Fact-Checking Health Claims in RFK Jr.’s 2nd Day of Confirmation Hearings

Day 2 of confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the country’s next health secretary kicked off with heated discussions about the safety of vaccinations, chronic illnesses and Covid-19.

Here is a running list of key health claims, fact-checked by our reporters.

Read Wednesday’s fact-check, and take a deeper look at Mr. Kennedy’s statements over the years.

Prioritizing chronic disease

“There has never been an H.H.S. secretary who came in to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said, answering a question about his goal of focusing on fighting chronic disease as secretary for health and human services.

Research into chronic disease has been a major focus of the National Institutes of Health, an agency under the H.H.S. umbrella, for many years.

The N.I.H. spends tens of billions of dollars on research into chronic diseases, operating institutes dedicated to studying diabetes, obesity, neurological disorders and heart disease.

Furthermore, the Biden administration championed a cancer “moonshot” program to fund research into cancer, one of the most common chronic diseases.

Covid-19 in Children

Mr. Kennedy asserted for the second day in a row that Covid does not pose a risk to young children. Senator Rand Paul echoed those statements, saying that no healthy children had died from Covid.

That is incorrect: While children with underlying health conditions are at greatest risk from the illness, those without chronic conditions have still died from the virus.

A study published in the fall examined 183 cases of children who died from Covid between 2020 and 2022, and found that around one-third of these children did not have another medical condition beyond Covid at their time of death. Between 2021 and 2022, Covid was the eighth leading cause of death among children in the United States.

“Nobody would dispute that you want to address one of the leading causes of death,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who emphasized that the risk Covid posed to children was “really not zero.”

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also showed that in 2023, more than 100 children in the United States developed Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, or MIS-C, a rare but serious condition that typically occurs weeks after a Covid infection.

The vast majority of MIS-C cases were in children who were eligible to be vaccinated, but were not. Roughly 1 to 2 percent of those children have died, according to the C.D.C.

Hepatitis B Vaccinations

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, cast doubt about the hepatitis B vaccines, questioning whether infants need protection against a virus that is often sexually transmitted.

“You’re telling my kid to take a hepatitis B vaccine when he’s 1 day old,” he said. “That’s not science.”

Mr. Kennedy did not respond to Mr. Paul’s statement. But, in fact, the vaccine is given to infants because their mothers can pass it to their babies. Hospitals often don’t test pregnant women for it.

The infection, which can lead to permanent liver damage and cancer, used to infect about 18,000 children each year, about half of them at birth.

Since vaccination became routine, hepatitis B has become extremely rare among U.S. children.

Use of Adderall

Mr. Kennedy said that 15 percent of American children were taking Adderall, a medication commonly prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D.

In reality, it is estimated that 5 percent of children in the U.S. are currently prescribed medication for A.D.H.D.

Stimulant drugs like Adderall are sometimes abused, and the percentage of children who use them without a prescription varies depending on what school they attend.

Weight Loss Drugs

Mr. Kennedy on Wednesday called Wegovy and newer obesity and diabetes medications “miracle drugs,” a shift from critical remarks he has made about the drugs and their manufacturers in the past.

During the hearing, he said that he did not think the medications should be a “front line intervention” for 6-year-old children. The Food and Drug Administration has not authorized Wegovy and Ozempic for children this young, though Novo Nordisk, the drugs’ manufacturer, has filed to expand access to liraglutide, an older obesity drug that causes weight loss, to a younger age group.

Wegovy is cleared to treat obesity in children 12 and older, and Ozempic is only approved for adults, although there are studies examining similar medications in younger age groups.

Mr. Kennedy said that these medications “eat away at muscle” if people do not exercise while on them. This is a concern shared by some physicians about older adults losing too much muscle with rapid weight loss. To this end, doctors often recommend that patients taking these medications eat plenty of protein and do strength-training exercises to counteract the risks of muscle loss.

Mr. Kennedy also noted that these drugs come with side effects, which is correct. The most common side effects are gastrointestinal issues, like nausea, vomiting, constipation and stomach pain. For most patients, though not all, the side effects diminish as they adjust to the drugs.

And he said that people experienced “problems” when they stopped taking the medications, but did not describe what he meant. Research has found that people tend to regain weight if they discontinue the drugs.

Cost of Childhood Diabetes

Mr. Kennedy said diabetes rates were rising among children. That’s true.

It was a correction of statements he has made in the past that 48 percent of teenagers in the country are diabetic. That number is wrong by orders of magnitude.

The National Diabetes Statistics Report estimated that in 2021, about 35 per 10,000 children and adolescents younger than 20 — that is, 0.35 percent — had a diagnosis of diabetes. Another study found that 0.1 percent of people ages 10 to 19 had diabetes in 2017.

He also said the high incidence of diabetes and pre-diabetes in children was in part responsible for “bankrupting our country.”

While chronic disease is a major driver of health care spending, its unlikely that costs from childhood diabetes significantly contribute.

Pre-diabetes is on the rise in children — about 28 percent of teenagers are prediabetic — but most cases don’t require treatment with insulin and can be reversed with lifestyle changes, which comes at little cost to the country’s health care system.

Harms of Electromagnetic Radiation

Mr. Kennedy has said electromagnetic radiation is dangerous to health. But scientific studies going back to the 1990s have repeatedly failed to support this claim. That includes studies involving cellphones and power lines.

For example, a review in 1996 by the National Academy of Sciences of 500 studies found no risk. A large national study the next year looked at childhood leukemia in particular and again found no link.

At the time, Robert Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland, said: “The number of questions you can ask is infinite. If it’s not the intensity of the electric field, maybe it’s the number of times you turn the field on and off. Maybe it only causes cancer in conjunction with eating bananas. You can keep asking questions forever.”

But, he said, at some point, it is time to invest research money in other things.

More recently, experts have debunked a chart that many skeptics cited while explaining why they feared the technology.