Health secretary again warns of declining fertility rate and claims teens less fertile than men approaching 70

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr used a press event at the White House on Thursday to make the extraordinary claim that American teenagers now have less sperm and testosterone than 65-year-old men.

Kennedy joined President Donald Trump in the Oval Office for a gathering to promote a new deal providing discount fertility drugs to couples trying for children, when he was invited to the lectern to say a few words.

"Thank you, Mr President," the secretary began, before launching into a bizarre address on the U.S. fertility rate, which he said was in decline and represented a national security threat.

"When my uncle was president, the fertility rate in this country was 3.5 percent," he declared. "Today, it is 1.6 percent. The replacement rate, in other words the amount of fertility that you need in order to keep your population even, is 2.1 percent. We are below replacement right now.

"That is a national security threat to our country and we know why this is happening, and President Trump is addressing the root causes through his MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] agenda of reducing endocrine disruptors, the exposure to chemicals that decrease fertility."

He continued: "Today, the average teenager in this country has 50 percent of the sperm count, 50 percent of the testosterone as a 65-year-old man. Our girls are hitting puberty six years early, and that's bad, but also our parents aren't having children.

"Parents who want to have children do not have access. I have seven children. I feel that God has blessed me with that and I can't imagine how different my life would be if I did not have that blessing."

Sperm counts are known to decline with age, meaning a teenage boy is likely to have a much higher count than a man in his late sixties, according to experts.

That said, data on young men's sperm counts is scarce.

"This is a very contentious issue in our field, and for every paper that you find that suggests a decline and raises an alarm for this issue, there's another paper that says that the numbers aren't changing, and that there's no cause for concern," Dr Scott Lundy, a reproductive urologist at the Cleveland Clinic, told NBC News this summer.

HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon cited two papers from 2017 and 2022 to support Kennedy's claims and told NBC, "A growing body of peer-reviewed research shows significant declines in sperm counts over the past decades, and pretending this isn't a serious trend is irresponsible. The data is real, the stakes are high and ignoring it doesn't make it go away."

Virility remains a major preoccupation of the manosphere, where wellness influencers and "pro-natalists" commonly stew over its supposed decline on podcasts and social media. They often recommend radical lifestyle changes to combat it, despite there being little real consensus on the seriousness of the problem.

This is nothing new for Kennedy, an environmental lawyer by trade. He made similar remarks to Fox News host Jesse Watters in April during a conversation about additives in foods marketed at children, putting the age of the hypothetical sexagenarian in the case at 68, not 65.

An incredulous Watters responded: "Wait, wait, a... wait, an American teenager has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man?"

"That's right, because the testosterone levels have dropped 50 percent from historic levels," the secretary answered. "And that is a problem and it's an existential problem."

Kennedy was not the only official to make a queasy claim at Thursday's event.

Medicare administrator Dr Mehmet Oz predicted there would be "a lot of Trump babies" as a result of the president's IVF treatment reforms, after years of America being "under-babied."

"The fundamental creative force in society is about making babies," Oz said.

RFK Jr rants about declining teenage sperm counts at White House fertility drug event