RFK Jr. announces new effort on Lyme disease during New Hampshire visit

During a visit to New Hampshire Friday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced millions of dollars in funding for research on Lyme disease before what’s expected to be a heavy tick season.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will be giving up to $2 million to projects that “harness artificial intelligence and open data to help patients with Lyme disease and other invisible illnesses get answers faster and access care more quickly,” Kennedy announced. He also said the department will be funding up to $250,000 worth of public awareness campaigns and educational projects, specifically those developed with input from patients, clinicians, and advocates, and another $250,000 to “promising frontline solutions.”

He also called on Congress to reauthorize the Kay Hagan Tick Act, a 2019 law meant to establish a federal plan for dealing with tick-borne illnesses. And he set a goal to reduce Lyme disease cases by 25% by 2035 compared to 2022 levels.

Kennedy, whose tenure as health secretary has been heavily criticized by the mainstream medical community, has made Lyme disease one of his priorities in office. He claimed Friday that “Americans can’t go into the woods anymore safely” because of Lyme disease. In the past, he has said Lyme disease is “highly likely to have been a military weapon.”

Lyme disease is a bacterial infection spread through tick bites. It’s at the center of major controversy within medical circles. Some doctors do not believe chronic Lyme disease — symptoms that persist long after an initial infection — is a real condition. Many patients, despite being told by clinicians their tests are negative and their symptoms should be gone, report continued fatigue, pain, and neurological symptoms, however. Kennedy, who disagrees with those who deny chronic Lyme disease, addressed the debate on Friday.

“For years, Lyme disease patients fought hard to be heard while much of the health care system failed them,” he said. “Doctors would often tell patients, ‘It’s your imagination. It’s something else. There’s no such thing as Lyme disease.’”

Asked what his message is to the doctors who don’t believe chronic Lyme disease exists, Kennedy pointed to a series of roundtables with doctors and patients he’s organized.

“I think it will turn that ship,” he said. “We’ve seen the same thing with other diseases in the past. They just weren’t recognized by the medical establishment. I think we’re going to turn that around very quickly, just because of the sheer amount of research that we’re doing, and the kind of public events that we’re doing to make sure that doctors know this disease is real and it is treatable.”

He and his colleagues cited long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome, other infection-associated diseases, that took time to gain more mainstream acceptance.

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Indeed, some researchers are finding evidence that Lyme disease isn’t psychosomatic, or triggered by mental factors rather than biological ones, but still the debate is far from a consensus.

Federal officials accompanying Kennedy Friday sought to center patients in the debate.

“Let me be clear that this movement did not start in government,” Dr. Kristen Honey, who is now managing public-private partnerships at DHHS. “It started with all of you. It started with the patients. It started with the caregivers, It started with the frontline providers and those affected families saying there’s a problem here, and rose up, came together, formed unusual allies.”

Several of those patients spoke Friday.

“I thought I was going to die,” Dana Parish, a Lyme disease activist, said. “I had 39 out of 60 symptoms when I was finally diagnosed by doctor No. 13.”

Kennedy’s announcement comes after a rough tick season in New Hampshire in 2025. Last May saw 283 tick-related emergency room visits in the state, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Officials expect another rough season in 2026. Scientists say climate change leading to warmer winters is allowing the ticks to proliferate. New England and the northern Mid-Atlantic are often the epicenter of tick-borne illnesses.

While state House Speaker Sherman Packard, who moderated the press conference Friday, refused to allow questions unrelated to Lyme disease, Kennedy’s broader agenda has sparked massive controversy and condemnation from the medical community, particularly his anti-vaccine stances. 

Last year, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the federal government’s advisory committee on vaccines, replacing several with vaccine skeptics. Those new members went on to roll back federal recommendations for childhood Hepatitis B and COVID-19 vaccines. He and President Donald Trump also cut hundreds of millions in funding for research on mRNA vaccines for illnesses like influenza and COVID-19 and fired roughly 10,000 federal health employees, including CDC Director Susan Monarez. Several other top officials have resigned in protest. However, courts have halted some of the moves due to questions about process and legal authority. 

Kennedy ran as an independent in the 2024 presidential election before dropping out and endorsing Trump, who later nominated him as health secretary. Asked if the reason he chose to announce this initiative in New Hampshire rather than other New England states with higher Lyme disease rates (such as Rhode Island, Maine, or Vermont) was related to his presidential ambitions and the state’s key role in the primary election season, Kennedy said: “New Hampshire has one of the highest rates in the country, and it may have the highest rate of Lyme disease per tick per capita.”