One of the most influential anti-vaccine activists of the past two decades is seeking a bigger platform: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of a former attorney general and US senator and nephew of a former president, is running for White. Home alone.
Kennedy submit candidacy documents Wednesday and plans to deliver a kickoff speech in Boston on April 19.
Before his anti-vaccine activism, Kennedy had a reputation mostly as an environmental advocate. But since the early 2000s, Kennedy has become an integral part of the anti-vaccine ecosystem in the United States, trading on his family name and high-profile connections to lend legitimacy to bunk science — which critics say is worthless. death and the wave of anti-science, anti-government paranoia that is now a major feature of American politics.
The work has led to criticism from his family, especially in 2019 Political articles where two brothers and one nephew wrote that by spreading misinformation and distrusting vaccine science, Kennedy was part of a “campaign to attack institutions committed to reducing the tragedies of preventable infectious diseases.”
One of the authors of the piece, Kennedy’s sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, declined HuffPost’s request for comment on the candidacy. Former Rep. Patrick Kennedy (DR.I.), son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), told HuffPost in a statement supporting President Joe Biden’s reelection bid.
The COVID-19 pandemic gave Kennedy a new platform for his false medical views. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense, more than doubled its annual fundraising to $6.8 million by 2020 and gets millions of monthly website visits, The Associated Press reported.
Next year, analysis from the anti-misinformation group Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Kennedy was the source of the most anti-vaccine content shared or posted on Facebook or Twitter, behind only Joseph Mercola, who had affected million with “natural” medicine.
“What makes him so difficult is his name. His family is one that stands up for the underdog, that represents the underdog, that speaks of power, so when he stands up and says, ‘This vaccine causes so much harm,’ that has a special impact,” said Paul Offit, director of the Center for Vaccine Education at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a longtime critic of Kennedy who believes he is the most influential anti-vaccine voice in the country.
Kennedy, Offit added, “lied and lied and lied about vaccine safety.”
“They lied and lied and lied about vaccine safety.”
– Paul Offit, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Children’s Health Defense was removed from Facebook and Instagram — both under Meta’s parent company — last year for “repeated violations of our policies,” a Meta spokesperson said. But it is permanent on Twitter; archives of glass shows the group has increased its number of Twitter “followers” by nearly 25% since January alone. Kennedy was personally banned from Instagram in February 2021, but he has 868,000 followers on Twitter and 352,000 on Facebook.
Notably, the landing page of Kennedy’s campaign website does not explicitly mention vaccines, but the candidate “has fought against corporate greed and government corruption to protect our children, our health, our livelihoods, our environment, and most importantly, our freedom.”
Children’s Health Defense on Thursday referred HuffPost’s questions to the Kennedy campaign, which said it would not schedule an interview with the candidate until after the campaign kickoff.
Decades of False Claims
Kennedy entered the anti-vaccine world quickly: In 2005, Salon and Rolling Stone published the article “Immunity is Dead.” Salon issued a retraction the following year, and Rolling Stone removed the article from its site. At its heart, the piece uses confusing and incorrect information to claim vaccines cause autism. As reporter Seth Mnookin pointed out, the article combines quotes to make it look bad and makes a fundamental mistake about vaccine chemistry.
As the corrections in Rolling Stone and Salon noted, among other serious errors, the article misstated the amount of ethylmercury babies received from vaccines in the first six months; Kennedy claimed 187 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended daily limit, but it was actually 40% of the limit. A few days after the correction, Kennedy admitted that he was wrong, “We are injecting our children with 400 times the amount of mercury that is considered safe by the FDA or the EPA.” (Many studies have found no link between vaccines and autism.)
The same lack of scientific research applies to Kennedy’s COVID-19 vaccine claims: Kennedy’s descendants told a Louisiana House committee that the COVID-19 vaccine is “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”
However, like other anti-vaccine voices, Kennedy relied on numbers from the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERs, a database that is unreliable because reports are not verified. In the same way that bunk movies like “Died Suddenly” claim that many deaths are due to vaccination, so does the VAER entry – although there is no evidence to support this claim or with any evidence to contradict it.
‘Boss in my own house’
More than any other anti-vaccine crusader, Kennedy’s name gave him instant credibility with many in the country, especially among wealthy liberals. Over the years, Kennedy has shared the stage and lobbied against vaccine legislation with the likes of Robert De Niro and Jessica Biel.
But although he is known for his anti-vaccine work, Kennedy also has a reputation as an environmental lawyer and progressive activist — a role in which he writes a blog and is the subject of numerous articles published by HuffPost. (Before HuffPost shut down its contributor platform in 2017, Kennedy also wrote several vaccine-disparaging blogs; those posts, along with others spreading misinformation about vaccines, have since been removed from the site.)
The combination of his family name and liberal bona fides gave Kennedy a unique position in politics and certainly in the anti-vaccine movement, which has tilted far to the right in recent years.
Among other things, Kennedy has a difference that is discussed for his role in the administration of Barack Obama and Donald Trump: in the administration of Obama as a potential EPA official, although he was never a serious competitor, and in the White House of Trump, at least according to him. for Kennedy, as head of the vaccine safety board. (Infectious disease specialist Paul E. Sax wrote that news of Trump’s appointment reminded him “of when Elvis Presley received an official Federal Narcotics Bureau badge from Richard Nixon, just a few years before Presley died of a drug overdose.”)
Recently, Kennedy’s views put him at odds with his wife, Cheryl Hines, an actor known for her role in “Curb Your Enthusiasm”: In one instance, at the end of 2021, Hines instructed guests invited to a family holiday party to be vaccinated or tested for COVID-19 — prompting Kennedy to tell reporters, “I’m not always the boss in my house.”
A month later, Kennedy cried during a speech that “even in Hitler’s Germany, you can hide in the attic like Anne Frank.” Hines retracted his remarks, and Kennedy apologized.
Dia Dipasupil/WireImage via Getty Images
A Libertarian Shift
Anne Frank Kennedy’s comments show a wider change in rhetoric since the beginning of the pandemic: Whereas before she could focus more on claims about the safety of vaccines, now she also focuses on the tyrannical ambitions of drug makers and governments – harder. cost to scientists and public health officials to combat.
“When they give you that vaccine passport, all the rights you have are turned into privileges dependent on obedience to an arbitrary government,” Kennedy said during the same speech, part of an anti-vaccine rally held at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. .
That tone drew support from far-right Trump aides like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon. Bannon has been “advocating this for months,” CBS News’ Robert Costa said reportedciting several unnamed people familiar with the matter.
In an interview this week, Stone called Kennedy “on all questions of the safety and efficacy of vaccination.”
For Offit, that reputation will mark a historical reminder of Kennedy — a stark departure from the civil rights and political work of his father and uncle.
In 2020, before the COVID-19 vaccine, Offit recalled, the children’s hospital where he worked was “overwhelmed” by the virus. Children struggle to breathe, require oxygen and intensive care, and occasionally die. In 2021, even though vaccines are finally available for children, some parents don’t trust the shots. Their children paid the price.
“Partly because of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who sow doubts about the safety of vaccines — or support the idea that it’s government overreach — you have to watch children suffer and sometimes die,” Offit said. “This is the legacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
Igor Bobic and Kevin Robillard contributed reporting.