RFK Jr. Defends Vaccine Skeptics on CDC Panel: “Sure, They Have No Credentials, But They’ve Won Several Online Arguments”

ATLANTA — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday defended his newly installed roster of vaccine skeptics at the CDC, praising them as “battle-tested intellectual warriors who have held their ground in countless Reddit threads against people with actual medical degrees.”

The comments came after a chaotic meeting of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices—an event that once resembled a sober scientific discussion but now functions more like a public access call-in show. Members spent hours disputing decades of hepatitis B research, questioning whether diarrhea could be “a form of encephalitis,” and pausing repeatedly because several forgot what the vote was even about.

Kennedy insisted the panel’s unconventional resumes are a strength, noting that one presenter is “a climate writer who bravely pivoted to medical science last week” and another has “read almost half of a vaccine safety PDF.”

Critics, including every major medical organization, called the meeting “a serious embarrassment.” One physician in attendance said the proceedings were so misinformed that “at one point it genuinely felt like I’d wandered into a live reenactment of a Facebook comment section.”

Kennedy dismissed the criticism as elitist. “What matters isn’t credentials,” he said. “What matters is courage—the courage to tell America that vaccine-induced diarrhea might actually be encephalitis and that the experts are too scared to admit it.”