Is he serious?
Independent American Presidential candidate and longtime anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has gained notoriety for decades due to the of the unusual things that go on in his head. Now, it seems, that metaphorical expression is also true in a horrifically literal sense.
The New York Times has reported that, during a deposition related to the legal proceedings surrounding his 2012 divorce, Kennedy admitted that he had suffered mercury poisoning that resulted in neurological issues. The son of former senator and United States Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy said that he’d suffered the mercury poisoning because of his too-keen affection for tuna sandwiches.
More shocking still, he said that a parasitic worm had eaten part of his brain, and had afterwards died in his head, where doctors later found its body.
He testified that, beginning in 2010, he began to experience memory loss (both short-term and long-term) and other “cognitive problems.” These issue manifested not long after his late uncle Edward Kennedy, formerly a Senator from Massachusetts, died from brain cancer. This coincidence sparked fears in Robert Kennedy that he also might have a brain tumor.
Prompted by these fears, he sought a second opinion from a New York physician who put him in a scanner and took pictures of his brain. The resulting images revealed the source of his problems: a dark spot in the midst of the brain tissue; the body of a dead parasite.
Kennedy’s other previous health problems, including those which led to his throat surery and the drug addiction that he battled in his younger years, have long been part of his public narrative. Nonetheless, as his long-shot presidential campaign sees him as a seventy-year-old running against two opponents—Biden and Trump—who are both north of eighty, he has sought to project an image of health, vitality, and (relative) youth in his campaign. . These revelations cast a shadow of doubt over those efforts.
