Doctors, vaccine researchers and health policy organizations have sharply criticized U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his claim that Arabs around the world make no contributions to science, literature or research.
Criticism has focused not only on what opponents describe as the racist nature of his remarks, but also on the fact that the official overseeing America's health care system and medical research made assertions contradicted by a long list of Nobel laureates and recipients of other prestigious scientific awards.
US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke about what he calls the meager contribution of Arabs to science
(Video: X platform)
Kennedy made the comments Monday at a campaign rally in Michigan, where he appeared alongside Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who is running against Abdul El-Sayed, an Egyptian American Muslim, physician and former public health director in Detroit.
During his speech, Kennedy sought to warn against the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, describing what he claimed was the decline of the Arab world since the movement was founded in Egypt in 1928. "There are 500 million Arabs in the world, and they don't produce science. They don't win Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals [the most prestigious award in mathematics] or Wolf Prizes [an international scientific award established in Israel]. They don't produce literature," Kennedy declared.
He argued that the Muslim world had once been a global center of art, literature, science and engineering, but that the Muslim Brotherhood had destroyed that tradition, turning the societies in which it operated into stagnant communities preoccupied with hatred, war and victimhood.
Gallery
US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alongside US President Donald Trump during midterm campaign in Florida
(Photo: Chris O'Meara/AP)
Among the first to respond were members of Kennedy's own family.
His sister, human rights activist Kerry Kennedy, shared remarks her brother had previously made condemning politicians who incite hatred against minority groups. "There was a time when I agreed wholeheartedly with my brother. Today, I am deeply ashamed of him," she wrote.
She said a person's ethnicity or religion does not determine their scientific or intellectual abilities, describing her brother's statements as "false, cruel and derogatory."
The scientist Kennedy forgot
El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate targeted by the political attacks, also responded. "It's ironic to hear someone who uses the language of eugenics and completely rejects science come to Michigan to lecture an Arab American scientist with two doctorates who believes in science, including vaccines," he said.
El-Sayed called Kennedy "the most unqualified health secretary we've ever had" and added that, if elected to the Senate, he would seek to investigate his performance in office.
The comments were mainly directed against Abdul-Sayed, who is running for a Senate seat from Michigan.
(Photo: Robin Buckson/Pool via Reuters)
Professor Peter Hotez, one of America's leading vaccine and tropical medicine researchers and founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, reminded Kennedy of his late colleague Ahmed Zewail, the Egyptian American scientist who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1999. Hotez and Zewail previously served as U.S. science envoys during the Obama administration.
"The brilliant Nobel laureate Ahmed Zewail would disagree," Hotez wrote on X. "May he rest in peace. At least he didn't have to hear this." Hotez added that Kennedy had also "forgotten that medieval Arab scientists played a central role in preserving and transmitting the knowledge of Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, which eventually reached scholars of the European Renaissance."
Dr. David Gorski, a surgical oncologist and professor of surgery at Wayne State University in Detroit, linked Kennedy's statements to his history in the anti-vaccine movement. "I've been saying for years that racism and antivax go together like the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan," he wrote on X, referring to the white supremacist organization. "And here's another example."
Dr. Alastair McAlpine, a pediatrician and vaccine researcher at British Columbia Children's Hospital in Canada, also criticized Kennedy. "Aside from being an unimaginably racist statement, it's also completely false," he wrote. McAlpine listed Arab scientists, writers and human rights activists who have received Nobel Prizes and Wolf Prizes, concluding: "Kennedy is a disgrace."
The video Kennedy denied
The U.S. advocacy group Protect Our Care, which promotes access to health care and has criticized the Trump administration's policies, joined the condemnation. The organization described Kennedy's speech as an "outright racist tirade," adding that while this was not the first time he had made remarks it considered racist, it might be the ugliest incident yet.
In its statement, the group also recalled comments Kennedy made in 2024, when he claimed that Black children were routinely given psychiatric medications that caused violent behavior and suggested placing them on rehabilitation farms where they could undergo "reparenting."
Arabs and Muslims have won the Nobel Prize
(Photo: Angela Weiss / Pool Photo via AP)
When confronted with those statements during congressional proceedings this year, Kennedy denied making them, despite the existence of video footage documenting his remarks.
The facts themselves contradict the health secretary's assertions. Just last year, Palestinian American chemist Omar Yaghi, who was born in Jordan, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, having previously received the Wolf Prize in 2018. Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1999, while Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988. British mathematician Michael Atiyah, who was of Lebanese descent, won the Fields Medal in 1966.
Kennedy also conflated Arabs, an ethnic and linguistic group, with Muslims, followers of a religion whose adherents are predominantly non-Arab.
Muslim Brotherhood allegations enter Michigan Senate race
Kennedy's remarks come amid the heated Senate campaign in Michigan ahead of the November 3 midterm elections.
President Donald Trump and other senior Republicans have alleged that El-Sayed has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, claims the Democratic candidate categorically denies. His half-sister, Iman Abdelhadi, wrote in 2012 that their shared mother had been active in the Islamist movement in Egypt during the 1970s. "My family has long been in the Muslim Brotherhood," she wrote.
El-Sayed, who initially also denied family connections to the movement, later said he had been raised by his father and stepmother and had no firsthand knowledge of his biological mother's activities.
Kennedy has declined to address the controversy surrounding his remarks. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also did not respond to media requests for comment.