Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. built a following along with his nonprofit anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense and have become one in all the world's most influential spreaders of fear and distrust of vaccines.
Now President-elect Donald Trump says he’ll nominate Kennedy to go the Department of Health and Human Services, which is liable for regulating vaccines.
Kennedy has long promoted the debunked concept that vaccines cause autism. He has also pushed other conspiracy theories, comparable to that COVID-19 could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. Comments he later said were taken out of context. He has repeatedly brought up the Holocaust when discussing vaccines and public health regulations.
No medical procedure is risk-free. But doctors and researchers have proven that risks exist Diseases usually are far greater than the risks of vaccines.
Vaccines have proven protected and effective in laboratory tests and in real-world use in lots of of tens of millions of individuals over many years – considered one of the vital effective public health interventions in history.
Kennedy has insisted he is just not an anti-vaxxer, saying he just wants vaccines to be rigorously tested, but he has also opposed a wide selection of vaccinations. Kennedy said in a podcast interview in 2023, “There is no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told Fox News that he still believes within the long-debunked concept that vaccines may cause autism. In a 2021 podcast, he urged people to “defy” CDC guidelines about when children needs to be vaccinated.
“I see someone on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I tell them it's better not to get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.
That same 12 months, in a video promoting his nonprofit's anti-vaccination sticker campaign, Kennedy appeared on screen next to a sticker that read, “IF YOU'RE NOT ANTI-VAXXER, DON'T PAY ATTENTION.”
The World Health Organization estimates that global vaccination efforts have saved at the least 154 million lives over the past 50 years.
In a 2021 study of verified Twitter accounts, researchers found that Kennedy's personal Twitter account was the biggest “super-spreader” of vaccine misinformation on Twitter, accounting for 13% of all misinformation spreads, greater than 3 times as high the second most retweeted account.
He has traveled to states comparable to Connecticut, California and New York to advocate or litigate anti-vaccination policies and has traveled world wide to fulfill with anti-vaccine activists.
Kennedy also aligned himself with corporations and special interest groups, comparable to anti-vaccine chiropractors, who saw profit in carving out a small slice of the larger health care market while spreading false or dubious health information.
An Associated Press investigation found that a chiropractic group in California donated $500,000 to Kennedy's Children's Health Defense, a couple of sixth of the group's fundraising income this 12 months. Another AP investigation found that he was listed as a partner in an anti-vaccination video series and ranked in the highest 10 of the series' “overall sales leaderboard.”
An AP review of the book found that dozens of individuals listed in it died from known causes unrelated to vaccinations, including suicide, intoxication asphyxia, overdose and allergic reactions. One person died in 2019.
Children's Health Defense currently has a lawsuit pending against a lot of news organizations, including The Associated Press, accusing them of violating antitrust laws by taking actions to spread misinformation, including about COVID-19 and COVID-19. 19 vaccines, uncover. Kennedy bid farewell to the group when he announced his presidential candidacy, but is listed within the lawsuit as one in all its lawyers.
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