Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Soon to Announce
White House Run, Sows Doubts About
Vaccines

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg

April 17, 2023

WASHINGTON — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
stood before the Lincoln Memorial in
January 2022 and condemned the
federal government’s coronavirus response
by railing against totalitarianism.
Jews in Nazi Germany, he suggested,
had more freedom than Americans
facing vaccination mandates and
school, church and business closures
in the era of Covid-19.

Family Backlash

Mr. Kennedy, 69, is the third-
eldest child of Robert and Ethel
Kennedy and a nephew of President
John F. Kennedy, who urged
Americans to take the Salk polio
vaccine and signed the Vaccination
Assistance Act of 1962 to help
states and cities carry out
childhood immunization programs.

His activism, and now his political
aspirations, have been wrenching
for his family. Some of his family
members have publicly rebuked him.
His sister Rory Kennedy told CNN
she was backing Mr. Biden, while
his sister Kerry Kennedy
said in a statement, “I love my
brother Bobby, but I do not share
or endorse his opinions on many
issues.”

Ahead of his White House
bid, Mr. Kennedy is playing up
his family history. He lives in
California but plans to make
his announcement in Boston,
a city closely identified with
the Kennedys. He recently
tweeted a photo of himself
in a vintage “Kennedy for
President” T-shirt.

His name and family reputation
have opened doors for him.
Dr. Fauci said he had met with
Mr. Kennedy several times and
had told him “that I believe that
his intentions are not evil, but
his information is incorrect,
and he’s misguided and can
inadvertently cause significant
harm.” Dr. Fauci said that
when Mr. Kennedy’s book
about him, titled “The Real
Anthony Fauci,” came out in
2021, he was “really shocked.”

“The entire book is such a complete
lie,” Dr. Fauci said.

Mr. Kennedy’s messages often
have a grain of truth. The Children’s
Health Defense website,
for instance, says “vaccines contain
many ingredients, some of which
are known to be neurotoxic,
carcinogenic and cause autoimmunity.”
Vaccines do contain preservatives
and additives, such as
aluminum salts, which have
been in use in vaccines for
decades. Studies show
adverse reactions are rare and
typically involve skin allergies.

“Vaccine injuries can and do
happen,” the website declares.
That is true as well, but the
federal government has an
aggressive system to track
and detect side effects so
they can be addressed.

The measles vaccine, for instance,
lowers the platelet count in
about one in every 25,000 to
30,000 people. That can cause
red spots from bleeding under
the skin — a problem that is
usually “short-lived and self-
resolving,” said Dr. Paul A.
Offit, the director of the
Vaccine Education Center at
Children’s Hospital of
Philadelphia. But measles
causes that problem in one
in 3,000 children — roughly
10 times as many as the
vaccine, he said.

“There are no risk-free choices,
just choices to take different
risks,” said Dr. Offit, who has
been a vocal critic of Mr. Kennedy.
“You could argue the greatest risk
of vaccines is driving to the office
to get them.”

A Movement Grows

By his own account, Mr. Kennedy
was at first a reluctant critic of
vaccination. He got involved in
2005, when he was an environmental
lawyer suing coal-fired power
plants to force them to reduce
emissions of mercury and other
toxic chemicals.

The anti-vaccine movement in
the United States had been growing
amid debate over a rise in cases
of autism. In 1998, a British doctor
named Andrew Wakefield published
a study of 12 children in The Lancet,
a prestigious medical journal, that
suggested a link between the
measles, mumps and rubella
vaccine and autism.

The article was retracted in 2010,
and Mr. Wakefield was later barred
from practicing medicine. But in
the years after its publication,
another theory began to take
hold: that thimerosal, a mercury-
based preservative that had
been used for decades to
prevent bacteria from growing
in multiple-dose vials of
vaccines, caused autism.

The measles, mumps and rubella
vaccine never contained
thimerosal, but other vaccines
given to infants did. The Centers
for Disease Control and
Prevention says there is
“no evidence” that the low
doses of thimerosal in vaccines c
ause harm, “except for minor
reactions like redness and
swelling at the injection site.”

But in 1999, after Congress
directed the Food and Drug
Administration to look at
mercury in all products, the
American Academy of
Pediatrics, federal health
agencies and vaccine manufacturers
agreed that thimerosal
should be removed from
childhood vaccines. The decision
was made “out of an abundance of
caution,” said Daniel Salmon,
the director of the Institute for
Vaccine Safety at the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health.

But the move alarmed parents. As
Mr. Kennedy traveled the country
giving speeches, he has said,
mothers of intellectually disabled
children began buttonholing
him, pressing him to investigate
vaccines.

“They would say to me in a
very respectful but also kind of
vaguely scolding way, ‘If you’re really
interested in mercury exposures
to children, you need to look
at vaccines,’” he told the
Hillsdale College audience.

In 2005, Rolling Stone and
Salon copublished an article
by Mr. Kennedy, headlined “Deadly
Immunity,” that blamed
thimerosal in vaccines for
fueling the rise in autism.
Salon later retracted the article.
Mr. Kennedy insisted Salon
caved to pressure from
government regulators
and the pharmaceutical industry.

Thimerosal is still used in
flu vaccines. In 2015,
shortly after Mr. Kennedy
published a book about
the preservative, he met
Eric Gladen, an engineer
who believes he was sickened
by thimerosal in a tetanus
vaccine and who made a
film about his experience.
The two joined forces.
Mr. Gladen’s advocacy group,
World Mercury Project, was later
rebranded as Children’s Health Defense.

“We had two huge tools to raise
funds; we had my film, which is
about 10 years of research put
into 90 minutes, and his book,”
Mr. Gladen said in an interview,
adding, “Between him being a
Kennedy, the film and his book,
it compelled a lot of people
to get involved.”

Mr. Kennedy points to such
efforts as evidence that
lawmakers and federal
regulators are conspiring
to protect drug companies,
which he says lack incentives
to focus on safety. During
the fight over the California
legislation, he invoked those
arguments, said Dr. Richard
Pan, a former state senator
who was an author of the
bill and met with Mr. Kennedy
at the time.

“He mainly focused on the
F.D.A. being corrupt and in
cahoots with the pharmaceutical
companies to hide the
danger of vaccines,” Dr. Pan said.

Meeting With Trump

Shortly before Mr. Trump was
inaugurated in January 2017,
Mr. Kennedy met with him at
Trump Tower in Manhattan.
Mr. Kennedy said afterward
that the president-elect wanted
him to lead a “vaccine safety
and scientific integrity” commission.
He told Science magazine that
Mr. Trump had told him he had
five friends whose healthy
children “developed a suite of
deficits” after being vaccinated.

The commission never came to
pass, but the coronavirus pandemic
gave Mr. Kennedy an even bigger
platform. As the country grew
ever more polarized, with many
of Mr. Trump’s followers shunning
the vaccines and Dr. Fauci becoming
a lightning rod, Mr. Kennedy’s book
about Dr. Fauci became a best seller.

Another book by Mr. Kennedy is due
out in June, this time focusing
on the controversy over the
origins of the coronavirus.
Titled “The Wuhan Cover-Up,”
it claims that federal health
officials “conspired with the
Chinese military” to hide the
pandemic’s origins — an assertion
that appears to conflate
experiments by the Chinese
military at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology with
other work there funded by
the U.S. government.

How much Mr. Kennedy
will talk about vaccine safety
during his presidential campaign
remains unclear. As he did
during the rally at the Lincoln
Memorial, he used his talk at
Hillsdale College to cloak his
activism in a broader point —
that the government, the
press and social media companies
are trying to silence him, pushing
the United States toward tyranny.

“The founders, specifically
Hamilton, Madison, Adams,
said, ‘We put freedom of
expression in the First Amendment
because all the other amendments
are dependent on it,’” Mr. Kennedy
said. “Because if you give a
government the right to silence
their opponents, they now have
a license for any atrocity.”

The New York Times

Published: April 17, 2023