Thanks to his efforts raising money for Obama his name was floated as head of EPA at the end of 2008, but even a president-elect who was on the fence about vaccines causing autism and had advisors who believed in UFOs and that girls can't do math told Obama that RFK Jr. was too kooky.(1)
He hasn't changed much, he will still say anything if it will get anti-science progressives donating money. Now he is regurgitating a bizarre 20-plus-year-old claim that the weedkiller known as atrazine is causing sexual dysphoria in humans.
![](https://www.science20.com/files/images/screen-shot-at-am-1.png)
Kennedy doesn't even get that right. The weird claim back then was about frogs. It was provocative, the Berkeley biologist's claim that the weedkiller 'turned frogs gay' as he phrased it, was published in PNAS, and it got EPA to call a special panel to investigate.
Then it all went wrong. The biologist, Tyrone Hayes, turned out to be what equally provocative journalists deemed a "cock-fixated megalomaniac" that made sexual threats toward female employees of the company behind atrazine. Hayes refused to send any of his data to EPA(2), claiming they were part of the corporate conspiracy against him, and the EPA found no harm to frogs.
Worse, as I revealed in the Wall Street Journal, PNAS didn't even peer-review his claims. Using a legacy mechanism for publication from the 19th century, a personal friend of his in the Academy declared he would personally review it, then he walked it right to being published.(3)
It still somehow comes up on occasion, just like fake claims about bees dying due to neonics even though bees are at record numbers, and even though the claim about frogs has never been replicated and 20 years later no one has seen the data that supposedly led to the screenshots he used in his non-peer-reviewed article.(4)
Why did Kennedy claim last year that atrazine caused sexual dysphoria in humans? No idea, but it was so outrageous that even journalists on his side of the political aisle called him out for it.
Yet he continues to claim that not only are frogs little people but that if it's in water it will castrate you. Imagine being told your sexuality, or anything about you, is decided by a chemical so far below the No Effect Level it is a ridiculous claim. And he's a Democrat, in the party where a TV host thinks last week's eclipse was caused by climate change and a Congressional Rep. claimed the moon is a planet made of gas.
It's even more bizarre than trial lawyers trying to claim plants are tiny green people and therefore glyphosate causes human cancer.WATCH: RFK Jr. says chemicals in the water turn kids trans…the man is deranged. pic.twitter.com/1NCaYDEQ34
— Kaivan Shroff (@KaivanShroff) March 27, 2024
It's unfortunately typical for Kennedy.
Yet if you do think the weedkiller made you gay, or trans, or even if it made you a better golfer, I would like to interview you.
NOTES:
(1) You're welcome, America. In 2017, he also crept into President-elect Trump's sphere but my article in the Wall Street Journal worked in that case as well. The incoming president said he did meet with RFK The Deuce but unlike Kennedy's claim, Trump was not going to create a 'vaccine commission' that Kennedy would run.
(2) “Dr. Hayes claims not only that his laboratory has repeated the findings many times in experiments with thousands of frogs, but that other scientists have also replicated his results. EPA, however, has never seen either the results from any independent investigator published in peer-reviewed scientific journals or the raw data from Dr. Hayes' additional experiments,” EPA deputy director Anne Lindsay testified in 2005.
Which means 22 years later, still no one has seen his data. Why that article hasn't been retracted is a mystery.
One screenshot of his emails to women. Berkeley will apparently allow its employees to say anything to women:
![](https://www.science20.com/files/images/tyrone_hayes_fulla.jpg)
(3) A few weeks after my article, PNAS removed that ability for Academy members.
(4) Even more weird, he was a co-author on a paper that he must not have read, because it completely debunked his claims by showing the weedkiller had no effect at all on frogs.
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