The surreal saga of Robert F. Kennedy’s brain worm was in the spotlight once again on Thursday as Piers Morgan grilled the independent presidential candidate about his now notorious parasite.
“You get everyone going with this extraordinary revelation about the worm in your brain,” Morgan said. “Did you expect the reaction that you got to that, and what is the lasting consequence of that health issue you had?”
“Well, first of all, Piers, are you under the impression that I announced that to the world?” Kennedy asked. Morgan answered that he did not think Kennedy had done so “explicitly.”
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“No, I didn’t,’ Kennedy said. “It was a short discussion in a deposition almost 15 years ago in my divorce, and The New York Times dug that up and, you know, made it—announced it as if it was recent news.”
“It was something I discovered,” Kennedy continued. “It’s interesting. It had no impact on my cognitive capacity. I did have at that time—I was having brain fog and I was having some memory and word retrieval issues that I noticed, nobody else noticed them.”
The Times report in May claimed that in 2010, Kennedy’s “memory loss and mental fogginess” became “so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor.” After finding a dark spot on his brain scans, doctors concluded he had a tumor, according to the report, and Kennedy was scheduled to have surgery before another physician reached a different conclusion: namely, that he had a “dead parasite in his head.”
In his interview with Morgan, Kennedy said he “ended up getting treated” for his symptoms and that the worm “was one of the things they discovered during the course of my treatment, but it wasn’t something that, you know, was any kind of a threat to me.”
He went on to claim that he’d learned after the publication of the Times piece “that a billion people in the world have that particular parasite,” which produced an incredulous “Really?!” from Morgan.
Perhaps equally surprising was one of the places Kennedy then claimed his doctors told him he may have contracted the worm. One was in India, where he says he’d “traveled extensively,” and the other was “in the hog industry.”
“I had been litigating against factory farms in North Carolina, Utah, around the country,” Kennedy said. “And apparently this parasite is very, very common among people who are in that industry. So I don’t know where it came from, but whatever it was—the one that was inside of my brain died on its own, thank God.”
“So to reassure potential voters,” Morgan replied, “There is no remaining worm in your brain?” Kennedy laughed and responded: “Yeah, thank you very much, Piers.”
