Fact Check: Is RFK Jr's claim US has the 'world’s sickest children' in midterm campaign true?
WASHINGTON, DC: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr's statement about the health of children in the United States has sparked a discussion online.
Kennedy made the remark while speaking at a Republican midterm convention on September 10, 2026, drawing attention to his description of the health of American children. Let's fact-check the claim.
Claim: RFK Jr said US has 'the sickest children in the history of the world'
Robert F. Kennedy Jr's comments came as the Trump administration has made children's health a major focus of Kennedy's work at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy criticized the country's healthcare spending and pointed to what he described as a growing burden of chronic diseases among American children.
He said, “This country pays two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays, and yet we have the sickest children in the history of the world.”
Kennedy also said, “We have the highest chronic disease burden ever recorded.” His remarks have drawn attention because they make a broad comparison between the health of children in the US today and children throughout history.
The claim also comes as Kennedy has pushed for changes in federal health policy, including a greater focus on childhood chronic diseases, nutrition, vaccines, and other public health issues. His comments at the Republican midterm convention have since circulated online, prompting questions about whether the historical comparison is supported by available health data.
Fact Check: The claim is false
The claims are false. Kennedy’s statement overlooks the major decline in childhood deaths and infectious diseases over the past two centuries.
Before modern sanitation and medicine, about half of children worldwide died before reaching puberty. In the US, about one in five children died before age 5 in 1900. By 2018, the death rate among children ages 1 to 4 had fallen to 24 per 100,000.
Vaccines, sanitation and antibiotics helped drive this decline. A 2024 study estimated that vaccination prevented 146 million deaths among children under 5 worldwide since 1974.
At the same time, US children face serious health problems. Studies show rising rates of some chronic conditions, and US children have higher mortality rates than children in other wealthy countries.
However, these problems do not support Kennedy’s broader claim that American children are the “sickest” in history. Therefore, children today are far less likely to die from disease than children in the past.
The US also performs worse than some other wealthy countries on several measures of child health. Recent research has linked this gap to higher rates of deaths from firearms and traffic crashes, as well as some chronic health conditions. These findings provide important context about current health challenges but do not establish that US children are the “sickest” in history.
