“We’ve got the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world. When my uncle was president, 3 percent of Americans had chronic disease. Today, it’s 60 percent.”
— Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., interview with Jesse Watters on Fox News, April 22
This is a favorite line of Kennedy’s — which he repeated while pitching his plan to phase out petroleum-based synthetic dyes from the nation’s food supply.
He’s said it enough that the figures have started to creep into search results of AI models on chronic diseases in the 1960s. Presumably that’s because Kennedy is now a Cabinet secretary and apparently is considered a voice of authority.
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Contrary to Kennedy’s claim, the percentage of Americans with chronic diseases has not increased 20 times over the past six decades. A survey from 1962 puts the percentage of Americans with chronic diseases at 44.5 percent, not the absurdly low number of 3 percent touted by Kennedy.
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