By Michelle R. Smith | Related Press
Lengthy earlier than the COVID-19 pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was increase a following together with his anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Youngsters’s Well being Protection, and changing into one of many world’s most influential spreaders of worry and mistrust round vaccines.
Now, President-elect Donald Trump says he’ll nominate Kennedy to steer the Division of Well being and Human Providers, which regulates vaccines.
Kennedy has lengthy superior the debunked concept that vaccines trigger autism. He has additionally pushed different conspiracy theories, similar to that COVID-19 might have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese language individuals, feedback he later stated had been taken out of context. He has repeatedly introduced up the Holocaust when discussing vaccines and public well being mandates.
No medical intervention is risk-free. However medical doctors and researchers have confirmed that dangers from illness are typically far larger than the dangers from vaccines.
Vaccines have been confirmed to be protected and efficient in laboratory testing and in actual world use in tons of of tens of millions of individuals over many years — they’re thought-about among the many best public well being measures in historical past.
Kennedy has insisted that he’s not anti-vaccine, saying he solely desires vaccines to be rigorously examined, however he additionally has proven opposition to a variety of immunizations. Kennedy stated in a 2023 podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and instructed Fox Information that he nonetheless believes within the long-ago debunked concept that vaccines may cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged individuals to “resist” CDC pointers on when children ought to get vaccines.
“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy stated.
That very same yr, in a video selling an anti-vaccine sticker marketing campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen subsequent to at least one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”
The World Well being Group has estimated that world immunization efforts have saved a minimum of 154 million lives up to now 50 years.
In a research of verified Twitter accounts from 2021, researchers discovered Kennedy’s private Twitter account was the highest “superspreader” of vaccine misinformation on Twitter, liable for 13% of all reshares of misinformation, greater than 3 times the second most-retweeted account.
He has traveled to states together with Connecticut, California and New York to foyer or sue over vaccine insurance policies and has traveled the world to satisfy with anti-vaccine activists.
Kennedy has additionally aligned himself with companies and particular pursuits teams similar to anti-vaccine chiropractors, who noticed revenue in slicing off a small portion of the bigger well being care market whereas spreading false or doubtful well being info.
An Related Press investigation discovered one chiropractic group in California had donated $500,000 to Kennedy’s Youngsters’s Well being Protection, about one-sixth of the group’s fundraising that yr. One other AP investigation discovered he was listed as an affiliate for an anti-vaccine video sequence, the place he was ranked among the many Prime 10 for the sequence’ “Overall Sales Leaderboard.”
His group has co-published quite a few anti-vaccine books which were debunked. One, referred to as “Cause Unknown,” is constructed on the false premise that sudden deaths of younger, wholesome individuals are spiking as a consequence of mass administration of COVID-19 vaccines. Specialists say these uncommon medical emergencies usually are not new and haven’t develop into extra prevalent.
An AP overview of the e-book discovered dozens of people included in it died of identified causes not associated to vaccines, together with suicide, choking whereas intoxicated, overdose and allergic response. One particular person died in 2019.
Youngsters’s Well being Protection at present has a lawsuit pending in opposition to quite a few information organizations, amongst them The Related Press, accusing them of violating antitrust legal guidelines by taking motion to establish misinformation, together with about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy took go away from the group when he introduced his run for president however is listed as one in all its attorneys within the lawsuit.
