Whopper of the Week: RFK Jr. Slanders Immigrants, Blaming Them for Infectious Disease Outbreaks

Whopper of the Week: 

RFK JR. SLANDERS IMMIGRANTS, BLAMING THEM FOR INFECTIOUS DISEASE OUTBREAKS

“[The measles outbreak] has nothing to do with me. It has to do with [sic] we have a global epidemic… You should look at the immigration policies in this country because the places where [polio and tuberculosis] is occurring are the places where the immigrants are going because they’re not vaccinated.” --Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., testimony to the House Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee on April 21, 2026

SUMMARY

Throughout history, demagogues have falsely painted immigrants and refugees as threats to society, a theme that has become central to the Trump administration’s America First propaganda. As medical ethicist Arthur Caplan, who had polio and uses a wheelchair, noted, there is a “long, sad and shameful tradition in the United States in using fear of disease, contagion, and contamination to stigmatize immigrants and foreigners.”

Despite the fact that decades of research show no link between modern migration and the spread of infectious disease to host populations, Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy spent the month of April repeating these falsehoods to Congress. Kennedy attempted to divert attention from his unpopular and ineffective policies. His statements only increase the stigma, discrimination and healthcare barriers faced by immigrants and refugees.

WHY IS THIS A WHOPPER?

Although it is true that European colonizers brought infectious diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever to the Americas, with devastating impact on some native populations, studies show that immigration is simply not a public health threat in the modern era. The libertarian Cato Institute published an in-depth report in 2025, which concluded: “We find no statistically significant relationship between the size of the immigrant population, the illegal immigrant population, or the legal immigrant population and the spread of serious communicable diseases” to the general population.

Other studies mapping disease clusters in the U.S. strongly suggest that poverty and lack of access to health services, not immigration density, explain variations in infectious disease concentration. A Lancet analysis of  96 studies involving more than 15 million international migrants found that while diseases such as tuberculosis are more prevalent among migrants, infection tends to be contained within migrant communities rather than spreading to the general population.  

Legal immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers undergo extensive health screening, including chest x-rays, prior to U.S. entry, unlike the approximately 70 million Americans who go abroad every year and return with no mandatory health checks. “Don’t think of these people as disease vectors,” said Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Rather, think about how we can help them to make sure that they reduce their risk by giving them prevention, by giving them proper screening.”

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Blaming immigrants for disease is an ancient slander. In the 1830s, Irish immigrants were falsely blamed for cholera outbreaks. In the late 19th century, Eastern European immigrants were blamed for TB and typhus, while in the early 20th century, Italian immigrants were blamed for polio, and Chinese immigrants were blamed for bubonic plague. In 1939, Hitler blamed Jews for importing “infectious political and physical diseases” and as recently as the 2020s, Asian Americans were blamed for COVID-19.

Kennedy and the Trump administration are following in these racist footsteps, fostering stigma and discrimination, while undermining access to health services by slashing funding, increasing the cost of health insurance, cancelling health research, suppressing health information, stationing ICE at health facilities, and restricting the very immigration that powers America’s health and homecare workforce. As the Migration Policy Institute has noted, “ethnic scapegoating and efforts to seal borders have been shown to be distracting and ineffective responses to public-health crises.”

Contributions from: Miriam Rabkin, M.D., Erica Bersin BCPA, Kathylynn Saboda, M.S., Benedicte Callan, Ph.D.