. In addition to his false claims about Lyme disease, Kennedy has said that human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was created when children were being vaccinated against other illnesses and that avian and swine flu were “fabricated” by the World Health Organization to control the public.
He has also said West Nile virus was created at Plum Island and that respiratory syncytial virus was purposely spread from apes to humans so pharmaceutical companies could profit off vaccines. Kennedy has also said that baby boomers have high cancer rates because they were vaccinated for polio, arguing that the vaccine caused more harm than the actual infection, which, at its height in the mid-20th century, killed or paralyzed a half-million people annually.
“I do not believe that infectious disease is an enormous threat to human health,” Kennedy said at an online campaign event in June 2023. “We can go down a whole list of diseases, and there is good evidence that even the Spanish flu came from vaccine research.”
Kennedy was named by Trump last month to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. He is famous for falsely linking immunizations to autism and cancer. But Kennedy’s conspiratorial views about viruses have gained less attention. In at least three episodes of his podcast — ranked as Spotify’s 11th most popular podcast in its “health and fitness” category — Kennedy says his distrust of vaccines is, in part, due to his belief that researching and developing immunizations has “created some of the worst plagues in our history.”
Kennedy’s belief that deadly diseases were created by humans has shaped his views toward the agency he is poised to lead. He has vowed to drastically reduce the professional workforce at the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Institutes of Health, because he says it is too cozy with pharmaceutical companies that are profiting off viruses. During his campaign event last summer, he declared that his promises to rid the nation of chronic diseases are rooted in his belief that communicable illnesses would not actually be dangerous were it not for pharmaceutical companies and world health officials bioengineering them.
“The real threat to human health is not coming from infections,” he said.
Public health advocates who have called Kennedy’s nomination “dangerous” due to his anti-vaccine views say his false theories about infectious diseases are another cause for alarm.
“One of the major challenges with his leadership and oversight is that much of what he puts forward as factual information has no basis in fact whatsoever,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “When he says these things, people assume he must know what he is talking about because he is a nominee and a Kennedy, but that is simply not the case.”
This week, some 75 Nobel Laureates, 30 of whom won the prize for medicine, have come out against the nomination in a letter to the Senate saying that placing him at the head of HHS would “put the public’s health in jeopardy.”
Kennedy did not respond to requests for an interview. His campaign did not respond to more than 20 written questions, including whether he stands by his past statements that infectious diseases were created as weapons, and why the American public should trust him to respond to potential outbreaks of illnesses whose severity he has downplayed.
If confirmed, Kennedy would be in position to lead a federal response to the diseases about which he has spread misinformation. That includes a growing number of bird flu outbreaks at U.S. poultry and dairy farms. Currently, bird flu appears to cause only mild symptoms in humans, and it has only been transmitted to humans through contact with animals. But experts at HHS and other research institutions have been monitoring it closely for signs of mutation.
In a podcast episode last September, Kennedy said that past bird flu outbreaks, as well as a 2009 swine flu outbreak, were cooked up by the World Health Organization.
He said WHO “fabricated the 2006 bird flu outbreak, which of course never happened, but the pharma industry made $20 billion on a vaccine that of course didn’t work and there was no pandemic.”
“There is a whole series of flus they fabricated in the lead-up to Covid, and they finally got it right and they got everybody convinced,” he told his guest, Meryl Nass, a Maine physician whose medical license was suspended for spreading misinformation about Covid-19.
The current avian flu cases, known as H5N1, are related to the viruses from 20 years ago that Kennedy claims were concocted by WHO, said Maurice Pitesky. He leads the poultry program at the University of California, Davis’ School of Veterinary Medicine and tracks how influenza moves between species.
Many flu viruses originate in waterfowl, like geese and ducks, which roost in wetlands, where infections can easily spread among the flock. Loss of roosting habitat worldwide means wild waterfowl are often intermingling with — and infecting — domesticated birds, which can in turn infect human caretakers.
“We have had flu viruses as long as we have had birds and waterfowl,” Pitesky said, adding that Kennedy’s theories “are not based on any scientific literature.”
Osterholm put it more bluntly: “There is no evidence that swine and avian flu were fabricated. Absolutely no evidence whatsoever. There is just none.”
Misinformation ‘superspreader’
Kennedy has spread disinformation about the safety of vaccines for years, but he rose to prominence in the wake of the Covid pandemic, when he promoted unproven cures like ivermectin, a treatment for parasites, and the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine. A study of verified Twitter accounts from 2021 found that Kennedy was a top “superspreader” of misinformation about the Covid vaccine. His personal account was responsible for some 13 percent of all reposts containing misinformation.
Kennedy has promoted the theory that Covid originated as a leak from a Chinese laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Many virologists today lean toward the theory that humans were first infected with Covid through contact with animals being sold at a market in Wuhan, but neither idea has been confirmed.
Osterholm, who once served on the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, noted that there are legitimate reasons to push for greater security measures at laboratories that conduct experiments on modified pathogens, like the research done at Wuhan. But he fears Kennedy will use his appointment as “a bully pulpit” to spread sweeping conspiracy theories rather than actually respond to infections.
“He distracts us from what the real issues are and what we really need to do for preparedness,” Osterholm said. “It is dangerous.”
In the final weeks before the election, Trump promised to let Kennedy “go wild” on health policy. Kennedy has since said he plans to fire some 600 scientists at NIH and clear out entire departments within the Food and Drug Administration. While running for president, Kennedy also said he wanted to redirect federal grants away from epidemiology, the field of study about how diseases spread and their patterns.
Kennedy has also promised to end FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of raw milk that has not been pasteurized to kill bacteria and viruses. Just two weeks ago, California’s health department issued a recall of raw milk from a Fresno farm that was found to contain the current bird flu strain. Last week, the Department of Agriculture announced new national testing regimens for raw milk to better track the virus.
As director of HHS, Kennedy could direct FDA to allow interstate shipments of raw milk for the first time, or direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to stop warning of the dangers of drinking raw milk or even promote false benefits of consuming it.
It is unclear how other appointees within HHS would react to those initiatives, but some have signed onto controversial ideas about virus response and prevention in the past. Trump’s pick to lead NIH is Jay Bhattacharya, a physician and economist who recommended in 2020 that Covid prevention efforts should target older people but that the virus should be allowed to spread among young people, whom he described as being “at minimal risk of death.”
Trump’s choice to run the CDC is former Republican Rep. Dave Weldon of Florida, who has previously expressed skepticism about the safety of vaccines and has suggested that immunizations are connected to autism — a claim that has been debunked.
Many of Kennedy’s plans are rooted in his distrust of vaccines and the belief that research and development for immunizations has created deadly viruses.
“Bioweapons research and vaccine research are the same tract,” he said on a podcast episode dedicated to Lyme disease last winter.
Kennedy has also said diseases that originate in animals are incapable of spreading to humans — without help from people. To make such infections threatening to humans, he said on the campaign trail, people “are going to need to tamper with it.”
“The idea that viruses are constantly humping to human beings from the wild is a myth that is utterly unsupported by history,” he said on his podcast.
Science says otherwise.
‘Denying science’
A 2022 study found that since 1950, the globe has seen 28 outbreaks caused by diseases that jumped from animals to humans. They often stemmed from greater contact between people and infected species, through rearing livestock, hunting and consuming wildlife. That includes areas of West and Central Africa, where deforestation led to more human contact with animals and consumption of wild ape and monkey meat, which in turn led to the first HIV infections in people.
Marcia Castro, who co-authored the 2022 paper and leads the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Department of Global Health and Population, said she and her colleagues wanted to examine species-jumping cases, in part, to advocate for prevention measures like reducing habitat loss. The paper also calls for increased testing of wild animals to better understand the diseases they carry before they infect people.
Kennedy has opposed similar plans by WHO to increase wildlife surveillance, saying that looking for new infections in the wild is “like looking for a gas leak with a lit match.”
He does not accept the prevailing science on the origin of HIV. Instead, he has blamed vaccines for polio and smallpox that were given to children in “the Congo.” Kennedy has also said he does not believe that HIV causes AIDS and falsely linked the deadly immunodeficiency syndrome to recreational drugs.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense, includes board members who have argued against using proven prevention measures to stop the spread of HIV and AIDS, like contraception and reproductive health education.
“It is quite inhumane to think like this,” Castro said. “It is beyond denying science, it is just shutting your eyes and not seeing what will be the consequences of what you say.”
Lyme as a ‘military weapon’
Kennedy rose to fame as a celebrity attorney for environmental groups. He says he still accepts climate science, but he also promotes false theories about vector-borne diseases that have become more common in the United States due to global warming and habitat destruction.
In the January episode of his podcast, which was focused on Lyme disease, Kennedy talked about how he noticed changes to the tick population in areas of New York where he grew up. Some of his children, Kennedy said, have been infected with Lyme and experienced severe symptoms, like facial paralysis.
“It has really ruined going into the woods on the East Coast,” he said.
Kennedy’s baseless assertion that Lyme was created as “a military weapon” has been debunked by researchers who traced the disease back to a bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi, which has been circulating in North American forests for at least 60,000 years.
Lyme has surged since its discovery in the 1970s, with reported cases nearly doubling in the past 25 years. Scientists say its quickening spread is due to environmental factors: Rising temperatures have extended the active season for ticks, and urban development has fractured habitats and increased contact between people and ticks.
Scientists within HHS monitor the spread of Lyme disease and help educate doctors and clinicians about its symptoms. The department has also funded research into its uneven effects to understand why some people develop severe symptoms while others are easily cured with a single round of antibiotics.
Those initiatives could be endangered under Kennedy, said Ostfeld, the disease ecologist.
“Further work and further research would get us closer to answers, and it gets vastly more difficult to solve if funding or support for this kind of science are undermined,” he said.
That echoes an observation in a 2022 report to Congress by the Tick-Borne Disease Working Group commissioned by HHS and consisting of experts and patients. The group, which surveyed Lyme patients as part of its work, noted that many people incorrectly “alleged scientific fraud and a coverup” relating to the origin of tick-borne diseases.
“This skepticism manifested in distrust of the regulation of tick-borne disease vaccines,” the report said, with some commenters saying that a previous vaccine for Lyme was “created solely for profit.” That LYMERix vaccine was only available in the United States for three years before vaccine skepticism forced sales to plummet and the manufacturer agreed to discontinue it.
Ostfeld is also worried about what could happen if Kennedy is in charge of HHS in two years, when Pfizer and Valneva say they will seek regulatory approval for a new Lyme vaccine, which is currently in clinical trials.
“It would be a tragedy for human health and well-being were we to throw that away,” Ostfeld said. “Many more people would suffer than are currently suffering.”
