RFK Jr. Made Promising Statements on Long Covid. Too Bad the Rest of His Plans Undercut Them

During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — vaccine conspiracy theorist, former presidential candidate, and Donald Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services secretary — answered most questions about his past and his plans for the future by talking in circles about vaccines, Medicare, and abortion, and demonstrating that his loyalty to the president trumps his concern for public health. But this wasn’t the case when Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) asked Kennedy about Long Covid. 

At a time when no one wants to think or talk about the global pandemic that began five years ago, there are an estimated 15 to 20 million Americans living with the chronic condition and its more than 200 symptoms who can’t move on, and, as Young put, have “been largely ignored.” This was certainly the case during the 2024 presidential race, when — with the exception of Kamala Harris (inadequately) answering one question about Long Covid during a Univision town hall — neither candidate addressed the condition in any meaningful way.

That’s why, as someone living with Long Covid for nearly five years, I was shocked to hear Young ask Kennedy if he would “collaborate with health care providers, researchers and effective communities to better understand and mitigate Long Covid’s impact,” and hear Kennedy’s answer: “Absolutely.” 

Surprisingly, Kennedy agreed to “commit to prioritizing Long Covid research and integrate this work in a broader healthcare policy,” and to working with Congress to ensure that Long Covid research funding “be directed primarily towards trial or novel research directions, and not replicating existing observational research.”

For someone living with a condition that is still routinely dismissed or met with disbelief, having the presumptive head of the Department of Health and Human Services not only acknowledge Long Covid, but agree to promote research on it sounds too good to be true. But is this a meaningful step forward, or was Kennedy simply telling Young what he wanted to hear? 

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Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and Long Covid expert and researcher, says he’s “happily surprised” by Kennedy’s stance during the hearing. “If he is serious about prioritizing Long Covid — and I certainly hope he is — I stand ready to work with him to address the crisis,” he tells Rolling Stone. 

To be clear, Long Covid is absolutely a crisis. It has robbed millions of us of our physical, mental, and cognitive health. It has forced countless people out of the workforce, and caused some to lose their homes. It has ruined relationships, alienated us from families and friends, and made us question our place and purpose in the world. While there are ways to help us manage our symptoms, there is no known cure for Long Covid. For us, research into potential treatments is our best source of hope.

As much as I want to take Kennedy’s commitment to Long Covid research at face value, it’s hard to reconcile his affirmative responses to Young’s questions with his views on vaccines — including the position that he’s held for two decades that some vaccines cause autism (a now disproven claim based on a fraudulent and since retracted 1998 study). He’s had endless opportunities to set the record straight — including in an exchange with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday — but has failed to do so, in turn, giving credence to this dangerous myth. 

And then there was the time in November 2023, during his presidential campaign, when he told an audience at an anti-vaccine conference about his plan for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to take a long hiatus from studying infectious diseases, like Covid-19 and measles, and focus instead on chronic conditions, like diabetes and obesity. “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, God bless you all,” Kennedy said in 2023. “Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”

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On the one hand, Kennedy’s full-throated support of Long Covid research is in line with his pledge to combat chronic illness: one of the pillars of his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign. On the other, he has been laser-focused on obesity and diabetes, his solution invariably centering on changing American diets. He consistently and conveniently ignores the numerous chronic conditions that can begin with an infection — not just Long Covid, but myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), post-polio syndrome, and other post-viral syndromes. If he was genuinely interested in taking on chronic illness, his vaccine skepticism and call to abandon infectious disease research for eight years wouldn’t be an option. He can’t have it both ways.

During the hearing, it was bizarre to hear the guy who, in May 2021, petitioned the Food and Drug Administration requesting that the agency revoke authorization for Covid vaccines, commit so readily to continuing Long Covid research, knowing that the Covid vaccine reduces the incidence of Long Covid. After all, the best way to avoid Long Covid is not to get infected in the first place.

“Obviously he has stances on vaccines and deemphasizing infectious disease research for nearly a decade, which is counter to prioritizing Long Covid, so there’s some inconsistency there,” Al-Aly says of Kennedy’s position on the condition during the hearing. “But I’m not naive. We will use this as leverage to push him in the right direction for Long Covid.”