On September 29, 2026, at a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) conference, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will free Americans from having to "trust the experts." "Every American will be able to check their own medical advice," said RFK Jr., and avoid the "medical tyranny" of public health officials who had misled us during the COVID pandemic.

RFK Jr. said that public health officials had lied about whether "masks or social distancing worked" to prevent the spread of COVID, and that "vaccines will prevent transmission and infection." RFK Jr. implied that checking with AI would have proven that all these claims were wrong.

However, a quick check with AI platforms such as Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT don't support RFK Jr.'s claims. All three AI sites state that masks reduce spread of the virus, which makes sense given that the droplets that carry SARS-CoV-2 are larger than the pore size of the masks. AI platforms also support the claim that vaccination reduces COVID symptoms and lessens, but does not eliminate, transmission, which is supported by published scientific studies.

AI also contradicts many other claims made by RFK Jr. For example, AI contradicts RFK Jr.'s claim that separating the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) into three separate vaccines would make it safer; that Tylenol taken in the first trimester of pregnancy causes autism, that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines cause harm; that fluoridation of drinking water is dangerous; and that raw milk is more nutritious than pasteurized milk. What I learned from checking with AI wasn't that we shouldn't trust medical experts, whose published studies populate AI; it's that we shouldn't trust RFK Jr.

RFK Jr. choose September 29, 2026, to make his claims about AI because that was the day that the White House launched its own AI-powered platform called America.gov, which was designed for "navigating federal information, tasks and services." The key phrase here is "federal information." If you ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini the question, "Do vaccines cause autism?", the answer is unequivocally, "No." If, on the other hand, you ask America.gov the same question, you get an equivocal answer that vaccines might cause autism and that no one has proven that they don't. When RFK Jr. took over as Secretary of Health and Human Services, he changed the CDC's website from "vaccines don't cause autism" to "vaccines might cause autism." America.gov relies on federal sources of information, such as the CDC's website. In other words, for the same reason that you can't trust RFK Jr. for accurate scientific information, you can't trust America.gov, which offers similarly misleading information about the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine.

In the right hands, AI is a powerful tool for providing accurate, up-to-date, science-based answers to questions. In the wrong hands, such as our current federal government leaders, it isn't.

1999 - Institute of Medicine - 44,000 to 98.000 Americans die each year from preventable hospital medical errors.
2016 - Johns Hopkins - 250,000 deaths per year due to medical errors.
2023 - Johns Hopkins - 371,000 deaths and 424,000 permanent disabilities occur annually due to misdiagnoses.

Medical errors by the "experts" is the third leading cause of death in America.

GrowlTowel said:

---

1999 - Institute of Medicine - 44,000 to 98.000 Americans die each year from preventable hospital medical errors.
2016 - Johns Hopkins - 250,000 deaths per year due to medical errors.
2023 - Johns Hopkins - 371,000 deaths and 424,000 permanent disabilities occur annually due to misdiagnoses.

Medical errors by the "experts" is the third leading cause of death in America.

---

The numbers are real citations, but the conclusion overstates what they show.

The three figures

• 1999, Institute of Medicine: Accurate. To Err Is Human estimated 44,000 to 98,000 hospital deaths a year from preventable medical errors. It was a landmark report, though its extrapolations from two state studies were debated even then.
• 2016, Johns Hopkins: Accurate that it was published. Martin Makary and Michael Daniel estimated over 250,000 deaths a year in a BMJ analysis. This was not a new study. They extrapolated from a few small earlier studies, some with only a few hundred patients, to the entire country. It drew heavy methodological criticism.
• 2023, Johns Hopkins: Accurate that it was published. Newman-Toker and colleagues estimated about 371,000 deaths and 424,000 permanent disabilities a year from diagnostic errors in all care settings, not just hospitals. The authors described it as an estimate with wide uncertainty ranges.

The "third leading cause of death" claim
This comes from the 2016 Makary paper. The CDC doesn't list medical error as a cause of death, partly because death certificates aren't designed to capture it. Critics have raised several problems with the claim:

• Many of these patients were already very sick, and the studies often can't show the error actually caused the death or how much it shortened life. One 2020 study used physician review of hospital deaths and estimated about 22,000 preventable deaths a year. Only about 7,000 of those were patients who otherwise would have lived more than three months.
• These deaths overlap with the existing causes. Someone whose heart attack was missed is already counted under heart disease, so you can't simply slot errors into the ranking.
• Lower estimates from other approaches, including the Global Burden of Disease project, put the number far below 250,000.

Bottom line
Medical error is a real, serious, and probably undercounted problem, and all three studies exist. But "third leading cause of death" is one contested estimate, not an established fact. Honest estimates range from tens of thousands to a few hundred thousand deaths a year, and no one knows the true number. Also, most researchers in this field, including Makary, attribute errors mainly to flawed systems such as communication breakdowns and handoffs, not to individual "experts" being incompetent. The scare quotes in that post imply a conclusion the research doesn't support.

Those are the "experts" you keep promoting. They sure do kill a lot of people.

And a heck of a ton more than a mom not vaccinating her children.