Brain Worm Watch: RFK Brain Worms Confirmed

Brain worms! Actual brain worms!

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

We throw around the term “brain worms” a lot. Brain worms this. Brain worms that. Joe Biden has brain worms, Donald Trump has brain worms, the news has brain worms and is also giving us brain worms, the worms are everywhere. I saw Dune 2 in theaters, because of the worms and also in order to appease the worms that have lodged in my brain from being on Twitter a lot. I have watched five seasons of the ABC copaganda show The Rookie in the past two months, because of the brain worms. Sometimes I cannot remember names and dates; this is also because of the brain worms. We all, at this point, have brain worms sometimes — the worms that make our brains feel less than healthy, anxious, forgetful, fevered, mad. But. Very few of us actually have worms in our brain.

However:

R.F.K. Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain

The presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain.

Yes! Hell yes! Actual worms!

This is the headline and subhed from an explosive worm story in the New York Times today, which details in typical Timesian fashion a litany of health issues faced by the 2024 election’s most absurd (and bizarrely most ripped) candidate.

Several doctors noticed a dark spot on the younger Mr. Kennedy’s brain scans and concluded that he had a tumor, he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Kennedy was immediately scheduled for a procedure at Duke University Medical Center by the same surgeon who had operated on his uncle, he said.

While packing for the trip, he said, he received a call from a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital who had a different opinion: Mr. Kennedy, he believed, had a dead parasite in his head.

The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition.

Incredible. A worm that got into his brain and ate a portion of it and then died. You could even say in this case that RFK’s allegorical brain worms were so powerful that they killed his literal brain worm.

Sadly for all of the very good ivermectin jokes going around, it’s worth noting that this happened in 2010, well before COVID, so it is unlikely that the horse dewormer that many cranks like RFK swore by in the depths of the pandemic had anything to do with, again, the worm that “got into his brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” but still. It’s worms all the way down.

The wider takeaway from the Times story is that RFK is also a 70-year-old man with a litany of health problems (as 70-year-old men are wont to have, sorry Dad), which erodes his argument that unlike Biden (brain worms, clumsy feet) and Trump (also brain worms), he is hale and hearty and capable of doing shirtless pushups. This is a valid critique to make in an election — an exercise in which basically everyone involved is making the most fantastical claims possible — but the thing about the worm is just so absurd that it overshadows everything else (the Times later says it was probably a parasitic worm he got from eating pork). The funniest part of all this is that RFK’s actual neurological issues probably weren’t caused by the literal worm in his brain but because he had been eating so much tuna fish that he got mercury poisoning. As a man who loves a tuna sandwich, this is truly an experience I can relate to. Anyway, don’t eat undercooked pork and then run for president.