Paul Offitt is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. This post appeared on his blog “Beyond the Noise.”

On July 5, 2023, RFK Jr. appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast, which boasts more than 3 million listeners. Regarding Fauci, Kennedy said, “He’s done a lot of things that I think are really bad for humanity. I think he is a genuinely bad human being.” In The Real Anthony Fauci, which has sold more than 1,000,000 copies, RFK Jr. claimed that Dr. Fauci is a figurehead for an elite cadre of wealthy insiders, dark money, and corporate interests. Kennedy’s vitriol invites a comparison of the careers of these two men.

Anthony Fauci was born on December 24, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York. His father owned a pharmacy; his mother and sister worked the register; Tony delivered prescriptions. Fauci attended Holy Cross, later earning his medical degree from Cornell Medical School. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was born on January 17, 1954. His father was Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle was President John F. Kennedy. RFK Jr. graduated from Harvard University in 1976, later earning his law degree from the University of Virginia.

Both men would eventually head organizations with the word “Health” in the title. After completing his medical residency in 1968, Dr. Fauci joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a clinical associate in the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In 1984, he was appointed director of NIAID. In 2011, after a stint as an environmental lawyer, RFK Jr. created and headed an organization called Children’s Health Defense.

During his tenure at NIAID, Dr. Fauci: (1) developed treatments for several previously fatal autoimmune diseases, later recognized as among the most important advances in the previous 20 years; (2) described the mechanisms by which human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) caused AIDS; (3) developed treatments to restore the immune competence of AIDS sufferers; (4) supervised the work of Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett among others that led to the development of mRNA vaccines to prevent COVID; and (5) helped create and design Operation Warp Speed, which delivered mRNA vaccines that have saved the lives of about three million Americans. For these efforts, Dr. Fauci received the Lasker Award, the highest award for medical research in the United States.

As head of Children’s Health Defense, RFK Jr. has also been involved in COVID vaccines, publicly stating that they were “the deadliest vaccines ever made.” In July 2020, to dissuade African Americans from being vaccinated, Kennedy claimed that “people with African American blood react differently to vaccines than people with Caucasian blood; they’re much more sensitive.” When baseball legend Hank Aaron died at 86 of natural causes, Kennedy called it part of a “wave of suspicious deaths among the elderly following administration of COVID vaccines.” In 2021, Kennedy debuted a propaganda film targeting African Americans called Medical Racism: The New Apartheid, which claimed that COVID vaccines were “just one huge experiment on Black Americans.” For these efforts, RFK Jr. was kicked off Instagram, videos of his vaccine interviews were removed from YouTube, and Children’s Health Defense was kicked off Facebook.

Both men were also involved in the public health of developing countries. Dr. Fauci was the main architect of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which is estimated to have saved 20 million lives in Africa. For this work, Dr. Fauci was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. RFK Jr.’s work in the developing world focused on the Pacific Island nation of Samoa. In July 2018, two nurses in Samoa prepared a measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine for two 12-month-old children. Instead of diluting the vaccine powder in water, they inadvertently diluted it with a muscle relaxant. Both infants immediately stopped breathing and died as a result. One nurse tried to cover up her error by taking the empty bottle of the muscle relaxant home after retrieving it from the garbage. Both were later sentenced to five years in prison.

RFK Jr. seized upon the story as proof that the MMR vaccine was deadly, spending months highlighting the two deaths on Facebook. After it had become clear that the MMR vaccine hadn’t caused the infant deaths, RFK Jr. visited Samoa, appearing alongside prominent local anti-vaccine activists and meeting with senior officials. Influenced in part by RFK Jr., the Samoan government suspended its measles vaccination program for 10 months. Immunization rates plummeted from 74 percent in 2017 to 31 percent in late 2018, precipitating a massive outbreak of measles. Between September and December 2019, at least 5,700 people suffered measles and 83 died, most of the deaths were in children less than four years of age.

On November 19, 2019, in the midst of the measles outbreak, RFK Jr. wrote a 4-page letter to the Samoan prime minister, stating, “To safeguard public health during the current infection and in the future, it is critical that the Samoan Health Ministry determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine.” Fortunately, no one was listening to RFK Jr. anymore. The Samoan Health Ministry launched a vaccination campaign in late November 2019 and, within five days, had immunized more than 17,000 people. The outbreak subsided.

Anthony Fauci and RFK Jr. do share one thing in common. Both attended Jesuit high schools. Dr. Fauci attended Regis High School in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. RFK Jr. attended the Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Maryland. Both were taught the Jesuit philosophy “to be men for others.”