Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was building up a following with his anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense, and becoming one of the world’s most influential spreaders of fear and distrust around vaccines.
Now, President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which regulates vaccines.
Kennedy has long advanced the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. He has also pushed other conspiracy theories, such as that COVID-19 could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, comments he later said were taken out of context. He has repeatedly brought up the Holocaust when discussing vaccines and public health mandates.
No medical intervention is risk-free. But doctors and researchers have proven that risks from disease are generally far greater than the risks from vaccines.
Vaccines have been proven to be safe and effective in laboratory testing and in real world use in hundreds of millions of people over decades — they are considered among the most effective public health measures in history.
Kennedy has insisted that he is not anti-vaccine, saying he only wants vaccines to be rigorously tested, but he also has shown opposition to a wide range of immunizations. Kennedy said in a 2023 podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told Fox News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism. In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.
“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated,” Kennedy said.
That same year, in a video promoting an anti-vaccine sticker campaign by his nonprofit, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to one sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”
The World Health Organization has estimated that global immunization efforts have saved at least 154 million lives in the past 50 years.
In a study of verified Twitter accounts from 2021, researchers found Kennedy’s personal Twitter account was the top “superspreader” of vaccine misinformation on Twitter, responsible for 13% of all reshares of misinformation, more than three times the second most-retweeted account.
He has traveled to states including Connecticut, California and New York to lobby or sue over vaccine policies…
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