CNN posted a scathing fact-check article immediately after Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s stunningly contentious interview on Sunday’s State of the Union, claiming the Health and Human Services chief pushed “medical misinformation” during his appearance.
Anchor Dana Bash grappled with Kennedy for 22-minutes about autism, measles, and Covid, with Kennedy accusing Bash of “saying nonsense” when she pushed back on his medical inaccuracies and attempts to politicize how the U.S. is planning for the next pandemic.
“In attempting to rewrite the history of the US Covid-19 response, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sunday pinned the blame for pandemic lockdowns on Dr. Anthony Fauci, while simultaneously reviving a string of debunked assertions about vaccines, RSV and measles,” the CNN article by Aileen Graef and Katherine Dillinger began.
“As HHS secretary, Kennedy’s skepticism of mainstream science is no longer just outsider rhetoric; it now shapes official federal policy,” the article continued. “His efforts to reframe the pandemic’s legacy come as the US battles its worst measles resurgence in more than three decades — a crisis experts warn is fueled directly by the type of vaccine misinformation and institutional distrust Kennedy amplified during the broadcast.”
The article referred to Bash’s interview with Dr. Ashish Jha that she conducted immediately after the marathon Kennedy session. Jha served as the White House Covid-19 response coordinator under President Joe Biden from 2022 to 2023, and condemned Kennedy’s false claims.
“There was a lot of information that secretary Kennedy said that it just isn’t true. Just factually not true,” Jha said.
When addressing Kennedy’s claims about vaccines and autism, Jha said, “This has been an issue that we have settled over and over again. There is zero link between vaccines and autism. This stuff does get a little tiresome.”
On measles, Dr. Jha said, “The truth is that the last two years we’ve had more measles cases than the entire rest of the 21st century, the cases combined than the last two.”
Jha said he didn’t think it was a coincidence that the outbreak happened after the Trump administration stopped actively promoting vaccines.
Bash, then asked about gain of function research, “which is, you go into a lab, and you take a disease and you give it mutations in order to see what happens, to try to come up with potential help for it, vaccines for it, in the future. He said that RSV and Covid came from gain of function research.”
“First of all, no, RSV did not come from any gain of function research. Obviously, Covid remains controversial,” Jha said, adding, “I have come to conclude that [Covid] is more likely to have been a lab leak.”
Watch the clip above via CNN.
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