Did RFK Jr. Get a Second Brain Worm From Swimming In Poop Water?

Let's look at the evidence!

There are few of life’s simple pleasures more universally enjoyable than taking a nice walk on a hot day and cooling yourself off in a nearby pond or creek. Just you, a breeze, and a gently babbling brook to take your mind off the pressures of our frantic 21st-century existence. It’s the sort of pastoral bliss that calls to mind a simpler time— one when communion with the great outdoors could be as easy as dipping a toe in a wooded stream, free from the din of modern living.

If you’re Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., however, that edenic scene needs just one more element to really bring everything to a whole new level of naturalistic serenity: gallons upon gallons of human feces.

This week, Kennedy boasted that he’d spent his mother’s day splish-splashing around with his grandchildren, sharing pictures on Twitter of the happy-seeming family as they purified themselves in the waters of Washington DC’s Rock Creek. The whole scene looks unremarkably wholesome until you realize that Rock Creek is, per the National Park Service, positively teeming with “high levels of bacteria and other infectious pathogens that make swimming, wading, and other contact with the water a hazard to human (and pet) health” And not just any bacteria and infectious pathogens, either. As a 2022 government report makes clear, the creek suffers from a “pervasive contamination of FIB,” or “fecal indicator bacteria.”

So…poop.

Now, if Kennedy wants to dunk his head in shit-water, I say be my guest. But given his well-documented history of parasitic incubation, medical crackpottery and a penchant for desecrating animal corpses (what NBC news described as a “string of outdoor episodes that have drawn public attention and scrutiny” which, lol) there’s one question I have above all others about the secretary’s poopapalooza: Did RFK Jr., the world’s most famous possessor of a brain worm, get a second brain worm from swimming in sewage-steeped waters?

Let’s look at the evidence, starting with the pictures Kennedy posted.