Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared on “The Tucker Carlson Show” earlier this month, calling on Americans to “stop trusting experts” and announcing that an “AI revolution” is underway at the department.
Kennedy claimed HHS has brought in “top people from Silicon Valley who walked away from billion dollar businesses” to implement artificial intelligence across agencies, including the FDA, CDC and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. “At FDA, we’re accelerating drug approvals so that you don’t need to use primates or even animal models. You can do the drug approvals very, very quickly with AI,” he said.
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine opponent, also described the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System as “antiquated” and promised to overhaul it with AI, saying, “We’re going to absolutely change VAERS and we’re going to create either within VAERS or supplementary to VAERS a system that actually works.” He repeated false claims that vaccines have “never been properly studied” and told viewers, “Trusting the experts is not a feature of science, it’s not a feature of democracy, it’s a feature of religion and it’s a feature of totalitarianism.”
Public health experts have pushed back, warning that while AI could help flag trends, it cannot determine vaccine safety or causality without expert oversight. Kennedy’s push for AI at HHS comes amid criticism over the White House’s Make America Healthy Again report, which he oversaw. Reviewers found broken links, duplicate citations and references to studies that do not exist, many apparently generated by AI.
This story is part of The Rebel Yellow Newsletter — a bold weekly newsletter from the creators of NextShark, reclaiming our stories and celebrating Asian American voices.
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