‘What Are You Talking About?’ Jake Tapper Fact-Checks RFK Jr’s Assertion About CDC Chaos

(Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

CNN’s Jake Tapper posted a video on social media on Saturday to fact-check Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claim about the Centers For Disease Control And Prevention’s views on abortion as being emblematic of the chaos that needed cleaning up.

Tapper played video of Kennedy claiming this week, “The CDC is an agency that is very troubled for a very long time. The CDC has on its website today that among the top 10 medical innovations, greatest medical accomplishments in history, was abortion. This, one of the greatest medical accomplishments, because it keeps small families. Go to the website, look at it.”

So that’s what Tapper did.

While sitting at his desktop, Tapper searched the CDC website for the word “abortion” under the CDC’s Ten Great Public Health Advancements.

“And you’ll see, none of them include the word ‘abortion,'” he said.

“There’s another one, also, just to be fair,” Tapper continued. “Here’s another ‘Ten Great Public Health Achievements,’ United States, a different one.”

When Tapper typed in “abortion,” the search came up “zero out of zero.”

“OK, so then we reached out to RFK Jr.’s office at HHS and said, ‘What are you talking about? The word abortion’s not in there at all.'”

HHS told Tapper that “abortion” might not be mentioned, but “family planning is.”

“So, here’s the question,” Tapper said. “Does the mention of abortion in this mean that they’re talking about abortion as an achievement or is abortion just used in some other context?”

Tapper found five mentions of the word “abortion” on that page, but none claimed that “abortion was some great achievement in health.”

Tapper concluded that Kennedy’s assertion “was not true, and then when we challenged them on that, ‘What are you talking about?’ they tried to come up with a way to retroactively make it true by noting that the word ‘abortion’ appeared on the ‘family planning’ page. Although, it did not appear in the context of an achievement, it appeared in the context of, ‘This is evidence of unintended pregnancies’…which is why contraception is good.”

Tapper said the whole exercise illustrated claims made by CDC scientists that “Robert F. Kennedy says things that aren’t true, and he bases them on a foundation of lies, and this is having an impact on American health.”

Watch the video above via CNN on X.