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NewsPolitical News · 2 Nov

Fact-check: RFK Jr’s claim that Arabs do not produce science or win major prizes is false

RFK Jr claimed Arabs do not produce science, literature or major prize winners. Nobel and Wolf records prove otherwise. We also examine his and Mike Rogers's claims.

Staff Reporter
Fish 4 News fact-check composite showing Robert F. Kennedy Jr and the headline 'RFK Jr's claim about Arab achievements', with a science-themed background.
F4N editorial composite illustration of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. This image is illustrative, not documentary footage of the Michigan event. Image © Fish 4 News.

FACT CHECK: US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s claim that Arabs do not produce science, literature or winners of major international awards is false. Official prize records provide multiple direct counterexamples, including a Nobel Prize awarded in 2025.

Kennedy made the comments on 26 October 2026 at a Republican campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, alongside Senate candidate Mike Rogers. He was criticising the Muslim Brotherhood while Rogers was campaigning against Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, a Michigan-born Muslim physician who has denied connections to that organisation. The remarks were reported by the Associated Press and Reuters.

What Kennedy said

“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don’t produce science, 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.”

Kennedy argued that the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, had destroyed a historic tradition of scientific and literary achievement. His assertion conflated an ethnic and linguistic identity, Arab, with Islam, a religion followed by people of many ethnic backgrounds, and with an Islamist political movement. The existence of prize-winning Arab researchers and authors makes the sweeping claim false regardless of any debate about the Brotherhood’s political influence.

Nobel Prizes: the claim is demonstrably false

The Nobel Prize’s own records identify Arab and Arab-descended recipients across chemistry, literature and peace:

  • Omar M. Yaghi, born in Amman, Jordan, shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing metal-organic frameworks. Nobel Prize announcement.
  • Ahmed Zewail, born in Egypt, won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research in femtochemistry. Nobel Prize record.
  • Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist, won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. Swedish Academy announcement.
  • Tawakkol Karman of Yemen shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for work on women’s rights and peace. Nobel Prize record.
  • Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian diplomat, shared the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Nobel Prize record.
  • Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. His record as a political figure remains contested, but the fact of the award is not. Nobel Prize record.

Not every Arab laureate was educated or carried out research exclusively in an Arab country. That distinction matters when assessing research infrastructure, but it does not rescue Kennedy’s claim about what Arab people produce.

Fields and Wolf Prizes: further direct counterexamples

  • Sir Michael Atiyah, a British mathematician of Lebanese descent, was awarded the 1966 Fields Medal. This is an example of Arab heritage, not a claim that he was a Lebanese national. International Mathematical Union.
  • Omar Yaghi won the 2018 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, seven years before his Nobel Prize. Wolf Foundation.
  • Ahmed Zewail won the 1993 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, six years before his Nobel Prize. Wolf Foundation.

The mathematician’s case is a heritage-based counterexample rather than the strongest evidence for Arab-country achievement. The Nobel and Wolf examples are sufficiently clear without relying on contested definitions of identity.

Literature and modern science

Kennedy’s claim about literature also ignores the Omani novelist Jokha Alharthi, whose Arabic-language novel Celestial Bodies, translated by Marilyn Booth, won the 2019 International Booker Prize. Oxford University describes her as an author of novels, short-story collections, children’s books and scholarly works. Sources: The Booker Prizes and University of Oxford.

Nor is the scientific record limited to these prizes. Lebanese-born neuroscientist Huda Zoghbi has made major contributions to understanding genetic neurological conditions, including Rett syndrome, and received the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. The Nobel chemistry awards to Zewail and Yaghi alone establish that Kennedy’s broad assertion about science is false.

The irony of ‘500 million’

There is an additional historical irony in Kennedy’s use of the number 500 million. The numerals used to write it belong to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. Its decimal positional foundations originated in India, were adopted and developed by scholars in the Arabic-speaking world and then spread to Europe through trade and scholarship. This does not mean Arabs invented the entire system or the English word ‘million’. It does mean that the way the figure is written reflects precisely the kind of cross-cultural mathematical contribution Kennedy’s remarks overlooked. See Oxford University’s history of mathematics and University of St Andrews’ history of Arabic numerals.

Kennedy’s own record of disputed scientific claims

A fact-check should not suggest Kennedy has achieved nothing. Before his cabinet appointment, he worked for decades as an environmental lawyer and campaigner. The relevant comparison is whether the factual claims he has made in public withstand scrutiny, especially when he is responsible for US health policy.

In detailed examinations of Kennedy’s August 2026 CNN interview and his September 2026 Children’s Health Defense speech, FactCheck.org identified multiple false, misleading or unsupported assertions:

  • Vaccines and autism: Kennedy suggested that meaningful vaccine-autism research had not been done. Researchers have repeatedly investigated vaccines, ingredients and vaccination schedules without finding a credible causal link.
  • Lyme disease and respiratory syncytial virus: he alleged these infections arose from laboratory research. FactCheck.org found no evidence for either origin claim.
  • Vaccine safety trials: he claimed that only one childhood vaccine had undergone a placebo-controlled trial. Historical trials of several childhood vaccines contradict that assertion.
  • Vaccine adverse-event lists: he treated events listed in package inserts as evidence of vaccine-caused injury, despite warnings that reports do not themselves establish causation.
  • Autism prevalence: he compared figures drawn from different periods and diagnostic methods as though they were directly equivalent, overlooking important changes in diagnosis and identification.
  • Thimerosal: he linked the vaccine preservative to serious neurological harm despite a large body of research not supporting that conclusion at low vaccine doses.

These assessments are sourced to FactCheck.org’s review of the August interview and its September keynote fact-check. A false claim is not the same as proof that a speaker knowingly lied, and this article makes no such allegation.

Mike Rogers has also faced repeated fact-checks

Kennedy was campaigning for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, whose statements about Democratic rival Abdul El-Sayed have received critical ratings from the independent US fact-checking organisation PolitiFact. In particular:

  • The 9/11 allegation: Rogers claimed El-Sayed believed America deserved the 11 September attacks. The remark was made by a different commentator, Hasan Piker, and El-Sayed had explicitly said the attack was not justified. PolitiFact rated Rogers’s claim ‘Pants on Fire’. Read the ruling.
  • Muslim Brotherhood: Rogers said El-Sayed had failed to disavow the group. Video shows El-Sayed explicitly agreeing to disavow it. PolitiFact rated Rogers’s claim False. Read the ruling.
  • Michigan synagogue attack: Rogers said El-Sayed could not condemn the attacker. El-Sayed had explicitly condemned the attack, although subsequent comments about cycles of violence caused offence and he later apologised for the wording. PolitiFact rated Rogers’s statement Mostly False. Read the ruling.
  • Prisons and policing: Rogers claimed El-Sayed supported emptying prisons. PolitiFact said his words overstated El-Sayed’s position and rated the broader claim Mostly False. PolitiFact record.

PolitiFact’s public record also lists three Rogers statements from 2024 rated False: a claim about 400,000 Michigan manufacturing jobs disappearing because of electric-vehicle mandates, an allegation that Elissa Slotkin voted to allow noncitizens to vote in federal elections and a claim that a vote on the Inflation Reduction Act cut Medicare benefits. These findings concern distinct claims made at different times and are not evidence that every Rogers statement is inaccurate. See the complete list and ratings.

Our verdict

FALSE. Kennedy’s sweeping claim is contradicted by verifiable Nobel Prize, Fields Medal, Wolf Prize and literary award records. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is a particularly recent and direct counterexample. His explanation blaming the Muslim Brotherhood does not change those facts.

The record of Kennedy’s medical claims and the independent rulings on Rogers’s campaign statements add relevant context about the accuracy of public claims by the two men. They should be judged individually on their evidence, not as proof that either man has contributed nothing.

Sources and further reading