It has been reported that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the top spot in this year’s Shkreli Awards from the Lown Institute. The annual awards call out greed and fraud in the healthcare industry. Lown Institute president Vikas Saini, MD, explained that the purpose of the awards is to call out “systemic problems” in which healthcare organizations and clinicians “chase money and greed to the point where they cut corners … with devastating results to patient care.”
Kennedy garnered the lion’s share of judges’ votes for his baseless claims about causes of autism that have baffled the public and angered medical experts. “Citing studies that showed correlation but no causal evidence, and despite clinicians, toxicologists, and major medical organizations having looked at the research and rejected the claim, he asserted a link between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism,” the Lown judges said.
Kennedy then suggested infants undergoing circumcision have higher rates of autism because they likely received acetaminophen for pain, yet his evidence was an unreviewed and unpublished preprint, judges said. “While this spectacle of erratic scientific leadership around autism is supposedly tied to Making America Healthy Again, many are now asking not what Kennedy can do for his country, but how his country can undo what he has already done,” the judges wrote.
Saini stated that Kennedy may be asking reasonable questions, like what is causing autism. The problem is that he then “makes brash announcements … and trumpets them like the Second Coming, saying, ‘We’re going to just fix all this,’ which is playing fast and loose with the facts, and really undermines confidence in decision making and leadership.”
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Needless to say that I agree with this award. On this blog, I have repeatedly commented on Kennedy’s irrational and dangerous views, actions and initiatives. In my view, he does not belong into any position of responsibility, particularly in the area of healthcare. In a nutshell, he uses science like a drunken man uses a lamppost – not for illumination, but for support.
5 Responses to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wins this year’s Shkreli Award
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With the added problem that the lamp posts he uses for support don’t actually exist, but are made up on the spot.
Kennedy is very keen on good science – in order to avoid or demolish it as much as possible.
https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/rfk-jrs-tuskegee-experiment
Disgusting, despicable! Shame on you, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.!
this should be illegal!
@Edzard
It may well be illegal, but that doesn’t matter to Trump and his cronies.
A lot of what the Trump administration is doing and has done is in fact illegal(*). But for some reason, his Republican buddies refuse to hold anyone accountable, or even criticize these crimes. And then we’re not even counting the thousands of real, convicted criminals who have been pardoned by Trump – including multiple large-scale drug traffickers. Each and every single one of these acts would have earned any other president an immediate impeachment and expedited removal from office.
This administration will go down in history as the most incompetent, corrupt, criminal and overall despicable government ever in the US.
*: As in: at least some 200 illegal acts between January and November 2025.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hybL-GJov7M
It seems to be becoming a habit for members of the US government to interfere in the politics of other countries without being ask. Now it is Kennedy’s turn.
https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/robert-f-kennedy-jr-us-gesundheitsminister-schreibt-beschwerdebrief-an-deutsche-gesundheitsministerin-nina-warken-a-54a7ea93-dd16-4973-8bee-7487cc4d5241