A Timeline of Robert F Kennedy, Jr's Anti-Vaccine Activities
Can you guess when RFK Jr started influencing people about vaccines?
A lot of people likely think that Robert F Kennedy, Jr started influencing people about vaccine with his presidential run.
They would be wrong.
Was it during COVID?
Nope…
A Timeline of Robert F Kennedy, Jr's Anti-Vaccine Activities
Although he got more popular as California worked to pass new laws to get more kids vaccinated, Bobby Kennedy has been an anti-vaccine influencer for much longer than most folks think.
And well before 2017, when People magazine started their timeline of RFK Jr’s controversies.
You have to go all the way back to 2005 to see when RFK Jr got his start bashing vaccines. That’s when he got his article on “Deadly Immunity” published in Rolling Stone and Salon magazine. An article that was soon retracted because it was filled with so many errors!
And while that should have been the end of Kennedy, he eventually returned.
As the keynote speaker at the 2013 Autism One conference, Kennedy reportedly compared Dr. Paul Offit to a Nazi war criminal and said that “To my mind this is like the Nazi death camps.”
And while that should have been the end of Kennedy, in 2015, he got a book published by Skyhorse Publishing - Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak: An Analysis of the Scientific Literature on Mercury Toxicity in Vaccines and the Political, Regulatory, and Media Failures That Continue to Threaten Public Health. A book that blamed thimerosal in vaccines, which had already been removed in the late 1990s, for continuing to cause an autism epidemic, ADHD, and other problems.
Next, in 2016, he appeared at the Green Our Vaccines rally with Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey and other anti-vaccine celebrities.
While RFK Jr initially focused on mercury in vaccines, forming the World Mercury Project in 2016, he quickly shifted to it is everything about vaccines like most other anti-vaccine influencers. He even changed the name of his organization to the ironically named Children’s Health Defense.
“In 2005, these “mercury moms” gathered their research and began appearing at Kennedy’s speaking engagements as he toured the country, raising awareness of the environmental impacts of mercury emissions in the water supply.”
History of CHD
More recently, in 2017, before Trump supposedly asked him to chair a commission on vaccine safety, Kennedy told parents that after kids get vaccinated, “their brain is gone. This is a holocaust…”
And while that should have been the end of Kennedy, he became more and more popular over the next few years, regularly appearing at anti-vaccine rallies and protests. And of course, regularly pushing misinformation and propaganda about vaccines, vaccine preventable diseases, and autism, etc.
By 2019, it had seemed as if he had taken over the anti-vaccine movement, becoming the clear leader among all the anti-vaccine influencers that were emerging in the age of social media misinformation.
He even went to Samoa before their measles epidemic had ever gotten started and then wrote a letter to the Prime Minister of Samoa blaming the MMR vaccine for the epidemic!
He also went to New York, in the middle of the largest measles outbreak in the United States in over 20 years. An outbreak that was centered in New York! Not surprisingly, he went to New York, to the Harlem Vaccine Forum, during COVID too.
More recently, just before running for President, Bobby Kennedy produced a movie, Medical Racism: The New Apartheid, in 2021, that was filled with misinformation and propaganda about vaccines.
But while you might think that his motivation is defending the health of children, know that he has made millions promoting anti-vaccine misinformation. He even makes money suing vaccine manufacturers (doesn’t he say that they have no liability and can’t be sued though???) and referring people to lawyers after convincing them that they have been vaccine-injured.
And tragically, as Secretary of HHS, he hasn’t stopped, even as measles cases are on pace to set records this year and two people have died, including an unvaccinated child.
References
As Trump Taps RFK Jr. for Health Secretary, a Look Back at Kennedy’s Claims. https://www.factcheck.org/2024/11/as-trump-taps-rfk-jr-for-health-secretary-a-look-back-at-kennedys-claims/
FactChecking Robert F. Kennedy Jr. https://www.factcheck.org/2023/08/scicheck-factchecking-robert-f-kennedy-jr/