On September 29, 2026, at a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) conference, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will free Americans from having to “trust the experts.” “Every American will be able to check their own medical advice” and avoid the “medical tyranny” of public health officials who had misled us during the COVID pandemic, said RFK Jr.
RFK Jr. claimed public health officials had lied about whether “masks or social distancing worked” to prevent the spread of COVID, and that “vaccines will prevent transmission and infection.” RFK Jr. implied that checking with AI would have proven that all these claims were wrong.
However, a quick check with AI platforms such as Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT don’t support RFK Jr.’s claims. All three AI sites state that masks reduce spread of the virus, which makes sense given that the droplets that carry SARS-CoV-2 are larger than the pore size of the masks. AI platforms also support the claim that vaccination reduces COVID symptoms and lessens, but does not eliminate, transmission, which is supported by published scientific studies.
AI also contradicts many other claims made by RFK Jr. For example, AI contradicts RFK Jr.’s claim that separating the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) into three separate vaccines would make it safer; that Tylenol taken in the first trimester of pregnancy causes autism, that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause harm; that fluoridation of drinking water is dangerous; and that raw milk is more nutritious than pasteurized milk. What I learned from checking with AI wasn’t that we shouldn’t trust medical experts, whose published studies populate AI; it’s that we shouldn’t trust RFK Jr.
RFK Jr. chose September 29, 2026, to make his claims about AI because that was the day that the White House launched its own AI-powered platform called America.gov, which was designed for “navigating federal information, tasks and services.” The key phrase here is “federal information.” If you ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini the question, “Do vaccines cause autism?” the answer is unequivocally, “No.”
If, on the other hand, you ask America.gov the same question, you get an equivocal answer that vaccines might cause autism and that no one has proven that they don’t. When RFK Jr. took over as Secretary of Health and Human Services, he changed the CDC’s website from “vaccines don’t cause autism” to “vaccines might cause autism.” America.gov relies on federal sources of information, such as the CDC’s website. In other words, for the same reason that you can’t trust RFK Jr. for accurate scientific information, you can’t trust America.gov, which offers similarly misleading information about the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine.
In the right hands, AI is a powerful tool for providing accurate, up-to-date, science-based answers to questions. In the wrong hands, such as our current federal government leaders, it isn’t.
Paul A. Offit, MD, is director of the Vaccine Education Center and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. This piece originally ran on his Substack, Beyond the Noise!
MORE FROM PAUL A. OFFIT, M.D.
