RFK Jr. Is Far Worse Than You Think

His war on women and the families of autistic children is truly revolting.

Image via AP

by Justin Rosario

Despite being an Official Old Person having reached my 50th birthday, I’m young enough to not have lived through the Kennedy era or grown up romanticizing the Kennedy family. I do, however, understand what the Kennedys mean to people and why they romanticize John, Bobby, and to a lesser extent, Ted. The Kennedy name stood for something and people are hungry for that kind of dignity and integrity in American politics, regardless if that integrity was real or imagined.

This explains why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is, as of this writing, polling in the mid-teens despite having zero experience in public service and being a complete kook. He used to be a serious person but he took a sharp turn into loonyland a long time ago. These days, he has a national profile because of his name, the right wing media pimping him, and the mainstream media desperate to weaken Joe Biden. Without that, Jr. would be nothing more than the son of a long-dead famous person, laboring away in relative obscurity.

This, however, is not an article about RFK Jr.’s 2024 run. The longer he talks, the more people will get to know who he is and that will be the story of his challenge to Joe Biden. All the fawning press coverage in the world will not save you from going on Joe Rogan and telling people that wifi gives you cancer. A year from now, no one will be talking about Jr’s campaign so neither will I.

Rather, this is about how much RFK Jr. offends me and dear reader, it’s a rather significant amount.

Siding with Team Cancer against women

I have tried really hard not to pay attention to anything Jr. says or does because as a matter of policy, I treat anti-vaxxers like something odious to be scrapped off of my shoe. There are a lot of people I dislike (Republicans, racists, Republicans, homophobes, Republicans, religious fundamentalists, Republicans, you get the idea) but anti-vaxxers inspire a particularly intense rage. That’s why when I found out that Jr. not only opposes the HPV vaccine but has sued Merck, the company that produces it, repeatedly, I did not not react well.

If you’re not particularly familiar with the HPV vaccine, you both kind of should be and kind of shouldn’t. On the one hand, it’s been around for over a decade and is ridiculously effective. It’s so effective and uncontroversial that out here in the real world it has seamlessly joined the ranks of childhood vaccines that make diseases like Chicken Pox and Rubella all but unheard of. 

On the other hand, HPV transmission is so ubiquitous that before the vaccine, pretty much every sexually active person contracted it. They just didn’t know it because HPV is mostly harmless. “Harmless” in the sense that you don’t get immediately sick when you have it. No runny nose. No cough. No fever. No symptoms. Nothing. You just have it and then pass it on to whoever you have sex with. Some people develop genital warts but otherwise, HPV is harmless. Except for the cancer. Did I mention the cancer?

HPV causes cervical cancer in women and, much less frequently, throat cancer in both men and women. Cervical cancer is nasty business, with roughly a 33% mortality rate meaning 1 in 3 women die from it. If the cancer is not caught before it spreads, the survival rate drops from 67% to 19%. The majority of women who do survive are rendered infertile as a little extra “fuck you” bonus.

Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, is 99% effective in preventing cervical cancer. What does that look like in the real world? The CDC has some details:

The HPV vaccine works extremely well. In the 10 years after the vaccine was recommended in 2006 in the United States, quadrivalent type HPV infections decreased by 86% in female teens aged 14 to 19 years and 71% in women in their early 20s. Research has also shown that fewer teens and young adults are getting genital warts and that cervical precancers are decreasing since HPV vaccines have been in use in the United States. Decreases in vaccine-type prevalence, genital warts, and cervical precancers  have also been observed in other countries with HPV vaccination programs.

I want to be very clear about this so we’re going to crunch a few numbers. Cervical cancer caused by HPV has been afflicting around 11,100 women a year, killing around 4,000 of them. Once enough women are vaccinated (and older generations who can’t be vaccinated shuffle off this mortal coil), that number will drop by at least 90%. 

A 90% reduction in HPV-caused cases of cervical cancer would be just 1,110 a year with roughly 366 deaths. That’s 10,000 women a year who will not have to suffer the loss of their reproductive ability and almost 3,600 that will live. In no universe is this not a triumph of modern medicine. 

Unless, of course, you are a religious Republican or a goddamn anti-vaxxer. Sam Harris explained how that worked in 2006’s “Letter to a Christian Nation”:

Got it? Without the threat of a deadly disease, women might have sex and that’s bad. This was not implied, they were quite explicit about it:

Gardasil has been a big target of the right for years. Not because of any alleged side effects, Aspirin kills thousands a year with nary a peep from the right, but solely because of the freedom it gives to women. The freedom from fear. The freedom to have sex without consequences. 

When you see someone demanding an end to HPV vaccines, you have to conclude, based on the evidence, that they want women to suffer.

The cruelty and sickness required to want women to die simply as a means to deprive them of sexual agency is staggering. This is what RFK Jr. is enabling. It doesn’t matter if he really believes he’s the good guy or not. His anti-vaxxer stupidity is furthering the right’s very clear and obvious anti-woman agenda. For that, he’s earned my eternal loathing. 

And yet, that pales in comparison to what I feel for Jr. over his autism bullshit.

That’s my kid you’re talking about

I already knew Jr. was an imbecile who thought wifi and 5G gave you cancer and affected your brain. People like this do not generally deserve the calories I burn thinking about them. But once I (accidentally) learned Jr. was also pro-cervical cancer, I knew he also peddled the autism-vaccine lie. This was going to tip me over into deeply offended territory, and to my utter lack of surprise, here we are.

Jr. is, in fact, a purveyor of the long-debunked lie that vaccines cause autism. I’m going to let Penn & Teller give you a quick refresher on one of the many, many reasons people like Jr. are unconscionable assholes:

The astonishing selfishness required to put children at risk for ideology is almost incomprehensible. This is where I cross the line from disgusted to deeply offended.

When an anti-vaxxer says they would rather risk their child dying from a completely preventable disease than “becoming” autistic, it’s an insult to me and my son Jordan. Someone who thinks that way also thinks my son’s life is worthless and it would be very much in their best interest to not say this in my presence.

What makes Jr.’s behavior so much more vile is that his family is responsible or partly responsible for some of America’s most important programs/laws benefiting special needs families. Ted Kennedy was one of the heavy hitters who helped pass the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, guaranteeing the civil rights of kids like Jordan.

A Kennedy founded the Special Olympics. The Special Olympics is not just an olympics for disabled elite athletes, there is an entire program that runs across schools throughout the country. It allows kids like Jordan to participate in competitive (sort of) sports and play against teams from other schools. Jordan loves to play basketball and because of the Special Olympics program, he got to play a season (sort of) against several other local schools on the weekend. He loved every second of it and we have a Kennedy to thank for that. Just not Robert F Kennedy Jr.

Jordan also spent a lot of time after school in the Best Buddies program. Best Buddies matches a student volunteer with a special needs student. They spend time every week or so playing a game, doing an art project, going on field trips, etc. It allows the special needs students to interact with their neurotypical peers, which they do not always have an opportunity to do. It also allows neurotypical students to spend time with their neurodiverse peers, an extremely important process that builds empathy and other emotional skills that cannot be taught. 

A Kennedy also founded Best Buddies. A few years later, RFK Jr. would take up his crusade against everything good and decent his family has ever done in an effort to turn my son into a victim of a grand conspiracy.

How dare you

Here’s the thing I find most enraging about Jr.: His works instills guilt in the parents of autistic children. It is incredibly difficult to convey how toxic guilt can be. I should know because I live with it every day.

In my entire, very large extended family including a dozen aunts and uncles, a few dozen cousins and good lord who knows how many kids from those cousins, exactly two Rosarios have autism: Jordan and Mason, the son of my half-brother Johnny. 

That means the only 2 out of literally more than 50 Rosarios who have autism share a grandfather. It’s possible it’s a random coincidence that of my father’s 6 grandchildren, 3 are boys and 2 of them are autistic (boys have a much higher prevalence of autism than girls). Possible, but so is winning the lottery twice in a row. I just wouldn’t bet my life on it. Oh, and no one in Debbie’s family is autistic. So, yeah, I know exactly which 50% of Jordan’t genes his autism comes from. 

That’s a horrible knowledge to carry. My sole consolation is that I didn’t “cause” Jordan’s autism. It is what it is. But what Jr. is doing is a thousand times worse. It’s one thing to feel the pain of having passed on defective genes. It sucks so very much but that is out of my control. It’s quite another thing to have someone convince you that you, personally, damaged your child. That they were born healthy and you, personally, broke them. You, their parent, destroyed their future because there is no “cure” for autism, no matter what morons like Jenny McCarthy say. 

Yes, Jr. puts lives at risk with his misogynistic anti-vaxxer idiocy but, to me, the lifelong pain he is inflicting on parents is beyond monstrous. His name gives him an unearned authority and he’s using it to leave scars that will never fade. It is unforgivable and long after he disappears from electoral politics into a footnote not even worth a tepid punchline, the damage he’ll have done to other special needs families will persist. Fuck RFK Jr.

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