RFK Jr. Doesn’t Actually Believe Germs Are Real, Which Seems Like Terrible News For Everyone Going On A Cruise This Year

Gastrointestinal illnesses on cruise ships hit a 12-year high in 2024, and 2025 has been even worse, with cruise lines seeing an entire year’s worth of outbreaks in only the first quarter of the year. So it was hard to understand why Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. decided it was the perfect time to get rid of the people at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who investigate outbreaks and ensure cruise ships are properly sanitized, especially with a new Norovirus strain running rampant. Now it all makes sense, though — RFK doesn’t believe germs are real.

That’s a serious claim, and we have so much evidence that germs cause disease, you probably don’t have a category in your brain for a real person in real life who actually believes germ theory is wrong, much less the person in charge of our nation’s health. And yet, as Ars Technica recently pointed out, that claim is based on RFK’s own words that he published in his book The Real Anthony Fauci. You just have to look at the Miasma vs. Germ Theory section of the chapter he titled “The White Man’s Burden.” Yikes. On so many levels.

In that chapter, Kennedy wrote, “‘Miasma theory’ emphasizes preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses,” which, as Ars Technica also pointed out, also demonstrates a misunderstanding of the long-debunked miasma theory that disease is caused by “noxious mists and vapors.” Apparently, according to Kennedy, germ theory wasn’t based on actual evidence but instead got popular because it “[mimicked] the traditional explanation for disease—demon possession—giving it a leg up over miasma.” 

By embracing germ theory, Kennedy argued doctors wrongly began to focus on “the pharmaceutical paradigm that emphasized targeting particular germs with specific drugs rather than fortifying the immune system through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” Kennedy has also bemoaned the “$1 trillion pharmaceutical industry pushing patented pills, powders, pricks, potions, and poisons, and the powerful professions of virology and vaccinology led by ‘Little Napoleon’ himself, Anthony Fauci, fortify the century-old predominance of germ theory.”

ok so for my sins i found the book and read the chapter, and it features a specious anecdote about louis pasteur confessing on his deathbed that germ theory was wrong all along. it’s sourced from a book called “virus mania.”

— Talia Lavin (@swordsjew.bsky.social) 2025-05-02T02:05:46.634Z

Independent journalist Talia Lavin also posted a screenshot (embedded above) from the chapter, where Kennedy claimed Louis Pasteur, aka the “father of microbiology,” made a deathbed confession that he’d been wrong about germ theory. The source of that claim? A book titled Virus Mania that also claimed Ebola, bird flu and hepatitis don’t actually exist, either. Again, the top health official in the U.S. wrote this stuff in his own book, and you can probably check it out at your local library if you’re brave enough.

If Kennedy doesn’t actually believe that germs make you sick, then his decision to fire the health officials in charge of the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program and gut the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice finally makes sense. He isn’t worried about Norovirus outbreaks because he doesn’t believe the Norovirus is real. 

“I thought ‘it now all makes sense’… I mean, it all adds up,” Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia pediatrician and infectious disease expert Paul Offit told Ars Technica after reading the chapter in question. “It’s so unbelievable, because you can’t imagine that someone who’s the head of Health and Human Services doesn’t believe that specific viruses or bacteria cause specific diseases, and that the prevention or treatment of them is lifesaving.”

Unfortunately for everyone involved, while you can and probably should avoid cruises for the foreseeable future, our Health Secretary’s unscientific belief that germs don’t actually cause disease will likely have far worse consequences than a bunch of cruise-goers losing it from both ends up and down the ship. What’s been described as a near-religious-level belief that everyone who disagrees with him is in the pocket of Big Pharma–pushing the theory that germs make you sick so they can get rich–is a threat to modern medicine and health in this country, as well as across the world. 

Are clean air, regular exercise, and a healthy diet that includes a variety of vegetables important? Absolutely. But germs are still real, people still actually suffer and die from the diseases germs cause, and it’s almost beyond comprehension that someone who doesn’t believe in something as foundational as germ theory is our country’s top health official. And yet, somehow, it’s true.