On July 31, 2021, RFK Jr. spoke to a packed crowd of 1,500 people in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, home to a large Amish and Mennonite population. “When I was asked to come here today,” he began, “it wasn’t convenient for me, but I really wanted to…not so much to teach, but to learn…We can all learn from the Amish [about] how to live our lives without allowing technology to become our masters.” He praised the Amish for rejecting the notion that “good health only comes in a syringe.”
RFK Jr. went on to explain his fascination with the Amish. “We did a film about mercury in vaccines,” he said. “We came down to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and interviewed a doctor here who ran a big, big clinic. He said, ‘yeah, I’ve never seen autism among the Amish. We don’t have it.” RFK Jr. congratulated the crowd for their choice not to vaccinate themselves or their children, which he believed prevented them from suffering chronic disorders like autism. “The CDC was angry at that,” said Kennedy Jr. “The Amish are our control group and they cannot stand it. And that’s why those agencies are going to do everything in their power to make the Amish get vaccinated. It is a thorn in their side that there is a group of people in this country who are not chronically ill.” According to RFK Jr., by choosing not to vaccinate themselves and their children, the Amish had made the healthier choice—and the CDC couldn’t tolerate it.
To RFK Jr., the Amish had proved his point—no vaccines equaled no autism. But RFK Jr. was worried that his perfect control group was at risk of being harmed by federal public health agencies. “I have a warning to all of you people who are Amish here today,” he said. “They are coming for you. Because they can’t stand the fact that you are healthy and there’s a control group that the rest of us can point to and say to the government officials, ‘You guys are doing something wrong.’”
In 2010, about ten years before RFK Jr. had visited Lancaster County, a study of about 1,900 Amish children in Ohio and Indiana found a rate of autism of at least 1 in 271 children, contradicting RFK Jr.’s claim. Although RFK Jr. was wrong about the incidence of autism among the Amish, he was right about two things:
First, RFK Jr. was right that public health officials “would soon be coming for them.” But not for the reason he had imagined. In 2026, five years after RFK Jr. had visited Lancaster County, a large measles epidemic engulfed Amish and Mennonite communities in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster, Jefferson, and Mifflin counties. Health officials recorded at least 1,300 cases, 250 hospitalizations, and 6 deaths. The epidemic launched an “all-hands-on-deck” strategy to vaccinate as many children in these communities as possible, fulfilling RFK Jr.’s prophecy that “they are coming for you.”
RFK Jr. was also right that the Amish had become “the control group that the CDC didn’t want you to know about.” Four years after that visit to Lancaster County, RFK Jr. was sworn in as Secretary of Health and Human Services. And, as he had predicted, the Amish had become “the control group that the CDC didn’t want you to know about.” Or at least the control group that RFK Jr. didn’t want us to know about. With RFK Jr. in charge, the CDC failed to accurately record the number of Amish and Mennonite people on its website who had died from measles. RFK Jr. didn’t want us to know how effective his 20-year campaign against vaccines had been.
During the current measles epidemic in Pennsylvania, RFK Jr. hasn’t return to Lancaster County to praise them for their decision not to vaccinate themselves and their children.
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