Shemitah Basu (2:59)

Well, let's get into some of that background. I mean, you write about this just a bit in the piece, as you said, it feels like incomplete to tell the story without touching on some of that. But how old was he exactly when his uncle was shot first?

Michael Shearer (3:11)

So he was nine years old when his uncle, President Kennedy, was shot, and then 14 years old when his father, Kennedy's brother, Bobby Kennedy was shot in California. And that was, I mean, obviously a trauma for any family. But compounding it was the fact that, you know, his mother was left with 11 children at that point to raise on her own. And he was left, you know, basically shipped off to boarding school. I mean, he was left without many people raising him. And he tells the story of the summer after his father is killed, 1969, someone offers him LSD. He was into a comic book at the time that was about Native Americans who lived among dinosaurs. So he said to this boy who's offering him acid, you think I'll see dinosaurs. It just shows I'm a 15 year old kid.

Shemitah Basu (4:04)

Yeah, he was 15.

Michael Shearer (4:05)

Yeah, yeah, 15. And that's just the beginning of his night. I mean, he crashes pretty hard later on and another group of kids offer him crystal meth. And it was the crystal meth. I mean, I think psychedelics have continued to play a role in his life, but it was a crystal meth that led to the heroin. And he said a year later, you know, at 16, he was taking trips up to New York to buy smack on the street and continued as a regular heroin user, through several boarding schools, as a high school student, through Harvard University, through the University of Virginia, where he got a law degree, through his first legal jobs in New York City until the addiction sort of got the best of him.

Shemitah Basu (4:47)

And what was the turning point for him in saying that he wanted to make a change?

Michael Shearer (4:52)

He had actually booked a trip to the Midwest where he was hoping to go into rehab. And on the plane out there, he overdosed in the bathroom of the plane and was pulled off the plane. They found heroin on him. He was arrested. So that was national news. You know, the son of Bobby Kennedy arrested for heroin. He went into rehab. Now, he was not alone in that scene of having a hard drug problem at the time. It's pretty remarkable what the sort of Kennedy clan went through in the 70s and early 80s. And shortly after he got out of rehab, his younger brother overdoses at Palm beach, you know, where the Families gathered for another event. And so this sort of heavy drug use was a huge cloud over his whole world at the time.

Shemitah Basu (5:38)

How does he talk about that period in his life and his turning point of seeking help and being in recovery, which it sounds like even to this day, he really does seek out meetings, 12 step meetings. And that's part of his daily practice, in fact.

Michael Shearer (5:55)

That's right. He goes every day. He said, yeah, and he went every day when he was running for president. No matter what city he was in, he would tell his security, you have to find me a meeting. I need to be able to go. I asked him how much his recovery affects who he is now. He said, it affects everything. I mean, I think it is impossible to separate any part of him now from the recovery journey. Part of it has to do with a sort of transparency that people in recovery have. I mean, the process of going to meetings is telling your story over and over and over again to other people in a way that makes sense and allows you to sort of forgive yourself for the things you've done to other people, for the way you've mistreated other people. But the way he has come out of that is through a sort of, you know, very dramatic storytelling that puts him on a sort of heroic path. I mean, when he was a young boy, before his father died, Once and Future King, which is a story of young King Arthur being trained by Merlin in the woods, was one of his favorite books. And the first red tail hawk he gets from his father, he names after a character in Once and Future King. So he, from a very early age, saw himself as a sort of King Arthur like figure. Right. You know, orphaned future king who has to fight demons and evil forces and fight his way back. And that force, that fierceness, I think, explains why I think he's been successful in the ways he's been successful, but also why he has been so willing to divert entirely from the sort of accepted wisdom of the scientific community. He really sees himself as someone who can see the truth in ways other people do not see the truth. And his mission is to sort of destroy and disrupt corrupt institutions. And that begins, you know, after his recovery in the early 80s. He becomes an environmentalist, and he has a number of successful lawsuits against big corporate polluters starting in New York State and the Hudson River. And so that was the frame of reference that Kennedy had in his adulthood, that he really was someone who could take on these evil institutional forces, which.

Shemitah Basu (8:09)

Just to say, in his environmental activism, a lot of it was more aligned with left leaning, progressive liberal ideology. I remember there was talk, there were rumblings when Obama was heading into office that he might be appointed EPA head, for example. Right. Which did not seem like at the time, a role that he. He was unqualified for. He had a really strong track record. Yeah.

Michael Shearer (8:33)

And he has always considered himself a liberal and I think still considers himself a liberal. I mean, he described himself as an FDR Kennedy liberal. In the early 2000s, when George W. Bush was president, he wrote a whole book about the fascism of the Republican Party and how their environmental record, the environmental record of Bush in sort of like handing over environmental policy to corporations was similar to what Mussolini did in Italy. It sort of echoed a lot of the liberal rhetoric that you now hear about President Trump. And so one of the remarkable things about Kennedy is to get to where he is now, he had to square that. He had to make the journey from thinking the Republican Party and its policy of appointing former corporate executives to be energy secretary, for instance, which Trump did. I mean, he serves now with an energy secretary who formerly worked for an oil company that. That was still part of this liberal crusade that Kennedy still believes he's fighting against entrenched power, corrupt bureaucracies, and sort of institutions that are, I mean, in the case of public health, quite literally, he believes, killing kids or hurting kids. And so that's a journey he took. And we talked quite a bit about how he got from describing Trump as someone who preyed upon the darkest impulses of American history. He was doing that in 2024, to standing on a stage in August of 2024 with Trump and endorsing his campaign and then spending the next several weeks fighting to get Trump elected.

Shemitah Basu (10:12)

I mean, what did Kennedy have to say when you pressed him on these issues? Exactly. The company that he's keeping in this administration and the ways in which they conflict with some of his past stated values.

Michael Shearer (10:25)

Yeah. He admitted it was complicated. And he said his relationship with Donald Trump is kind of like when you're dating a girl and you find out you keep liking her more and more.

Shemitah Basu (10:33)

Well, I read that and I thought, well, you have to start from a point, though, of actually actively not liking the girl for this metaphor to work. Right. Which is really the place where he seems to have started on Trump.

Michael Shearer (10:44)

I think that's right. Yeah. I mean, the simplest way to answer that question is that Kennedy decided that Trump was at heart not a conservative, but a populist. So they were aligned in this sort of populist health crusade to break up the sort of established scientific view of how things like vaccines work, how chronic disease is approached, how chemicals are regulated. I mean, there's a whole long list of things he's done at HHS since then. And I think the simplest explanation for what he did was this was a transaction. Trump was offering him power, real political power in his administration to make some of the changes that Kennedy had been arguing for for a long time. And he took the deal.

Shemitah Basu (11:29)

So now that he is health secretary, which just to say, and I mean, you point this out in the piece, just how powerful of a role it really is, he oversees one out of every $4 in the federal budget. He's in charge of about 17% of the nation's economy in this role. Not to mention the hugely influential impact of health policy, public health policy, in. I mean, what has he managed to accomplish so far in this role? What have seemed to be his biggest priorities? What did he tell you about how he feels about what he's accomplished so far?

Michael Shearer (12:01)

It's been a real whirlwind. I don't think there's ever been as dramatic. We're nine months or ten months now into the administration at hhs. The first thing you have to say is about a quarter of the people who work for HHS have left, which is a massive downsizing. Some of them were fired, some of them were given buyout packages, some of them left voluntarily because they objected to the direction of the policies that were happening. But that's a dramatic shift. There have been enormous reductions in funding at nih. So that's sort of the institutional part. On the policy front, there's a whole bunch of stuff he's done. A lot of them are things that are classically liberal, Ralph Nader type policies. He's announced that he wants to review whether pharmaceutical advertising should be allowed in the US It's a Bernie Sanders priority. He has pushed for voluntary agreements from food companies to take certain food dyes out of cereal and candy. He has pushed states to change eligibility for public assistance to make it so that people who are receiving public assistance cannot spend that money on sugary sodas and in some cases, candy. Because he's sort of refocused a lot of everyone's attention on the fact that chronic disease is now the thing that's killing us. It's not infectious disease like it was a hundred years ago. But the most controversial area and the area of greatest friction that has gotten most attention has been his efforts to remake the way U.S. public health approaches vaccination.

Shemitah Basu (13:33)

Yeah. And I mean, this is a huge part of not only what Kennedy is doing at hhs, but also just who he is and what he believes. Tell me a little bit more about how he came to hold these views about vaccines and how he's implementing those views at HHS.

Michael Shearer (13:51)

Yeah, he is convinced. He became convinced in the mid 2000s that there was an unrecognized epidemic of disease, things like autism or arthritis, that were arising from vaccines, including mostly vaccines given to children either in the first year of life or shortly afterwards. And he was making those arguments and still making those arguments based on mostly an absence of evidence. There is not a lot of clear scientific evidence that there is a direct connection between these two things. His point, when you get down to it, and this is actually the debate that's being made right now as we speak in the cdc, is that that science needs to be done. And so he is committed to spend billions of dollars on hundreds of studies to investigate a connection between things like autism and first year vaccines that most scientific leaders do not believe exists. And even if it was found, would have such a small impact that it would probably not change vaccine recommendations, because vaccines are a big part of the reason why we no longer fear infectious disease anymore. I mean, the reason we're able to die of cancer and heart disease late in life is because we didn't die of measles or hepatitis earlier in life. And then in the interim, while he's doing those studies, he has sought to change research priorities around vaccination and also change recommendations around vaccination in a way that vaccinologists fear will lead to a spike in infectious disease over the coming years that is going to hurt people. And so you have this remarkable fight going on now within public health over who's going to hurt more kids. I mean, you couldn't make the stakes any higher than this. Right? Both sides are saying to the other side, if you do this, kids will die. This is just one of the hottest areas of politics right now.

Shemitah Basu (15:53)

Sure, of course. And it intersects with the personal and personal decision making, personal autonomy, making decisions for your own family, which clearly, when Kennedy talks about that as an issue, is very important to so many people. It was really resonating, resonating with a lot of Americans, this idea of I should have the autonomy to choose what's best for my family rather than have it dictated. I mean, you spoke to Dr. Paul Offit for this piece. He is a person who Kennedy has often criticized, I should say. He's a doctor, he's a pediatrician, he's an infectious disease expert and a public health expert who talks a lot about the policy making behind a lot of these decisions. He's been very critical of Kennedy. What did he have to say to you, though, about this conversation about vaccines specifically?

Michael Shearer (16:38)

Yeah, I mean, Offutt is furious and outspoken. Offit's view was that Kennedy just doesn't have the data to support what he's saying. And if he had the data, he should publish it, but he can't publish it. And so that all this talk is just talk. And Offit's, you know, become rather pessimistic, at least in the short term, about what this is all going to mean. He believes that rates of disease are going to rise and that ultimately the viruses. The way he said it to me was the viruses and the bacteria are going to do the education. A state like Florida is getting rid of vaccine mandates in schools. I think it's happened in Idaho. There are other places that are making moves in that direction that we are going to see outbreaks, and those outbreaks will lead to injury and death. And the only point in which we sort of swing back the other direction will be when that happens. That's off its view.

Shemitah Basu (17:30)

I mean, you write about how Kennedy seems to take personal interest in topics and then want to read as much as he can about them. It seems like the Tylenol announcement might be one example of a case like that, right, where Kennedy got very interested in the suggestion that Tylenol might have any connection to autism. And in the piece, you talk a little bit about how that announcement sort of unfolded, where Kennedy stood by President Trump as Trump told pregnant women not to take Tylenol because of unproven links to autism. The way that the president characterized it was as if there is, in fact, a proven link. To me, this story tells me something about how Kennedy operates versus how Trump operates, for one, but also how public health messaging really works in this country. What did you, under this president, what were you kind of pulling out of this?

Michael Shearer (18:25)

Well, so the place to start is that Kenny said for a long time that you shouldn't trust experts, which is a wild thing for someone running HHS to be saying.

Shemitah Basu (18:32)

He likes to say, don't trust me even, right?

Michael Shearer (18:34)

He says, don't trust me. He said, you should do your own research. And I said to him at one point, I was like, well, wait, if I have to fix my car, I don't start reading manuals about how to replace the carburetor. I take it to someone to fix the carburetor. And his answer to that was, well, yeah, but you'd shop different body shops. You'd go to different mechanics to figure out the best one. You'd ask other people, which is the mechanic you want. And so he loves read. He's a lawyer by training, not a doctor. He has no formal medical training, but he loves reading scientific papers. And so what happened in August is that a Harvard professor put out a paper. It was basically a meta analysis of a bunch of other studies that showed a possible connection between Tylenol use during pregnancy and neurodevelopmental illness, including autism. It was a large epidemiological study. So it's not showing causation. It's showing, look, we looked at this large number of people. We know these people took Tylenol. We're seeing slightly higher rates among those people. That could be a cause. We don't know it's a correlation. It could be a cause. Kenny got very excited when the paper was published, and he told me he spent that weekend reading 70 papers. And he called other researchers who'd been working on this topic, people who'd been looking at the possible biologic connections here. He called in the CEO of Kenview, which is the company that makes Tylenol, and had him bring in his researchers and came out of it with what he described to me. And I think it was a sort of nuanced view of what's going on here. Fevers during pregnancy are dangerous for kids and mothers. That's not disputed. And right now, the only fever reducer that is recommended for pregnant women is Tylenol. You know, other fever reducers have known negative effects. And so if you have a very high fever and you're pregnant, the doctor will say, you should take Tylenol because you don't want to the high fever to affect your unborn child. And so what Kennedy told me when we were first talking about this, and this is before the announcement with Trump, was, we have to be nuanced about this. We don't want to say you just can't take Tylenol, but we do want to say there could be this connection here. So we have to be concerned. We have to do more research. And if you have the option, if it's a low fever, if it's not a big deal, it's probably better not to take Tylenol. And. And when he initially went to President Trump with his findings, Trump's initial reaction was, I just want to tweet this out right now. Don't take Tylenol. And Kennedy told me he told the president, no, don't do that. And then weeks later, they have a press conference. The FDA has drafted advice for pediatricians and obstetricians. And it was a kind of complicated, nuanced set of advice. That's what they presented at the White House. And then Trump came to the microphones and said what you just said, don't take it. Do whatever you can not to take it, which is just not the medical advice.

Shemitah Basu (21:16)

Were you able to glean how Kennedy felt about how that announcement went?

Michael Shearer (21:20)

He was not interested in our conversations, in criticizing the president directly like that. One of the things I found during the reporting was that they do have actually a very close relationship. They talk regularly. Trump is sort of hot and cold on vaccines. He's a big fan of the COVID vaccine, which he developed. He's a big fan of other vaccinations. He also seems to be convinced there is some autism connection that's worth finding. And so I think they have a very warm personal relationship that is based on some give and take here.

Shemitah Basu (21:50)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, where does Kennedy stand today? With the rest of his family, for one, but also his old friends and allies in the Democratic Party?

Michael Shearer (22:03)

Yeah, it's not in a great place. I mean, the Kennedy family is a very large family. There are a lot of cousins. And so I think he still has relationships with a number of them. But a number of them, including some of his siblings, are publicly outspoken, very critical of him, including, most recently, the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, who's sadly suffering from terminal cancer, who wrote a rather blistering appraisal of his HHS leadership in the New Yorker. And his relationship with Democrats is similarly very strained. I mean, I wrote about Sheldon Whitehouse, who's a senator from Rhode Island. They went to law school together. They were friends. They were in each other's weddings. And I've been to a couple of these hearings where White House questions Kennedy, and it is vicious. I mean, White House just goes after him with, like, a real, like a tenor of fury. And these are very close old friends, but there's no acknowledgement at all that they ever had a friendship. And Kennedy's response in those hearings has been, well, look, just give me a call. You have my cell phone. We can talk about this. But this is such a political hot potato right now, the vaccine question, again, because the stakes are so high, like, as high as they could possibly be, that a lot of relationships have been lost.

Shemitah Basu (23:12)

You know, I wanted to ask you, Michael, it just feels hard to ignore Some aspects of the Kennedy coverage, which is the salacious ones, Right. I mean, there have been some really, truly out there stories about him. I mean, I'm talking also about during campaign times, the worm in his brain stories, a story about the bear, and then even more recently, the details that are coming forward about his relationship with the reporter Olivia Newsy. I know that you asked him to some degree about some of these stories, including the Newsy stuff, and he didn't want to comment on it. But what do you of all of that reporting? There's this other, like, it just feels like there's so much happening in the health sphere, which is what he's actually officially in charge of. But then there's this other kind of sideshow to the RFK story that's happening, right?

Michael Shearer (24:06)

Well, some of those are just things that happen. I mean, he swims in lakes and rivers and travels the country, and he had a parasite in his brain and he has this very unique relationship with animals. So I think he just approaches the idea of finding a bear on the side of the road that's been hit by a car differently than almost anyone else would, or finding a whale on a beach differently than anyone else would. The other category of that, though, especially his relationship with women and sex, is something that, I mean, we didn't discuss it much in detail, but he has also been very clear that his addictions. He describes his brain as a formulation pharmacy, which is basically a way of saying that he can turn anything into a drug. It's rock climbing, it's working with birds or sex. And so he is still very much someone who struggles with his demons. And I think, I mean, he has not commented at all on the relationship with Olivia during the campaign last year. He has said when he's been confronted with other claims about infidelity, there was a babysitter who worked with his family who said he inappropriately touched her at some point and sort of propositioned her. He's apologized for that. And he'll say, I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could vote, I'd be king of the world. And he'll make kind of jokes about the things he's done in the past that are not honorable. But I think the main takeaway from that for me was this is a person who still very much struggles. He's not someone who's ever presented himself as being cured from the demons that haunted him during his teen years and twenties. And I think that is actually something that also explains his actions in other areas as well. It's what drives him forward.

Shemitah Basu (25:52)

The piece that you published in the Atlantic, the title was, why Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. So convinced he's Right? I thought that was an interesting framework to think about him as a person. What is it that you think is underpinning his deep conviction? Because that's something that you've described now many times over the course of this conversation. He has deep conviction in his beliefs.

Michael Shearer (26:14)

I think he is a person who is actually very accomplished at launching crusades like the one he has launched recently. And this is from his environmental days, who believes that he was born to do something, to fulfill the promise of his uncle and his father and his family name. And who, as I just described, has been through. I mean, he described his drug addiction as hell. He's someone who describes himself as having returned from hell. And as he has returned from hell, that has endowed him with certain perspectives and powers that other people do not have. And then I think the second part of that, which the story does, and it's hard to get into because it becomes very complicated very quickly, is you can engage him at length on the actual science. I mean, science is supposed to be a place where there is an objective truth. And this is not debatable. In practice, it's much harder because what science shows you is very pinpoint pixels of light in a very large room. You don't see everything. You just see what you've. The question you've asked, and then you have to scrutinize that. And there's a lot that is unproven in science. There are a lot of assumptions made in science. And it's really interesting to spend time with him and kind of go down these rabbit holes where I think he is making assumptions that end up in some cases not being true, that he is focusing on a vision which the burden of proof of science has flipped from where it's been. He believes you have to prove before you give a vaccine to a healthy person that there is no harm. Whereas the scientific community for the last century has basically said, well, look, if we can prove there's enormous benefit, that's enough, and then we'll monitor for harm. But it's a different sort of framework he's bringing to it.

Shemitah Basu (28:01)

Did you come across anyone in the scientific community who believes that he is asking some of the right questions? I think that there might be a complicated thing happening also, where even acknowledging that many Americans are in this place of feeling distrustful toward public health institutions is somehow allowing for bad policy to be made or sort of Inviting that.

Michael Shearer (28:26)

Yeah. I think that, you know, there's a lot of topics that are talked about here, and I think a number of the things he's pushing forward on, including the chronic disease stuff, are very popular, broadly embraced. I mean, like the idea that food stamps are used to pay for sugary colas, which are clearly causing health effects. That's now a broad, bipartisan view, and I think a lot of the scientific community is fully on board with that. On the question of vaccines, there are scientists who, you know, everyone will admit that we don't know everything about these vaccines. Billions of doses are given of these vaccines. We don't know everything, but we don't know everything about almost everything in our lives. And the question is, how skeptical do we want to be about vaccines? How much do we want to devote our resources and time and to pull back on using vaccines while we find out? And there were vaccinologists I talked to who said, look, I am open to a new study about autism in the first year. Vaccines, we can do that. We just have to structure in the right way. There are confounding variables we have to account for. They don't trust that Kennedy will do it. They don't believe Kennedy has the scientific training or the people he is appointing have the neutrality needed to do that study properly. But there is openness to the idea that we need more science. He's now going to do that. The question is. The open question is, will Kennedy discover what he believes to be there with this clear causal connection between vaccines and harm to children that has not yet been discovered? Or will his efforts to discover that cause far more harm to American health in the meantime? And we don't know the answer to that. And I asked him at the end of our time together, I said, well, what if you're wrong? You know, what if all you're doing here doesn't work out and off it's right, and the vaccines and the bacteria do the education, and we have measles and whooping cough outbreaks, and kids are put in the hospital. And his answer was, we would listen, which was a hopeful answer. And then he went on to sort of list out all the reasons that he was not wrong. So he's not in any way conceding that he's wrong. But I think we're now on this journey as a country, as a public health apparatus, and we're gonna see what happens.

Shemitah Basu (30:45)

Yeah, Michael, really fascinating piece, and one of those rare pieces where you really, really sat with the subject and let us sit with you. So thank you for writing it. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Michael Shearer (30:56)

Thanks so much for having me.

Shemitah Basu (31:01)

We'll include a link to Michael Shearer's profile on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. On our show notes PA page. And every weekend you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, that's the little headphones at the bottom to find it.