“He enjoyed showing people how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks.” It was a striking description of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., written by his cousin, Ambassador Caroline Kennedy.

In January, she denounced him as a “predator” in a scathing  letter to the Senate, imploring them to reject his nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy is known for many things: his determined vaccine scepticism, a history of substance abuse, an alluring personality, a grandiose overconfidence in his own convictions, and doubtless other traits defined by boldness and excess. These qualities are overrepresented in individuals who possess a triad of toxic personality traits, known as the Dark Triad. These traits — narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism — are also overrepresented in believers of conspiracy theories. The research findings on why individuals with Dark Triad tendencies tend toward conspiracy thinking and the impact they have on organisations when they enter positions of power reveal grandiose and disordered thinking can harm organisations and the people they serve.

The limits of publicly available information make it impossible to judge a public official’s true motives from a distance – though RFK Jr’s recent public  performance in front of Congress was quite conspiratorial and unhinged. The possibility that some of RFK Jr.’s new appointees, such as Robert Malone, Casey Means and Martin Kulldorf, may hold genuine convictions about the supposed danger of vaccines adds another layer of complexity to what motivates the new appointees who replaced the previous 17-person Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices RFK Jr. purged. However, we are seeing the degradation of scientific knowledge, ideological capture, financial conflicts of interest and the spread of misinformation one would expect when narcissistic leadership takes over a public institution.

Dr Malone is perhaps the most unhinged voice appointed to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices after the June shake-up. He displays classic signs of narcissism and grandiosity, viewing himself as a crusader against the government’s “ PsyWar,” the title of his book on how the state supposedly used information warfare to usher in an age of tech-totalitarianism. According to Malone, a recent example of this massive conspiracy was a government cover-up and disinformation campaign to assure the public the COVID-19 vaccine was safe when, according to him, it was deadly.

The overwhelming scientific evidence that the COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective is no match for personality traits that guide dark triads towards conspiracy thinking. “Across two studies,” according to a 2021  paper by Sara Hughes and Laura Machan, “collective narcissism (i.e., inflated superiority of one’s self which extends to inflated in-group superiority) positively correlated with heightened conspiracy beliefs as well as intentional dissemination of COVID-19 related conspiracy theories.” Malone has amassed a Substack following of more than 355,000 and 1.3 million followers on X. He made up to US$31,200 a month from his COVID conspiracy Substack and was paid US$350 an hour to testify against Merck’s mumps vaccine. Fellow new ACIP member Martin Kulldorf was also paid to testify against a Merck vaccine, conflicts of interest that would typically disqualify someone from the ACIP in the past.

The grandiosity on display in Malone’s paranoid musings — enclosed in a book cover featuring a three-headed dog with glowing green eyes and chains with skulls on them — is characteristic of the sense of superiority that drives narcissists to conspiracy theories. Their derision of expertise stems from a sense they know more than mainstream authorities, while granting them access to conflict with those authorities, an audience, and seemingly special knowledge to enlarge and protect their egos. Narcissists are also surprisingly gullible and may themselves be susceptible to conspiracy theories and scams because of their overconfidence in their ability to judge and discern information – as  happened to major anti-vax influencer Joseph Mercola when he fell under the spell of a psychic.

When dark triads ascend to leadership positions, they often seek to create conformity and control as they remake the system in their image. Kennedy has strategically placed crackpots like Malone in positions once filled based on vaccine expertise. Crucially, he also allows dissent from non-experts. This creates the appearance of a diversity of opinion, which still results in decisions like the recent disastrous  end to the recommendation that children under four receive the MMR vaccine.

Semi-retired surgeon Dr Raymond Pollack was the only one of Kennedy’s five most recent appointees to respond to a request for comment from NPR. He openly dissented from the anti-vax party line, saying the COVID vaccines are “safe to administer” and that “the notion that the government tried to ‘cover it up’ is false.” There was even open  dissent during last Thursday’s discussion on the Hepatitis B vaccine. However, if Kennedy truly valued open discourse on the advisory committee, he would not have fired the most competent vaccine experts in the country and replaced them with a mixture of anti-vaxxers and supporters of vaccines who work in different areas of medicine. He would have let them stay and defend one of Western civilisation’s greatest accomplishments – near-universal childhood vaccination.

The crackpots and non-experts Kennedy has appointed to the advisory committee show signs of deference to a conspiracy mindset, which will result in anti-science public health policies. The self-promoting committee members with a public platform have an alluring ability to bring their followers along on a story where outsider heroes challenge the forces of evil and impurity. Lifestyle brands like Surgeon-General nominee Casey Means or the alluring language of Robert Malone’s theatrics about vaccine safety make regular people feel they are involved in a cosmic cause. As these influencers spread their misinformation into the state, they also harm the people they bring along with them in the grand narrative they spin for more ego satisfaction, with one in six parents now rejecting the vaccine recommendations the ACIP is currently tearing apart.

Republished from CounterPunch, 29 September 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.