In Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first interview as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he made multiple incorrect or misleading statements, including about seed oils, an abortion drug and the notion that the U.S. has the “sickest population in the world.”
Kennedy’s remarks came in a Feb. 14 interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. The day before, the Senate confirmed him in a 52 to 48 party-line vote. The lone Republican dissenter was Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who suffered from polio as a child and is still living with complications of the disease today. Although Kennedy insists that he isn’t opposed to vaccines, he has a long record of spreading false and misleading information about them.
- Kennedy told Ingraham the U.S. “literally” has “the sickest population in the world.” That’s an exaggeration. While Americans generally have poorer health than people living in other wealthy nations, they still live longer and are healthier than much of the world.
- He said people in the U.S. “buy 70% of the pharmaceutical drugs on Earth.” But in 2023, Americans used around 6% of the world’s prescription drugs, according to data from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science.
- Kennedy baselessly claimed that replacing the seed oils used to cook Big Macs with beef tallow would make the burgers “good for people.” Available evidence suggests the switch, if anything, would harm health.
- He incorrectly claimed that the NIH told “doctors and patients not to report injuries” after taking an abortion drug. The drug he’s likely referencing, which is regulated by the FDA, has more stringent adverse event reporting requirements than the vast majority of prescription medicines.
- The HHS secretary claimed that “almost all” members of the department’s advisory committees have “severe conflicts of interest.” Federal rules prevent such experts from participating in matters “that could directly and predictably affect” their financial interests.
- Kennedy repeated some of his go-to claims about vaccines, including the false idea that “vaccines are the one medical product that is exempt from prelicensing safety studies.” All vaccines are tested for safety before being approved.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed by the Senate as the Secretary of Health and Human Services on Thursday.
Not the ‘Sickest Population in The World’
When Ingraham presented Kennedy with a video of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer criticizing Kennedy’s lack of health experience, Kennedy defended himself by saying it was the kind of qualifications Schumer was talking about that “got us to where we are today.”
“These are the people who got us to be the sickest country in the world,” he said. “We are 4.2% of the world’s population, we buy 70% of the pharmaceutical drugs on Earth, we spend two to three times what other countries pay for health care, and we have the worst health outcomes. We literally have the sickest population in the world.”
Four days after his interview with Ingraham, Kennedy repeated the claim in an address before HHS staff, linking his claim to chronic disease. “We are, in fact, the sickest nation on Earth, with the highest chronic disease burden in the world or in the history of the world,” he " target="_blank">said.
We contacted HHS to ask for support for Kennedy’s claim, including how he is defining “sick” and whether he was speaking only of wealthier nations, but we didn’t get a response. People in the U.S. do have poorer health and lower life expectancies than those in peer nations. They also have especially high rates of obesity and other chronic diseases. But on a variety of measures of overall health, the U.S. is hardly the “sickest country in the world.”
In 2023, the U.S. ranked 69th out of 167 countries in the health category of the Legatum Prosperity Index. The ranking is created by a research group based in London, and measures health as “the extent to which people are healthy and have access to the necessary services to maintain good health, including health outcomes, health systems, illness and risk factors, and mortality rates.” The lowest ranked country was the Central African Republic.
In 2019, the U.S. also ranked 35th out of 169 nations in the Bloomberg Healthiest Country Index — a poor showing for a wealthy country, but far from the worst. That ranking was based on life expectancy; health risk factors, such as obesity and alcohol and tobacco use; and health-related environmental factors, including air pollution and access to clean water and sanitation.
In the U.S., the life expectancy at birth is 80.9 years, according to 2024 estimates by the CIA’s World Factbook. That’s 26.5 years more than the life expectancy in Afghanistan, which at 54.4 years is the lowest of 227 countries. The U.S. ranks 49th.
Kennedy is mostly right that the U.S. spends “two to three times what other countries pay for health care.” The average amount spent on health care per person in the U.S. in 2022 was $12,555, nearly twice the average spent in comparable countries ($6,651), according to data from the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.
According to a report from the Commonwealth Fund, an independent health care research group, the U.S. also spent more, as a percentage of its gross domestic product, than nine other wealthy nations in 2023. Calculated this way, however, the difference is not quite as large as Kennedy says, as the U.S. spent 16.5% of its GDP on health care, compared with around 10% to 12% for the other countries.
It’s worth noting that while a significant part of the poorer health of Americans compared with peer nations is related to obesity and other chronic conditions that Kennedy frequently highlights, there are other contributors, including gun violence. The U.S. is also the only high-income country to lack universal health care coverage.
“Americans suffer higher death rates from smoking, obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, suicides, road accidents, and infant deaths,” Our World in Data’s Max Roser wrote in 2020 when summarizing the factors that can explain why the U.S. has a lower life expectancy than its peers, despite paying more for health care. “In addition to this, deeper poverty and less access to healthcare mean Americans at lower incomes die at a younger age than poor people in other rich countries.”
Prescription Drug Usage
Kennedy’s claim that the U.S. buys “70% of the pharmaceutical drugs on Earth” is wrong. While Americans do pay significantly more for prescription drugs, they are not as medicated as Kennedy says.
People in the U.S. purchase around 6% of the world’s prescription medicines, according to the latest data from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. The group uses the World Health Organization’s metric of the defined daily dose, or the assumed average dose of a medicine, to calculate how much medicine is used worldwide. In 2023, the U.S. used 210 billion out of 3.3 trillion such doses globally, or 6.4%, according to the group’s 2024 reports.
As noted in a USA Today fact-check two years ago, when a similar claim was circulating online, other statistics are based on sales, but IQVIA is the only group that makes an estimate of global use of prescription drugs by volume.
A December 2024 HHS issue brief states that in 2022, the U.S. “made up about 50 percent of worldwide sales revenues” of prescription drugs, “but only 13 percent of total volume.” When limited to a comparison with 32 other higher-income Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, those figures rose, to 62% and 24%, respectively. Both estimates were based on IQVIA data.
Unsupported Seed Oils Claim
While emphasizing that he would not take junk food away from people, including the Big Macs that President Donald Trump enjoys, Kennedy made an unsupported claim about seed oils.
“McDonald’s ought to be incentivized to use beef tallow fat when it’s cooking its Big Macs,” he said, “so that they’re good for people, rather than using seed oils or some other cooking oils that are actually going to probably make you sicker.”
Kennedy has frequently railed against seed oils, typically bringing them up in the context of french fries rather than Big Macs. He said in October on X that seed oils have “unknowingly poisoned” Americans and that they are “one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic.”
It’s not just Kennedy, either. A major push of many wellness influencers in the past several years, including several in Kennedy’s orbit, has been to cast seed oils — vegetable oils made from seeds, including corn, canola and grapeseed oils — as dangerous or unhealthy.
But many researchers say there’s little evidence that the oils are particularly hazardous.
As Stanford University nutrition scientist Christopher Gardner wrote in an editorial for NBC News, “there is an overwhelming body of scientific evidence confirming this family of oils is more healthful than harmful in moderation.”
And there’s no reason to think that swapping out seed oils for beef tallow, which is made from the fatty tissue of cows, would improve health — or that it would suddenly make a Big Mac “good for people.”
On the contrary, while fried foods aren’t healthy regardless of the oil or fat used, studies generally suggest that using a product high in saturated fat such as beef tallow would likely be worse than using a polyunsaturated fat such as a seed oil.
“There’s a fair amount of evidence that shows substituting plant oils for animal fats is good for you,” nutritionist Marion Nestle, a professor emerita at New York University, told STAT News.
A common claim about seed oils is that they increase inflammation because they have a higher ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids. The latter are considered more anti-inflammatory. But there isn’t evidence that any harmful inflammation occurs from omega-6 fatty acids. Reviews of as many as 30 randomized controlled trials have found that consumption of linoleic acid, a primary omega-6 fatty acid in seed oils, doesn’t increase markers of inflammation in people’s blood.
Seed oils are also common in many ultra-processed foods, such as cookies, chips and fast foods, which have been linked to a variety of poor health outcomes. But this doesn’t mean the seed oil itself is the problem or that exchanging the oil with another fat would make the foods healthy. The foods also tend to be low in fiber and high in fat, sugar and salt.
Cutting back on ultra-processed foods, regardless of their seed oil content, is generally a good idea. Experts have long recommended consuming more whole foods, including plenty of fruits and vegetables.
False and Garbled Abortion Drug Claim
Near the end of the interview, Ingraham asked Kennedy what he would do about certain “over-the-counter” abortion drugs that Biden had “loosened” restrictions on.
Kennedy replied that Trump hadn’t made a decision yet, but that the president had told him to “study the safety.”
“During the Biden administration, the NIH did something that was inexcusable, which is to tell doctors and patients not to report injuries,” he added. “That’s not a good policy.”
Given the details provided, it’s not entirely clear which drug Kennedy is speaking about. HHS did not respond to our inquiry asking for clarification. But multiple features of Kennedy’s response — and even Ingraham’s question — are incorrect.
Greer Donley, an abortion law expert at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told us in an email that “no abortion drug is over-the-counter and the NIH doesn’t regulate any drugs.”
Still, Donley said that she thought Kennedy was thinking of mifepristone, a Food and Drug Administration-approved drug used in medication abortion. As we have explained previously, multiple studies have found mifepristone to be safe and effective for terminating early pregnancies.
In 2016 — under former President Barack Obama — the FDA did relax some regulations on the drug, which had been approved with what became known as a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy, or REMS. Changes to these special regulations, including other modifications under the Biden administration, were the subject of a 2022 lawsuit the Supreme Court dismissed in 2024 for a lack of standing.
But contrary to Kennedy’s claim, the agency “didn’t tell anyone not to report injuries,” Donley said. Instead, after a review of the data, the agency did away with some — but not all — of the extra reporting requirements originally applied to the drug, which included physician reporting of “any hospitalization, transfusion or other serious events” that occurred after administration of the drug. All of the standard reporting expected with any FDA-approved drug remained.
“The FDA removed a part of the REMS, which required doctors to report non-fatal adverse events,” Donley explained (emphasis is hers). “Rather, the agency decided to rely on its regular adverse event reporting structures that exist for all prescription drugs, where the manufacturers report adverse events to the agency.”
“They did this for a variety of reasons, including that there was no evidence that the physician reporting was catching things that weren’t being reported otherwise,” she continued. “Patients were never required to report adverse events, but can always (then and now) report them.”
Today, prescribers of mifepristone are still required to report any deaths, no matter the suspected cause, following use of the drug — a requirement that is highly unusual. In an amicus brief supporting the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug, Donley and other food and drug law scholars wrote that even after the 2016 changes, mifepristone “remains subject to a more rigorous adverse event reporting regime than the vast majority of other drugs,” as it is one of just 35 drugs for which the FDA requires any kind of reporting from prescribers or distributors.
Kennedy is therefore mischaracterizing the FDA’s rule change. Any injuries possibly related to the use of the drug can still be reported using the standard system for prescription drugs. It’s just that individual prescribers no longer have the added requirement of reporting all serious events. And in fact, the regulation of mifepristone with respect to possible side effects remains unusually strict.
Reports of death or other possible side effects do not necessarily mean that the drug caused those events. In any case, reports of death after taking mifepristone are extremely rare. Through the end of 2024, the FDA received 36 reports of deaths out of the approximately 7.5 million people who took the drug since its approval in 2000.
Conflicts of Interest
When Ingraham asked Kennedy about “drug company grants” to people connected to the federal government, Kennedy claimed that “almost all” of the experts in HHS’ advisory committees have “severe conflicts of interest.” But those experts must follow ethics rules.
“In HHS, in FDA, CDC and NIH, there are panels that are made up of outside individuals, outside experts, who come in and set policies,” he said. “They set, for example, the food triangle, the food pyramid, the nutrition guidelines, the vaccine guidelines, the medical standards of care. In the past, those people, almost all of them, have severe, severe conflicts of interest.” (Kennedy used air quotes when he said “outside experts.”)
We asked HHS for support for Kennedy’s claim, but we didn’t get a response.
Committees of outside experts, such as the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices or the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, do not set policies. As their names imply, federal advisory committees provide advice or recommendations to the governmental agencies or officers they serve.
A number of these experts may have work relationships with industries, companies or organizations, which is often how they gain the expertise and experience they’re valued for. But as we’ve written, members of federal advisory committees must follow specific ethics guidelines. Those rules prohibit them from participating in matters “that could directly and predictably affect” the member’s financial interest and those of their immediate family and other entities related to the member. Financial interests can include employment, grants, contracts, stocks, bonds, royalties, interests or any other kind of payment or compensation.
Members of advisory panels are required to file annual financial disclosure reports that are then reviewed by the agencies they serve. The agency can then determine if there’s a conflict of interest and disqualify a member from participating in a committee — or, if the “need for the individual’s services outweighs the potential for conflicts of interest created by the financial interests involved,” restrict an expert’s participation. These screenings also occur prior to or at the beginning of every committee meeting.
Repeated False and Misleading Claims About Vaccine Safety
As he has before, Kennedy questioned the safety of vaccines, incorrectly saying that vaccines are not tested for safety before regulators allow them to be used.
“We don’t have good safety studies on almost any of the vaccines,” he told Ingraham. “Vaccines are the one medical product that is exempt from prelicensing safety studies.”
All vaccines are tested for safety prior to authorization or approval. This testing is not always within a randomized controlled trial using a saline or water placebo, which is often what Kennedy seems to mean by this. But there are legitimate reasons not to do that kind of testing, including when a newer version or combination vaccine is involved, since it’s not ethical or helpful to test those products against no vaccine at all.
Kennedy is also incorrect to suggest that this type of testing is unique to vaccines, when drugs are often tested against a standard of care rather than a sugar pill, for example. Vaccines are widely considered to be more heavily scrutinized for safety than drugs or other medical products. They also are subject to more intensive post-marketing surveillance.
Kennedy also repeated his claim — recently asserted during one of his confirmation hearings — that there isn’t good data on the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines.
“We don’t have good data on it, and that is a crime, the fact that we don’t have a surveillance system that actually works,” he said, when Ingraham asked about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines. “CDC has a surveillance system called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and it’s supposed to pick up injuries. But CDC did a study of that system in 2010, and that study said — and this is a published study by CDC — that it captures less than 1% of the vaccine injuries. That’s inexcusable.”
The general safety of the COVID-19 vaccines is well established. In addition to the clinical trials, numerous studies and surveillance data from around the world show that the vaccines only rarely cause serious side effects.
HHS did not respond when asked which CDC study Kennedy was referencing when mentioning VAERS. But he has previously cited a 2010 report submitted to HHS to make the same misleading claim about underreporting to the system.
The report was written by researchers with the nonprofit health insurance company Harvard Pilgrim Health Care for a project funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, an HHS agency that Kennedy now oversees. It states that “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.” (The researchers consulted with some CDC staff for the project, but the report was not authored by people at the CDC, nor was it published in a peer-reviewed journal, as Kennedy’s description might imply.)
This is not nearly as alarming as it might sound. Dr. Michael Klompas, a public health surveillance researcher at Harvard Medical School and one of the authors of the report, previously told us that the figure “takes into account that many adverse effects of vaccines are mild and expected so not worth reporting (sore arm, fatigue, local redness, etc.).” Studies have shown that VAERS more completely captures more serious adverse events compared with mild ones.
VAERS relies on voluntary reporting of health issues that occur following vaccination to quickly identify possible problems. By design, it doesn’t capture all true side effects of a shot, but it also includes many events that are entirely coincidental. The reports are not vetted and do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a problem. Precisely because the system is passive, the government uses other active monitoring systems in conjunction with VAERS to ensure vaccine safety.
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