RFK Jr. is Weird - Part 2: Vaccines and Anti-Vaxx Nonsense

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is weird. His campaign for President in 2024 has been filled with bizarre statements and stories about his weird and off-putting behavior. This is noting new. Prior to his run for President, RFK Jr. was best known as a conspiracy theorist who regularly made false statements about the safety of vaccines. This post will document a short sampling of some of the anti-vaxx things RFK Jr. has said over the decades.

RFK Jr. is not well versed on the topics he talks about and should not be listened to:

In 2011 Rolling Stone retracted RFK Jr.'s 2005 article "Deadly Immunity" that claimed vaccines cause autism.

Salon.com retracted the same article.

In 2013 RFK Jr. called Slate to yell at them about his vaccine conspiracy theories.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s elaborate conspiracy theory is just as delusional and dangerous. Rather than accepting the findings of the Institute of Medicine, the National Institute of Mental Health, or the American Academy of Pediatrics, Kennedy says the scientists are lying. He says vaccine-makers are intentionally poisoning kids and giving them autism. Only he and his fellow activists know the truth because journalists, although they may report aggressively on the National Security Agency, Defense Department, and Central Intelligence Agency, are cowed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2015 RFK Jr. linked vaccines to the holocaust.

He later had to apologize for that incredibly weird statement.

RFK Jr. met with Donald Trump in 2017 to discuss plans of setting up a commission on "vaccine safety" to investigate a link between vaccines and autism, a claim that had been debunked for well over a decade.

The scientific Journal Nature responded with the editorial: Trump’s vaccine-commission idea is biased and dangerous.

Given the people Trump has chosen to listen to, his suggestion of a Kennedy-headed vaccine commission should be no surprise. But it remains difficult to grasp how someone in his position, with unlimited access to the world’s best resources on vaccine safety, would selectively choose to overlook them all: the studies, the commissions, the scientists who have spent a lifetime studying vaccines. What good is another investigation of speculation already so thoroughly analysed and debunked — unless it is being set up to reach a different conclusion? It is a clear waste of money and effort. Much more frustratingly, it fuels an anti-vaccination movement that puts children and elderly people at risk.

In the midst of this ridiculous plan RFK Jr. and Robert De Niro publicly spreading the lie that vaccines aren't safe.

Donald Trump's first term was filled with chaos, and the people around him managed to put the vaccine safety commission on the back burner.

They eventually dropped it entirely.

In 2019, RFK Jr.'s own family wrote an Op-Ed to criticize his anti-vaxxer position: RFK Jr. Is Our Brother and Uncle. He’s Tragically Wrong About Vaccines.

In 2018 and 2109 RFK Jr.'s advocacy group was spreading lies about vaccines in Samoa among other places.

Misguided information spread by those who advocate against vaccines appears to have made inroads in Samoa before the outbreak. The Post reports that anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s advocacy group, Children’s Health Defense, made several Facebook posts in July and August 2018 that questioned the safety of the vaccines the infants received. [...] A recent study showed that 54 percent of the advertisements spreading false information about vaccines on Facebook were bought by two groups, one of them Mr. Kennedy’s. 

In the summer of 2018, RFK Jr. traveled to Samoa to meet up with other anti-vaxxers:

Kennedy has asserted that vaccines cause autism, a claim disproved by extensive research. Members of the Kennedy family have publicly criticized him for helping “spread dangerous misinformation.”

An Instagram photo shows Kennedy embracing the Australian Samoan anti-vaccine activist Taylor Winterstein in Samoa on June 4. “I am deeply honored to have been in the presence of a man I believe is, can and will change the course of history,” Winterstein wrote in the caption, adding hashtags #makinginformedchoices #investigatebeforeyouvaccinate.

In the fall of 2019 the country experienced a measles outbreak that resulted in 83 deaths, many of them being infants and children. Rather than take responsibility for his roll in the outbreak, RFK Jr. wrote the Samoan Prime minister asking that they investigate the MMR vaccine as the cause of the deaths.

Kennedy’s charity shared a Nov. 19 letter he wrote to Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi, in which Kennedy encouraged officials to examine the MMR vaccine. “To safeguard public health during the current infection and in the future, it is critical that the Samoan Health Ministry determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine,” he wrote.

 Fortunately the government did not listen to his ramblings and instead conducted a mass vaccination campaign to end the outbreak.

The Health Ministry embarked on a vaccination campaign in late November and, within five days, immunized more than 17,000 people. Vaccinations are compulsory for children from 6 months to 19 years and for nonpregnant women between 20 and 35 [...].

Measles, once declared eliminated in the United States, spread rapidly in 2019. Worldwide, there were more measles cases in the first six months of 2019 than in the initial six months of any year since 2006, according to WHO data.

 Samoa isn't the only place RFK Jr. spreads his dangerous lies during preventable measles outbreaks. He does the same thing in the United States.

And before you assume he's spreading this nonsense simply because a worm ate large parts of his brain, it should be noted that he also makes a lot of money spreading this garbage.

And he doesn't seem to care who he hurts along the way.

In 2023 RFK Jr. baselessly claimed Covid-19 was ethnically targeted to spare Jews and Chinese people.

In 2024, despite all evidence to the contrary, he denied any role in the Measles outbreak in Samoa.

Ultimately the end-goal of RFK Jr.'s presidential campaign is to help Donald Trump get elected. I'm sure Trump would be happy to follow through on another vaccine commission, if not a higher-level position or cabinet post, if he is able to help Trump re-claim the Presidency.

This is part two of a two-part series. You can find the companion post here: RFK Jr. is Weird - Part 1: Jeffrey Epstein, Bears and Brain Worms.