Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared on the latest episode of Tucker Carlson’s podcast on Monday and it’s filled with the ramblings of a man completely detached from reality. Kennedy falsely suggested vaccines cause autism, more or less endorsed the idea that Anthony Fauci should go to prison, and says that AI will allow the FDA to approve new drugs very quickly. It’s quite a mess.
These absolutely unhinged ideas wouldn’t be such a problem if this were any other fringe lunatic appearing on the podcast of a racist former Fox News host. But Kennedy happens to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a man who’s been given enormous power over America’s entire healthcare system thanks to President Donald Trump.
One of the most troubling moments in the new interview comes when Kennedy discusses the role that artificial intelligence is going to play in replacing or altering the VAERS system, which stands for Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. VAERS allows doctors to report incidents when they believe a patient has been harmed by vaccines, but Kennedy isn’t happy with it. The secretary insists it was “designed to fail,” suggesting it’s not registering enough people who in his mind have been harmed by vaccines over the years.
“We’re going to absolutely change VAERS and we’re going to make it, we’re going to create either within VAERS or supplementary to VAERS, a system that actually works,” Kennedy said. “And, you know, right now, even that system is antiquated because we have access to AI.”
Kennedy told Carlson he was creating an “AI revolution” at the Department of Health and Human Services and was attracting the top people from Silicon Valley who “walked away from billion dollar businesses.” But Kennedy says these people don’t want prestige or power, they just want to make the healthcare system better.
“We are at the cutting edge of AI,” Kennedy said. “We’re implementing it in all of our departments. At FDA, we’re accelerating drug approvals so that you don’t need to use primates or even animal models. You can do the drug approvals very, very quickly with AI.”
Kennedy has previously talked about using AI to increase efficiency at FDA but hasn’t provided details about what AI tools will be used and how they would be used to approve new drugs. But given generative AI’s instability and propensity for failing at some of the most basic tasks, the idea of putting drug approvals in the hands of robots is pretty terrifying.
Kennedy, who was the founder of an anti-vaccine group called the Children’s Defense Fund, says repeatedly during the interview that vaccines have never been properly studied, which is just a flat-out lie. But he now has the power to demand investigations into vaccines that will get him the results he wants, no matter how much he insists his own opinion doesn’t matter.
“We need to stop trusting the experts, right?” Kennedy told Carlson. “We were told at the beginning of COVID, don’t look at any data yourself, don’t do any investigation yourself, just trust the experts. And trusting the experts is not a feature of science, it’s not a feature of democracy, it’s a feature of religion, and it’s a feature of totalitarianism.”
Kennedy went on to insist that it was important for everyone to “do your own research,” a common refrain among those in the so-called Make America Healthy Again movement. But Kennedy is intentionally misrepresenting the role of experts in an informed society. Listening to experts isn’t about abandoning all critical thinking. It’s about recognizing that there are areas where you may not have expertise and taking the opinions of medical professionals more seriously than random people on shows like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson who are just self-proclaimed experts.
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