RFK Jr.'s ethics filing reveals book deals worth millions of dollars

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. listens as President Trump speaks in the Oval Office about an administration healthcare initiative last Friday. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

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In the minutes before Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the stage last Thursday at an anti-vaccine conference in Washington, D.C., MAHA Institute President Mark Gorton was calling vaccines "a public health disaster."

The conference was for Children's Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group that has filed dozens of lawsuits against federal agencies, state governments and companies over vaccine requirements and other policies it disagrees with.

Kennedy co-founded the group, and it paid him $326,056 in salary and bonuses in the year before he left his role as chairman of the board and chief legal counsel to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a federal ethics filing.

"Let me be clear. You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House," Kennedy told the crowd. "We've accomplished in 19 months … things that would have seemed unthinkable two years ago."

Talking to the anti-vaccine group he led so recently is just one of the ways Kennedy is pushing norms. He has also taken cash for book advances, defied his ethics agreement by promoting one of his books on social media and accepted expensive gifts.

"Having a secretary of health and human services not only give a keynote address at an anti-vaccine group that he helped found and continue to promote his anti-vaccine agenda is endangering the health, safety and lives of American citizens and the world at large," says Dr. Jason Goldman , the immediate past president of the American College of Physicians. "Nothing that I have seen with the current secretary of health and human services and his handling of public health and vaccines is, in my opinion, the norm."