GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced widespread rebuke on Tuesday, October 27, 2026 from civil rights groups, healthcare advocates, scientists and Democrats over remarks about Arabs he made a day earlier at a Republican campaign event in Michigan — remarks that Reuters, the Associated Press and NBC News all reported as factually false.

Kennedy was campaigning in Michigan for Republican Mike Rogers, who is running for the U.S. Senate against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, and for Republican Congressman John James, according to reports of the event. Rogers' opponent, El-Sayed, is an Arab-American physician and former public-health official — a fact that put Kennedy's words at the centre of the state's Senate race within hours.

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 said at the Monday event, in a quote carried by Reuters, the AP and NBC News.

Kennedy also criticised the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement founded nearly a century ago, saying its rise had created "stagnant societies" — while acknowledging, in the same speech as reported by Reality Tea's account of the rally recording, that in the 13th century Muslim princes kept bigger libraries than all of Europe combined.

The record contradicts the claim

Arabs have won every prize Kennedy named, as the AP's fact check set out: Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988; Egyptian chemist Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999; Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011; and Omar Yaghi, a Palestinian-American chemist at UC Berkeley, won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the 2018 Wolf Prize. Critics' lists also named Nobel science laureate Moungi Bawendi and literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Peace laureates Anwar Sadat, Yasser Arafat and Mohamed ElBaradei.

Peter Hotez, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine who specialises in vaccine development and tropical medicine, said his late colleague Zewail — who died in 2016 — "would disagree" with the health secretary's comments, Reuters reported.

The rebuke

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which documents hate against Muslims and Arabs in the United States, called the remarks on Tuesday "a textbook display of unvarnished racism and bigotry" and "Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vile anti-Arab rant." In a fuller statement reported by HuffPost, CAIR said Kennedy had used "fabricated, white supremacist talking points" to dehumanise half a billion people, including millions of Muslim and Christian Arab Americans, and that anyone holding such contempt for an entire ethnicity "has no business leading a federal agency meant to serve all Americans" — a call, in effect, for his removal.

Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, retweeting a clip of the remark on X, called Kennedy a "disgusting racist" and wrote that as anti-Arab and Islamophobic hate rises, "we must all speak out louder than the hate," according to NBC News reporting carried by Primetimer. U.S. rights advocates told Reuters they have raised concerns over escalating rhetoric against Muslims, Arabs, immigrants and ethnic minorities by President Donald Trump and his allies during the ongoing midterm election campaign.

Why Michigan felt it first

Michigan is home to one of the largest Arab-American communities in the United States, concentrated in and around Dearborn and metro Detroit, and its Senate race pits Rogers against El-Sayed, who would be one of the few Arab Americans in the Senate if elected. A cabinet secretary's claim about Arabs, made on a Michigan stage in the final stretch of that race, therefore landed not as an abstract Washington controversy but as a local campaign event — which is why Michigan voices, from Tlaib to state-level advocates, were among the first and loudest respondents in Tuesday's coverage.

What happens next

As of Tuesday's reports, the Department of Health and Human Services had not responded to requests for comment, and no apology or clarification from Kennedy had been reported. CAIR's position — that the remarks are disqualifying for the official who leads the federal health agency serving all Americans — sets up the next test: whether the administration defends, distances itself from, or ignores the comments in the remaining days of the midterm campaign, and whether the Rogers campaign addresses remarks made at its own event. Awaaz Punjab will update this story if HHS or Kennedy responds.