‘He is an evil, evil man’: AusDoc interviews RFK Jr’s arch-nemesis
If Robert F Kennedy Jr has an arch-nemesis, then it is probably Dr Paul Offit.
The paediatrician is a doctor of global significance. He happens to be one of the inventors of the rotavirus vaccine (RotaTeq), which has saved thousands of infant lives since it was rolled out twenty years ago.
But the 75-year-old has, in these dark times of misinformation and bonkers conspiracy theories, railed at the rise of RFK Jr and his anti-science cronies.
“He is an evil, evil man and I have such hatred for him,” he said recently. “I will do everything I can every day to hold up to the light what he is doing to America’s children.”
Speaking to AusDoc last week, Dr Offit recalls that they crossed paths once.
It was back in 2004, where they chatted on the phone for an hour when RFK Jr called him to ask questions about thiomersal, a preservative once common to childhood vaccines that has been a dog whistle for anti-vaxxers of all forms.
At the time, Mr Kennedy had been hearing concerns from parents worried about vaccine safety. He wanted help understanding the science behind it all.
“I thought the conversation went well,” Dr Offit says.
“And then, I read an article in Rolling Stone where he just sandbagged me.”
The article, titled Deadly Immunity and penned by RFK Jr, contained numerous falsities: that thiomersal in vaccines caused autism; that the amount of thiomersal in vaccines was 187 times greater than the recommended limit; and that Dr Offit had defended thiomersal because his rotavirus vaccine was, in the words of Mr Kennedy, “laced with it”.
As Dr Offit has explained, the alleged autism association had already been refuted in multiple studies, the amount of thiomersal was 1.4 times the limit, and his rotavirus vaccine never contained the preservative.
He called a senior editor of Rolling Stone and the article was retracted.
“But I learned, with the publication of that article, that Kennedy was an anti-vaccine activist, a science denialist and a conspiracy theorist.
“He believed that mercury in vaccines was causing harm — he ultimately wrote a book about it called Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, where the science didn’t get to speak at all,” Dr Offit says.
“And he was off and running.”
If someone had told Dr Offit back then, however, that Mr Kennedy would become the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he says he would have thought the world had turned upside down.
But the world did turn upside down.
Today, Dr Offit is angry — and very public about being angry. Amid the alarming spectacle of the dismantling of the US public health system and the worst measles outbreak in more than 30 years, he gets invited by the media to talk about vaccines and science and risk and benefits.
He also writes a blog on Substack, called Beyond the Noise, which has more than 41,000 subscribers. RFK Jr features prominently.
When AusDoc last spoke with Dr Offit in March last year, he was committed to remaining a member of the FDAs vaccine advisory committee until Mr Kennedy booted him out.
That actually happened six months later. But it was done quietly. The FDA submitted paperwork to renew his tenure on the committee for another two years. The Department of Health and Human Services simply never replied. He was off.
Eventually, he received an email thanking him for his service, but no official reason for his effective dismissal was ever given.
“I had heard from others that RFK Jr just didn’t want me to be on the committee anymore,” he says.
“I don’t know why — you think it could have been something I said?” He laughs and adds: “I’m glad I’m getting on [Mr Kennedy’s] nerves.”
But his departure is part of a broader exodus of scientists and experts from institutions long regarded as bastions of evidence-based public health.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for instance, has long been considered one of the world’s leading public health agencies, having helped eradicate smallpox, eliminate malaria from the US and advance global polio eradication efforts, while playing a central role in responses to HIV/AIDS, Ebola and COVID-19.
Mr Kennedy described it last year as a “snake pit”, and the experts working in his department as “biostitutes” — a portmanteau of biology and prostitutes — because he believes that many of the staff are in the pocket of Big Pharma.
Since January 2025 the CDC has lost around a quarter of its workforce, and Mr Kennedy pledged last March to further cut the health department’s overall workforce by another 10,000, down from 82,000.
The question AusDoc asks is whether there is resistance from within — can the staff, the experts protect the institutions from inside by not following orders when new management arrives.
“There’s a brain drain, I mean, people are being discouraged from being basic science researchers — they’re leaving,” Dr Offit says.
The staff who remain are trying their best. Dr Offit calls it a “noble mission”.
Still, he says it becomes difficult when they have “been taken over by a science denialist” who appoints sympathetic leaders.
He points to the new CDC director, Dr Erica Schwartz, who was asked during her confirmation hearing last month what she would do if Mr Kennedy directed her to implement harmful, unscientific policies.
“I do not believe that the president or the secretary would ever do [that],” she responded.
“Even though he’s been doing it for a year and a half,” Dr Offit says to AusDoc.
But the consequences have been real.
With the CDC’s food surveillance group “practically eliminated”, Dr Offit says there have been outbreaks of salmonella and cyclospora, as well as deaths from listeria.
Immunisation rates are also down, and cases of tetanus are up, as well as deaths from whooping cough and influenza in children, which are the highest they have been in almost a decade.
And then there is the measles outbreak. Headline news at the beginning of 2025 when two children — girls aged eight and six from western Texas — died.
But it still continues. The latest numbers show more than 2400 confirmed cases in 2026.
What was Mr Kennedy’s response? He sent shipments of vitamin A to western Texas, which he claimed “can dramatically reduce measles mortality”.
“[It] only caused a lot of people to take too much of it and get admitted to the hospital with liver toxicity,” Dr Offit says.
“That’s who our Secretary of Health and Human Services is. It’s embarrassingly stupid.”
Dr Offit is far from a vaccine propagandist, if such things exist beyond the minds of the anti-vaxxers. And he is sensitive to the doubts and fears of parents.
As Dr Offit says, concerns about vaccines and their effects have been around since Edward Jenner and his smallpox vaccine.
Back in 2002, Dr Offit was the sole member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to vote against offering voluntary smallpox vaccination to thousands of Americans, amid growing fears of bioterrorism.
“In the absence of disease, one can argue quite strongly that the risks of the vaccine outweigh its benefits,” he told PBS at the time.
But Dr Offit has witnessed the reality of uncontrolled infectious diseases. He recently told Philadelphia Magazine that as a registrar, he saw hundreds of children with rotavirus, one of whom died, and recalled watching unvaccinated patients slowly die from measles through an ICU window.
After a botched foot surgery as a child, he spent weeks in a polio ward listening to children scream in pain, some of whom were in iron lungs.
“That was a traumatic experience,” Dr Offit said.
“I really think the scars of your childhood make for the passions of your adulthood. Mine comes from defending that little boy in the hospital.”
Many assume that Mr Kennedy’s tenure as lord of mischief has a finite life. Two years — the end of the Trump administration. So, sanity returns?
Can the damage be undone, can you rebuild these institutions and — just as importantly — the public’s trust in them?
Dr Offit is an optimist, but he admits it will take time.
Misinformation is a lucrative business, he says, and it has thrived in a climate of post-COVID-19 mistrust, where to be anti-science or anti-vaccine is, at some levels, to be anti-government.
In some ways, the success of public health institutions has also contributed to their erosion. Dr Offit points to the wonders of the measles vaccine, which not only eliminated the disease but “eliminated the memory of measles”.
“I think the only way people are going to realise the importance of vaccines is when they once again fear the disease.
“I don’t think there’s been enough disease yet to cause that to happen.”
However, he says he is ready at any moment to make a return.
“Science is a powerful thing to have on your side,” he adds. “Science brought us out of the age of darkness into the age of enlightenment.
“We shouldn’t be so quick to give it up.”
And that, as he says, requires political engagement.
As he told Philadelphia Magazine: “I feel like we’re falling off a cliff in slow motion, and nobody in power is saying anything.
“Where the f*** is Congress, where the f*** is everyone standing up to RFK Jr?”
You can read Philadelphia Magazine‘s in-depth profile of Dr Offit here.
