Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s broad and false claims about Arab contributions to humanity's scientific and literary discoveries at a Republican campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, have drawn outrage just days before midterm elections.
"There's 500 million Arabs in the world and yet they don't produce science," Kennedy claimed on the campaign trail, on Monday. "They don't win the Nobel Prize. They don't win the Fields Prize. They don't win the Wolf Prize. They don't produce literature."
The health secretary's comments — widely condemned overnight by critics as untrue and racially biased — were made while campaigning in a state with a large Arab American population.
An HHS representative did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment.
Arab Nobel Prize winners
Egyptian law scholar Mohamed El Baradei, a diplomat and vice-president of Egypt, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 alongside the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Baradei and the IAEA, which he previously chaired, were awarded for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes.
Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist, politician, and human rights activist, was a co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Yemeni and the first Arab woman to win the award.
Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian-American scientist, was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry.
Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988.
Jordanian-born Omar M. Yaghi was one of three chemists awarded the Nobel Prize in 2025, and won the 2018 Wolf Prize in Chemistry. Sir Michael Atiyah, of Lebanese descent, was a Fields medalist in 1966.
Yasser Arafat, the former head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his “efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East."
Arafat died in 2004.
Former Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize with then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978 after they signed the Camp David Accords, which ended Israel's occupation of the Sinai Peninsula.
The background of his comments Kennedy made the comments while campaigning for Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who has accused his opponent, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
"Mike Rogers was talking about the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s something I can talk about," Kennedy said.
Kennedy claimed that the world’s 500 million Arabs have not contributed to science or the humanities due to the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, after he cited Islamic civilisation's contributions to literature in the 13th century.
RFK Jr fact-checked
Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse said in a statement that this wasn’t the first time RFK Jr “has trafficked in racism”, but it may be his "ugliest episode yet." Woodhouse was referring to Kennedy's comments on the "High Level Conversations" podcast in 2024, where he implied that Black children with ADHD and on medication should be “re-parented.”
"Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel in Literature in 1988. Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel in Chemistry in 1999, after winning the Wolf Prize. Omar Yaghi won the Nobel in Chemistry in 2025," X user Jordan Guy pointed out. "Algebra is an Arabic word. So is algorithm. The math on this claim doesn’t work."
Dr. Peter Hotez, founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and Texas Children’s Hospital, posted on social media on Monday evening that his former colleague, Nobel Prize winner Zewail, would disagree with Kennedy.
"God rest his soul he didn’t have to endure this, and of course RFK Jr forgets that it was the Arab scientists of the Middle Ages who kept Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen alive to hand it down in the Renaissance."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organisation, called for RFK Jr to be fired over the inaccurate comments.
"To stand on a public stage as a sitting US cabinet official and dehumanise half a billion people – and millions of Muslim and Christian Arab Americans – with fabricated, white supremacist talking points is utterly disqualifying for public office," CAIR said in a statement.
"His sweeping erasure of Arab contributions to humanity is not only maliciously false, but it also fans the flames of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate at a time when communities are already vulnerable to bigoted attacks from other public officials nationwide."
Scientists and historians have also emphasised that scholars during the Islamic Golden Age laid the foundations for modern optics, mathematics (including algebra and trigonometry), astronomy, and medicine, preserving vital scientific knowledge while Europe was in the Middle Ages.
Eyad Al-Hamoud, a Saudi Arabian influencer slammed Kennedy, citing four recent Nobel winners.
"The strongest part is that in the responses, they remind the secretary that under Arab rule, the greatest sciences emerged — ones we’re still living off to this day: Algebra and algorithms, development of trigonometry and equations, observatories, surgery and anesthesia, the hospital system, modern optics with Ibn al-Haytham, experimental chemistry and distillation, preparation of acids and water clocks (and much more besides)."
Kennedy is slated to serve as a special guest at the "Make Iowa Healthy Again Rally" in Des Moines on Wednesday.
