RFK Jr.'s wearable health tech fetish has roots in a red bouncy ball
(A red bouncy ball Kennedy got paid serious cash to peddle.)
From Sommer’s article:
“My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years,” Kennedy said. He went on to reveal that a major government-funded ad campaign to promote wearables — a category of digital devices that includes Fitbits, Apple Watches, and similar devices — is in the works …
… Taken together, Kennedy’s endorsement of MEGAFTA (the Make Everyone Get A Fitness Tracker Agenda) provoked a wave of backlash from leading figures of MAHA.
“Horrifying,” prominent anti-vaccine podcaster Shannon Joy wrote on X.
“Wearables are spy devices,” fringe health figure Mike Adams, who has often appeared on InfoWars, posted, adding that the devices would be “medical shackles” fit for prisoners of a “medical police state.”
This may disquiet you. But should you really be surprised?
In February, writing in
, I told the tale of how Kennedy had made a killing — relative to the minimal time and effort he expended — by peddling a wearable fitness device called “Boxbollen.”
Boxbollen is a red bouncy ball attached to a string. The string, in turn, is tethered to a band you wrap around your head.
When you’re fully geared up, you attempt to punch the ball. There’s a tracking app that tracks your punches. It’s billed as a fun way to get a workout. And if you’re Kennedy, you earn serious scratch for your endorsement of Boxbollen.
Oh, yes, there’s video.
From my article:
And that confirms it: This is RFK Jr., husband of Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines and the vaccine-trashing 2024 Democratic presidential candidate who became an independent presidential candidate before throwing his support to a Republican presidential candidate in Donald Trump who, of course, won the election — and named Kennedy his secretary of Health and Human Services.
“This is Boxbollen, the ideal stocking stuffer,” Kennedy exclaims in the ad spot, which appears on YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram and other social media. “When I’m on the road, I try to use it as often as I can, because it keeps up my hand-eye coordination, and it gives me a workout.”
So what, exactly, is in this for Kennedy?
Money, in short. Federal records filed with the Office of Government Ethics indicate Kennedy, whose net worth Forbes estimates at about $15 million (though some reports put it closer to $30 million), was paid a cool $100,000 for his Boxbollen endorsement.
As Sommer notes in his recent article, there’s also a money angle to Kennedy’s latest wearable fitness device push:
For one thing, wearables are central to the businesses founded by two of Kennedy’s closest allies: brother and sister duo Calley and Casey Means.
Entrepreneur Calley Means, sometimes described as Kennedy’s “right-hand man,” is the cofounder of a company that advises people on how to use health savings accounts to buy fitness technology — including, as the Guardian reported last week, health wearables.
Meanwhile, Casey Means, recently nominated by Donald Trump to be surgeon general, cofounded her own company, Levels, that sells fitness wearables as an optional add-on for an app-based health-tracking subscription package.
If this all makes you feel the least bit dirty, you could always follow Kennedy’s lead and jump into the cool waters of a creek — one filled with sewage and bacteria.
So let’s say you live in a rural area and your health tracker shows an incipient heart and you try to find a nearby hospital and can’t get to the closest one in time because they’ve all been closed. As I wrote in my Substack today, I think RFK Jr. will be the first of Trump’s Cabinet to go as the king gets fed up with him. It won’t be due to this Big Brother is Watching idea. Rather it is because contagious diseases aren’t political.