RFK Jr.’s claim that the US has the ‘sickest children’ in world history is wrong

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said despite high healthcare spending, the U.S. is failing its children on an unprecedented level.

“This country pays two to three times what every developing nation in the world pays, and yet we have the sickest children in the history of the world,” Kennedy said, addressing the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on Sept. 10. “We have the highest chronic disease burden ever recorded.”

For this fact-check, we’re focusing on the claim that the U.S. has the “sickest children in the history of the world.”

PolitiFact reached out to the Health and Human Services Department for data to back up Kennedy’s statement and didn’t immediately receive a response. He’s made the statement at least once before, in 2024.

Kennedy’s statement ignores the massive drop in childhood mortality and infectious disease rates since the 19th century. 

For almost all of human history, about half of all children died before reaching puberty, with infectious disease as a major contributor. Children worldwide got sick and died far more often in the past than they do today, including in the U.S.

In 1900 in the United States, 1 in 5 children died before age 5, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2018, 24 in 100,000 U.S. children ages 1 through 4 died.  

Sanitation, vaccination and antibiotics are the three big contributors to the huge decrease in childhood mortality over the 20th century. A 2024 study found that vaccination prevented 146 million deaths among children under 5 globally since 1974.

Compared with developing countries, American children have better health outcomes. The U.S. under-5 mortality rate is about 80% lower than the global average, and some of the leading global causes of childhood death such as diarrhea and malaria now cause almost no childhood deaths in the U.S.

In the long view of history, today’s American children are far less likely to die of disease. But by some metrics, U.S. children’s health has gotten worse in recent decades, and U.S. children have worse mortality rates than their peers in other developed countries.

A 2024 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report said the U.S. “ranks at the bottom among wealthy nations on the mental wellbeing, physical health, and academic and social skills of children.”

From 2007 to 2022, the mortality rate for U.S. children and teens ages 1 to 19 was 80% higher than the same age group in other high-income countries, according to a 2025 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 

The death rate between U.S. children and peers ages 1 to 19 in other developed nations most differed when it came to gun-related and traffic deaths. U.S. children were 15 times more likely to die because of a firearm compared with children in other high-income countries, the study by researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of California, Los Angeles found.

The study also found that chronic diseases such as obesity, sleeping problems and mental health issues have been increasing for U.S. children in recent decades. It found that U.S. children in 2023 were 15% to 20% more likely to have a chronic condition than children in 2011. But chronic diseases are only one form of illness, and the data doesn’t support Kennedy’s sweeping statement.

The same study found infants born in the U.S. were 78% more likely to die than in other developed countries, with prematurity, congenital anomalies, sudden unexpected deaths and respiratory infections being more common.

Our ruling

Kennedy said the U.S. has the “sickest children in the history of the world.”

Before advances in sanitation and medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries, about half of all children worldwide died, largely from infectious diseases. 

Some data shows chronic disease rates are rising and children in the U.S. have a higher mortality rate than children in other developed countries. But Kennedy’s statement ignores the major reductions in childhood illness and death achieved over the last 200 years, and he’s wrong that the U.S. has the “sickest children” in history.

We rate that False.