August 2, 2023
I: Introduction
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has decided to compete for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States in the 2024 election. Kennedy is a dangerous conspiracy theorist, whose wrong-headed and anti-scientific views on a variety of health issues have endangered thousands, if not millions, of lives worldwide over the past two decades. Although we have already dealt with some of his conspiratorial disinformation in a few earlier posts on this blog site, we consider it important to dedicate a post to his career now, lest some voters assume that his famous name grants him qualifications for high political office.
In this post, we will first review Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s history. Then we will discuss at length the claims he has made as an anti-vaccine advocate and an HIV-AIDS denier. We will also review his statements regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, and allegations he has made regarding Dr. Anthony Fauci and entrepreneur Bill Gates. We have encountered Robert Kennedy Jr. in prior blog posts. Kennedy wrote an introduction to Dr. Judy Mikovits’ book Plague of Corruption, that claimed the U.S. government had mis-identified the cause of the COVID pandemic and was covering up the real cause of this disease. We reviewed Dr. Mikovits’ career and allegations in an earlier blog post. We discussed Kennedy’s anti-vaccination actions in a blog post on vaccination. And we wrote a post on the “Disinformation Dozen,” the twelve individuals who had been most active in posting false information on the Web regarding the COVID pandemic. In that post, Robert F. Kennedy was the #2 most influential blogger spreading misinformation. We even gave Kennedy one of our initial Pseudoscience Awards for his unsupportable, hyperbolic, and evidence-free claim that “The Pfizer COVID-19 shot kills more people than it saves.”
II: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Career
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is a member of a family dynasty in American politics. He is the son of former senator and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy received his J.D. degree from the University of Virginia, and a Master of Laws degree from Pace University. Kennedy founded the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University, and he co-directed that clinic for 30 years. As the supervising attorney for that clinic, RFK Jr. prosecuted a number of firms for environmental damage; he seems to have been rather effective in that role.
Figure II.1: Environmental lawyer and anti-vaccination activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
However, he switched his focus from environmental law to vaccines and public health. He tells a story of his conversion to anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist (note: Mr. Kennedy denies that he is an anti-vaccination advocate; however, we will see that his criticisms of vaccines have become more and more strident, and the conspiracy theories about vaccination that he endorses have become a serious threat to the public health of Americans, and indeed citizens around the globe). In 2005, a woman named Sarah Bridges brought Kennedy a stack of articles. Bridges was convinced that her son’s autism was caused by vaccines, and in particular she believed that her son’s autism was caused by a compound, thiomersal (also called thimerosal), that had been added to several vaccines to prevent multi-use vaccines from developing bacterial growths. Kennedy was convinced by Ms. Bridges’ arguments. He began to turn his attention to issues involving the safety of vaccines and antiretroviral drugs and their contribution to public health. However, before we dig deeply into Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer claims, we will briefly discuss some of the many other conspiracy theories he has endorsed.
RFK, Jr. and Conspiracy Theories:
In this post we will concentrate on two of the conspiracy theories espoused by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr; namely, the claim that a vast conspiracy is attempting to hush up the harm caused by vaccines, and HIV-AIDS denials and conspiracy theories. However, these represent only a fraction of the conspiracy theories that Mr. Kennedy has pushed. In recent months these have been summarized in a number of articles, particularly after Mr. Kennedy announced that he is running for President, and after initial polls show him garnering roughly 20% of the votes in Democratic primaries. Here are other fringe positions articulated by Mr. Kennedy.
- He claims that gender dysphoria suffered by American youth results from exposure by these youths to chemicals. Kennedy has particularly mentioned the chemical atrazine (Fig. II.2), which is commonly used to kill weeds and on farms. According to Kennedy, research has shown that exposure to atrazine “induces complete feminization and chemical castration” in frogs exposed to this chemical. However, there is no evidence that exposure to atrazine causes similar symptoms in humans; there is also zero evidence showing that exposure to atrazine induces gender dysphoria in American youth. We have dealt with gender dysphoria in our previous posts on Sex, Gender, Genomes and Hormones, where we pointed out that this condition reflects a tension between the physical sex organs of an individual, typically formed during the first trimester of pregnancy, and the sexual differentiation of the individual’s brain, which begins during the second trimester and is sensitive to the fetal exposure to testosterone levels in the womb.
Figure II.2: Chemical structure of atrazine, a chemical used to combat weeds in agriculture.
- Kennedy claims that recent school shootings by young adult males are a direct result of the use of antidepressants by these males. Kennedy argues that the recent spate of school shootings is “coterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.” However, there is no evidence that most young adult male school shooters were taking antidepressants. In the few cases where shooters were taking antidepressants, researchers report that “no direct or causal association was found” between the drugs and the resulting violence.
- Mr. Kennedy has endorsed the conspiracy theory that his uncle President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the Central Intelligence Agency. The official Warren Commission investigation into the murder of President Kennedy concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the killer and that he acted alone. A U.S. House of Representatives investigation in 1976 concluded that President Kennedy’s death was “probably” the result of a conspiracy; however, their inquiry concluded that the CIA “was not involved.”
- Kennedy has asserted (with no evidence to back up his claim) that John Kerry was actually the winner of the 2004 Presidential Election, but the Republicans fraudulently stole the election. In a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Kennedy claimed that the Republicans suppressed 350,000 votes for Kerry in the state of Ohio. In 2004, it was reported that a ‘glitch’ in voting machines had added 3,893 votes to Bush; however, it was stated that this error was caught and corrected in preliminary vote counts. Bush eventually carried Ohio by more than 118,000 votes.
- Kennedy has expressed doubt that Sirhan Sirhan killed his father in June 1968. When he was arrested in 1968 for the killing of Senator Robert Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan confessed to law enforcement officials that he had killed Kennedy. However, he now claims that he was “hypnotized and coerced” to kill Kennedy.
- Kennedy has claimed that gun ownership in Switzerland is similar to that in the United States. It is true that all Swiss men serve in the armed forces and are allowed to keep their firearms after their service is completed. But according to the small arms survey by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, there are 27.6 firearms per 100 people in Switzerland. In the U.S., there are 120 firearms per 100 people; this is the highest rate of firearm possession in the world.
- Kennedy asserts that the COVID-19 virus was genetically engineered by the Chinese. Kennedy has claimed on Twitter Spaces that “COVID was clearly a bioweapons problem.” He went even further in a recent press event to suggest that it was an “ethnic bioweapon…targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” implying that its design purposely spared “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” American intelligence agencies have raised the possibility that COVID originated as an accidental leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan (Fig. II.3) that studies such viruses. However, we know of no evidence that the virus was deliberately leaked from a Chinese lab or developed as a bioweapon. Also, the intelligence agencies have offered little or no evidence for their conclusion that an accidental lab leak was responsible for releasing the COVID virus.
Figure II.3: Part of the lab complex at Wuhan, China. There is controversy over the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. While some believe the virus was accidentally leaked from this lab, others maintain that the virus originated at a market in Wuhan where wild animals were sold.
- Kennedy has claimed that the pharmaceutical industry favors Democrats in political funding, since passage of the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Kennedy claimed on Twitter Spaces that “Democrats were getting more money from pharma than Republicans.” But an analysis by STAT News found that political donations from 23 of the country’s biggest drug companies and 2 pharmaceutical trade organizations have favored Republicans in 14 of the past 16 elections from 1990 – 2020.
There are many Americans who believe in a conspiracy theory, particularly since a majority of Republican party members claim with no justification that Donald Trump won the 2020 Presidential election. However, the sheer number of conspiracy theories endorsed by Robert Kennedy, Jr. gives one pause. He is obviously willing to place his belief in ideas for which there is no credible evidence. He seems inclined to believe that many well-researched accounts from recognized experts in their fields are lies, and that internet anecdotes are a preferred source of information. With respect to vaccines, and in particular the COVID vaccine, we will see that Kennedy places his trust in “maverick” doctors and scientists who push fringe theories about medicine and health. In the process, he rejects the consensus on these issues by the medical community. He endorses far-fetched claims regarding medicines and public health, and (as can be seen from the above list of theories that he advances) he disregards voluminous evidence that contradicts his theories.
As a public citizen and the bearer of a famous name in politics, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has inherited a legacy that provides him great influence with the American public. Unfortunately, he has chosen to spread unfounded rumors and false statements regarding matters of public health. It would be seriously disturbing if a man with such dubious analytic powers were somehow to become President.
This is not simply our conclusion about Kennedy’s public statements. Several members of his own family have released their concerns about his public statements regarding vaccination. In 2019 two of Kennedy’s siblings, former Congressman Joseph Kennedy II and former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, joined with Kennedy’s niece Maeve Kennedy McKean, the executive director of Georgetown University’s Global Health Initiatives, to jointly author an op-ed in Politico stating “We are proud of the history of our family as advocates of public health and promoters of immunization campaigns to bring life-saving vaccines to the poorest and most remote corners of America and the world, where children are the least likely to receive their full course of vaccinations … On this issue, Bobby is an outlier in the Kennedy family.”
And in 2020, his niece Dr. Kerry Kennedy Meltzer published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Vaccines Are Safe, No Matter What Robert Kennedy Jr. Says;” the article was subtitled “As a doctor, and as a member of the Kennedy family, I feel I must use whatever small platform I have to state a few things unequivocally. I love my uncle Bobby. I admire him for many reasons, chief among them his decades-long fight for a cleaner environment. But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong.”
III. Deadly Immunity:
In July 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. published an article in Rolling Stone magazine called Deadly Immunity (see Fig. III.1). That article, apparently Kennedy’s first foray into anti-vaccination activism, was also posted on the Salon Website. Kennedy’s article described the 2000 Simpsonwood CDC conference that was attended by many of the country’s experts in vaccines. Kennedy claimed that this was a secret gathering of scientists, the U.S. government, and Big Pharma to hide from the public the deadly dangers associated with vaccines. In particular, Kennedy claimed that the participants knew that thiomersal posed a deadly danger to vaccinated youth, and that the government “colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thiomersal from the public.”
Figure III.1: Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s 2005 article Deadly Immunity in Rolling Stone magazine. This article was also posted on the Salon Website, but was retracted in 2011 because of its many false and misleading statements.
In fact, virtually all of Kennedy’s arguments were false or misleading. Here, we include material from our blog post on Vaccination. We include some of Kennedy’s claims from his Deadly Immunity article (in italics, preceded by RFK), and we follow those with comments from Seth Mnookin’s book The Panic Virus (preceded by SM).
RFK: In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy.
SM: Note the emotive language – an “isolated” conference center “nestled in wooded farmland… to ensure complete secrecy”. Sounds suspicious, yes? Well, not really. Perhaps Kennedy should have read the actual full 286 page transcript of the meeting because then he would have learned (page 257) that it was only held there because there had been a Super Computer Conference at the same time and that the Simpsonwood center was the only place available in Atlanta at such short notice. He might also have noted the closeted location had “created a spirit that (the meeting) benefited from”. But that would have robbed Kennedy of his sensationalist opening, I guess.
The conspiracy mongering didn’t stop there. At the end of Kennedy’s first paragraph is:
RFK: All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly “embargoed.” There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.
SM: Sounds shady, right? Wrong. Again, if you read the transcript you’ll find the participants were actually told: “…consider it embargoed and protected until it is made public on June 21 and 22 at the ACIP. There is a plan to do that.” (Page 256) Completely different: it was only embargoed until official release later that same month. Kennedy seems intellectually dishonest in taking these non-issues and writing them up to make it sound as though there is something fishy going on.
Kennedy’s article continues in this same vein. Participants are misquoted, and statements taken out of context. Kennedy argues that the purpose of this “secret” meeting was part of a conspiracy to acknowledge but cover up what Kennedy asserts is the relationship between vaccination and autism, a fact allegedly known to the conference participants.
Kennedy argues that there is a direct link between the mercury compound thiomersal (an organomercury compound that was a well-established antifungal and antiseptic agent) and autism. In 1999, the Centers for Disease Control and the American Academy of Pediatrics requested that vaccine manufacturers remove thiomersal from vaccines as a precautionary measure. This was rapidly accomplished in both the U.S. and the European Union. Since then, extensive studies in Denmark and Canada have shown that rates of autism continued to rise, even after thiomersal was removed from vaccines.
We should emphasize that the claim of a link between vaccines and autism was fostered by a 1998 article in The Lancet written by Andrew Wakefield (Fig. III.2) and twelve co-authors. That paper alleged that in a study of 12 children with autism or related disorders, the authors had detected a link between the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine and the onset of behavioral symptoms. The authors claimed to have identified a new form of inflammatory bowel disease that they termed “autistic enterocolitis.” Wakefield argued that the MMR vaccine “causes persistent measles infection in the gut; this results in a distinctive ‘enterocolitis,’ which in turn produces a ‘leaky bowel’ which allows toxic ‘opioid’ peptides … to enter the blood stream; passing to the brain, these peptides cause autism.”
Figure III.2: Former British physician and medical fraud Andrew Wakefield.
An additional claim was that in all 12 children in the study, the symptoms of autism manifested themselves within one month of receiving the MMR vaccine. In fact, Wakefield and others claimed that some otherwise normal young children would begin to exhibit signs of abnormal behavioral symptoms almost immediately following treatment with the MMR vaccine. This paper set off a world-wide effort to determine whether there was a causal relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism. By now, there are many studies, involving millions of children, that show no connection between vaccines and autism. This is one of the most carefully studied (and refuted) hypotheses in modern medicine.
It is now known that the Wakefield study was not just wrong in its conclusions, but in fact was fraudulent. BBC investigative journalist Brian Deer published an award-winning study (see Fig. III.3) that showed the following:
- Prior to publication of his Lancet paper, Wakefield had applied for a patent for a “single-jab measles vaccine” (in their paper, Wakefield’s group alleged that use of a single vaccine to simultaneously treat all three diseases (MMR) was likely the cause of the ‘developmental regression’ claimed in their study).
- A colleague of Wakefield’s had found no measles virus in the children in Wakefield’s study (the authors of the original study claimed that measles virus was found in some of their patients).
- Some of the patients in the Wakefield study were recruited by a UK lawyer who was preparing a lawsuit against MMR manufacturers. In addition, it was alleged that Wakefield had failed to disclose that he himself had been paid over £400,000 by the lawyers responsible for the MMR lawsuit.
Figure III.3: Various articles by journalist Brian Deer in the Sunday Times that exposed Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent articles that claimed a connection between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination shots and the onset of autism in children.
After publication of these allegations, 10 of Wakefield’s 12 co-authors published a retraction of their conclusions in The Lancet article. Here is their statement: “We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient.” Two years later, Deer released records showing that Wakefield had received £435,643 in undisclosed payments from the Legal Services Commission for the purpose of building a case against the MMR vaccine. Up to this point, Wakefield had denied all of Deer’s accusations. But once the records of payment were released, Wakefield dropped his libel suits and was ordered to pay all defendants’ costs.
Between July 2007 and May 2008, the UK General Medical Council held hearings to determine possible action against Dr. Wakefield. In Jan. 2010, the Council issued their findings. The GMC found that Wakefield had:
• Improperly obtained blood for research purposes from normal children attending his son’s birthday party, paid them £5 for their discomfort, and later joked during a lecture about having done this.
• Subjected autistic children to colonoscopy, lumbar punctures, and other tests without approval from a research review board.
• Failed to disclose that he had filed a patent for a vaccine to compete with the MMR.
• Started a child on an experimental product called Transfer Factor, which he planned to market.
The GMC ruled that Wakefield had “failed in his duties as a responsible consultant,“ “acted against the interests of his patients,” and acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in his research. They recommended that Wakefield be struck off the UK medical register. This ended Wakefield’s career as a doctor.
In 2009, Brian Deer published the results of a new study. In this case, Deer reviewed the histories of all twelve patients who had been included in the study published by Wakefield and collaborators. As described by Wakefield, the results had been quite dramatic. All twelve youth were claimed to have shown normal progress until they received the MMR vaccine. Then, within a 14-day period, all children had shown dramatic effects of regression; in some cases, the onset of symptoms appeared immediately following the MMR shot.
Deer published a table contrasting the original hospital data on the children with the information published in the Wakefield paper.
- Of the nine children described as having regressive autism, three did not have any diagnosis of autism, and only one of the nine was diagnosed with regressive autism.
- The Wakefield paper claimed that all twelve children were “previously normal;” however, five of those children had documented developmental concerns that pre-dated the MMR shots.
- Wakefield claimed that in several instances, behavioral symptoms manifested themselves within days of vaccination; whereas hospital records showed that in some cases the symptoms appeared months following vaccination.
- In nine cases, colonic histopathy results that showed no fluctuations in inflammatory cell populations had been changed to indicate “non-specific colitis.”
- Patients were recruited through anti-MMR campaigners, and the study was commissioned and funded for the purposes of subsequent litigation.
In Feb. 2010, The Lancet formally retracted Wakefield’s 1998 paper, issuing the following retraction statement: “Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.”
In January 2011, Salon retracted Kennedy’s article Deadly Immunity; its editor-in-chief Kerry Lauerman stated that: “In the days after running ‘Deadly Immunity,’ we amended the story with five corrections (which can still be found logged here) that went far in undermining Kennedy’s exposé. At the time, we felt that correcting the piece — and keeping it on the site, in the spirit of transparency — was the best way to operate. But subsequent critics, including most recently, Seth Mnookin in his book ‘The Panic Virus,’ further eroded any faith we had in the story’s value. We’ve grown to believe the best reader service is to delete the piece entirely.” In 2023, Salon editor Joan Walsh wrote that publishing this article was the worst mistake of her career. We should note that in a recent interview with Nick Gillespie and Zach Weissmueller from Reason magazine, Kennedy claimed that he had never been shown “even one mistake” in that article. This is false: before retracting the article, Salon had already published five ‘corrections’ to false or misleading statements in that article. And in his book The Panic Virus, Seth Mnookin listed a number of false statements in Deadly Immunity. Like all deniers, Kennedy continues to make false statements even after those statements have been shown publicly to be false. Kennedy seems incapable of absorbing criticism of his assertions.
Furthermore, the debunking of Wakefield’s claims about a link between vaccines and autism did not deter Robert Kennedy. He followed up Deadly Immunity with a Huffington Post article called Attack On Mothers. In this (now retracted) article he continued his assertions that thiomersal in vaccines caused autism in otherwise healthy children. Kennedy claims there are “hundreds of research studies from dozens of countries showing the undeniable connection between mercury and Thimerosal and a wide range of neurological illnesses.”
Kennedy further asserts that “deliberately deceptive and fatally flawed studies were authored by vaccine industry consultants and paid for by Thimerosal producers and published largely in compromised journals that neglected to disclose the myriad conflicts of their authors in violation of standard peer-review ethics.”
Kennedy’s claims about thiomersal and autism contradict everything we know from comprehensive clinical studies of vaccination and autism. After removal of thiomersal from vaccines, cases of autism continued to rise. The Institute of Medicine, the World Health Organization, the CDC and the FDA all reject any causal link between thiomersal and the incidence of autism. Nevertheless, it continues to be an article of faith among many anti-vaxxer groups that vaccination, particularly the multiple-disease MMR vaccine, is a cause of autism, even though thiomersal is not present in the one-jab version of the MMR vaccine.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. believes that a vast conspiracy exists to deny the fact that vaccines are extremely dangerous, and are responsible for a number of different ailments, including autism. He believes that members of this conspiracy include government health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, researchers who develop vaccines or study their effects, the major pharmaceutical companies, and members of the media who cover health issues. Because he believes in this (exceptionally unlikely) conspiracy, Kennedy is free to disregard all scientific evidence showing that vaccines are safe and effective. He is also free to accept the claims of those who make unsupported allegations about the harms of vaccines. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. shares with other conspiracy believers what we have characterized in an earlier post as “a nearly iron-clad, ‘catch-22’, defense mechanism… scientists who endeavor to disprove their claims, or to address the flaws or gaps the conspiracy believers highlight in the consensus view, are immediately judged to be part of the (ever-growing) conspiracy and therefore not to be trusted.”
These unsupported allegations against vaccines are evident in Kennedy’s actions in his organization, the Children’s Health Defense. As we will see, it is also prominent in Kennedy’s book on Dr. Anthony Fauci, an American physician-scientist who served as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022.
IV. Children’s Health Defense:
In 2011, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. founded an organization called the World Mercury Project. Its name has subsequently been changed to Children’s Health Defense. A central focus of that organization is its claim that exposure to chemicals and radiation has caused a large number of American youth to suffer from a variety of medical conditions. In our posts on Toxic Product Defenders, we have pointed out that there is, indeed, epidemiological evidence of serious health risks from some modern chemicals, but Kennedy does not rely on actual scientific evidence. The conditions Children’s Health Defense highlights include autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, allergies, cancer and autoimmune diseases. The group has campaigned against substances that they claim are causing these diseases. They include pesticides and aluminum; but they also include fluoridation of drinking water, vaccines and wireless communications (most recently 5G technology). In their campaign against vaccines and 5G wireless, the Children’s Health Defense has made many baseless claims and filed a number of lawsuits about the purported harms arising from these technologies.
The Children’s Health Defense is currently leading efforts to promote vaccine hesitancy among the public. In this, they are advancing arguments that are rejected by an overwhelming majority of the scientific community. In our blog post on Vaccinations, we point out that vaccination is one of the most successful medical treatments of all time. Through vaccination, we wiped out the deadly disease smallpox around the world. We have nearly eradicated polio as well. Vaccines have saved hundreds of millions of lives around the world in the past century. In the U.S., childhood vaccination against measles-mumps-rubella has eliminated measles as an endemic disease. Currently, measles epidemics in the U.S. are begun when the measles virus is introduced from abroad and then spreads through the population. However, in order to prevent measles from spreading through the population in an epidemic, roughly 95% of the population needs to have immunity, either from contracting measles or from vaccination. The fraction of the population F that needs to have immunity in order to prevent an epidemic is given by the equation
F = 1/R0 – 1. (1)
The quantity R0 is the average number of persons infected by a single carrier in an unvaccinated population. Figure IV.1 shows the quantity R0 and F for various communicable diseases.
Figure IV.1: The basic reproduction number R0 and the herd immunity threshold F in percent for various communicable diseases. Note that for a typical measles epidemic, F is above 90% (note: the entry for SARS-CoV-2 is for the initial alpha variant of that virus; for the Delta variant F is closer to 90%).
Measles is one of the most infectious diseases, with a reproduction number of about 15. This means that unless about 95% of the population is vaccinated, a measles epidemic could occur whenever a case of measles is introduced into a community. The Children’s Health Defense is urging citizens to avoid or delay vaccination for their children, on the false grounds that the common MMR vaccine (measles-mumps-rubella) has serious negative effects. While the COVID virus had the most serious risks for the elderly, measles is most dangerous for young children. If children are not vaccinated, they risk coming down with measles, or with infecting other children who are too young to receive the MMR vaccine. In recent measles outbreaks in developed countries, measles was fatal to about 0.1% of people who caught it (the most common scenario was that children with measles contract pneumonia, which can be fatal).
As a direct result of the vaccine hesitancy pushed by groups like Children’s Health Defense, it is quite probable that measles epidemics will once again break out with regularity across the U.S. The vast majority of child deaths resulting from such outbreaks could have been prevented if a sufficient fraction of children (F, as shown in Fig. IV.1) are vaccinated against these diseases. For example, in April 2019 the Children’s Health Defense filed a lawsuit against the New York City Dept. of Health, protesting the imposition of mandatory MMR vaccinations as a result of a measles epidemic in the Williamsburg area of New York City. Kennedy’s organization argued that the imposition of mandatory vaccination was unnecessary for what they termed was a “garden-variety annual measles outbreak.” However, Judge Lawrence Knipel responded that the plaintiffs had based their case on “unsupported, bald-faced opinion.” He continued, “The unvarnished truth is that these diagnoses represent the most significant spike in incidences of measles in the United States in many years and that the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is at its epicenter.”
Unfortunately, the anti-vaxx movement, with Kennedy, Jr. as a prominent leader, has taken root worldwide and lowered child vaccination rates. UNICEF reports that in 2020, 23 million children worldwide missed out on all basic childhood vaccines, an increase by 3.7 million over the preceding year. In the Phillipines, a country that had all but eliminated measles fifteen years earlier, reduced vaccination rates led to a 2019 measles outbreak that led to nearly 48,000 infections, causing 632 deaths. In Samoa, where Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had interacted personally with the Prime Minister to advise against use of the MMR vaccine, the 2019 measles outbreak infected 8% of the country’s children under 15 years of age, and 87% of the 87 deaths caused by measles occurred among children under the age of 5. These, too, we suppose were identified by the Children’s Health Defense group as “garden-variety annual measles outbreaks.” Unfortunately, misinformation kills. In December 2019, the Samoan government changed its policy by introducing a new law requiring all children to be fully immunized before starting primary school.
The Children’s Health Defense has also filed a number of lawsuits against the proprietors of online sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Politifact. They claim that these organizations have shut down messages from Children’s Health Defense, and that such actions represent illegal censorship of fact and violations of freedom of speech. These cases are interesting and ongoing – a lawsuit filed in Jan. 2023 is currently pending that names Reuters, AP, the BBC and the Washington Post, claiming that these organizations have conspired to keep anti-vaxxer statements out of the public media. This suit is currently pending before Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas – remember that Judge Kacsmaryk was the person who suspended the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. Conservative groups have filed a large number of suits in the Amarillo, Texas Division of the Eastern Circuit, where Judge Kacsmaryk is the only federal judge.
To the best of our knowledge, nearly all of the Children’s Health Defense lawsuits have so far failed. However, that has not stopped Robert Kennedy, Jr. from making progressively more outrageous statements regarding vaccines and vaccine mandates. In January 2022, Kennedy gave a speech where he claimed vaccine and mask mandates in the U.S. were more strict than the conditions Jews faced in Nazi Germany. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did.” He neglected to mention that the attic did not save Anne Frank. At this time, the CDC reported that unvaccinated adults were 13 times more likely to test positive for COVID-19 than adults who were fully vaccinated and boosted, and had 68 times the risk of dying from COVID-19. Cases of serious illness or medical conditions arising from the mRNA vaccines appear to be rare and minor – although you would never know this from listening to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
V: RFK’s Book The Real Anthony Fauci:
A book that provided a factual and thoughtful analysis of public health in America – including the role of government agencies, the pharmaceutical industry, how priorities are set for various diseases and health challenges, and the funding of health care – would be a valuable resource for a public conversation on medicine in this country. The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Skyhorse Publishing, 2021) is not such a book. In this book, Robert Kennedy launches a vicious attack on American health care, and in particular on Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates. This book contains an astonishing collection of half-truths, downright lies, and conspiracy theories. We will spend some time reviewing this book as it provides a detailed account of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s history of science denial and conspiracy theorizing.
Figure V.1: Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Skyhorse Publishing, 2021).
The COVID-19 Pandemic:
The beginning sections of The Real Anthony Fauci describe the COVID-19 pandemic. Kennedy argues that the appropriate response to this virus would be not to spend resources on the development and rollout of a vaccine against the virus, but to rely more on improving nutrition for Americans, boosting their immune systems, and using medicines that had been “re-purposed” from their original uses. According to Kennedy, “medicines were available against COVID – inexpensive, safe medicines – that would have prevented hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and saved as many lives if only we’d used them in this country.” And what were those medicines? Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and ivermectin.
How would one go about assessing whether HCQ and/or ivermectin were effective against the SARS Cov-2 virus? It seems fairly obvious – one would go to a health portal such as the FDA Website or other agency Websites, and inquire whether hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin were effective against COVID. For HCQ, a drug that is taken as an anti-malaria agent, one would find the following statement from the National Institute of Medicine, along with links to the largest randomized clinical trials on this drug: “Randomized trials published in high-quality peer-reviewed journals, which provide the most reliable evidence to detect the most plausible small to moderate effects, have shown disappointing results.” Alternatively, one could go to the Website of the British medical journal The Lancet; they have a May 2022 article titled Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19: The Curtains Close on a Comedy of Errors (needless to say, this did not constitute an endorsement of HCQ for COVID). The same issue of The Lancet reported on the largest outpatient therapeutic trial of hydroxychloroquine published to date. That article concluded “Like dozens of smaller trials published before, it failed to demonstrate any benefit to hydroxychloroquine in preventing progression of COVID-19 among outpatients with initially mild COVID-19.”
Figure V.2: Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) sulfate tablets. HCQ is taken as an anti-malaria drug; in randomized clinical trials HCQ showed no effectiveness in treating mild cases of COVID-19.
As for ivermectin, a drug commonly used to treat intestinal parasitic worms, the Mayo Clinic states “Famotidine (the name of a medicine containing ivermectin) isn’t thought to be beneficial in treating COVID-19. The drug ivermectin … isn’t a drug used to treat viruses. The FDA hasn’t approved of this drug to treat or prevent COVID-19.” And an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association reports on “A Cochrane meta-analysis of 11 eligible trials examining the efficacy of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 published through April 2022 concluded that ivermectin has no beneficial effect for people with COVID-19. Since May 2022, an additional 3 large randomized clinical trials including several thousand participants have been published, each reaching a similar conclusion.”
Figure V.3: Ivermectin tablets, used to treat cases of intestinal parasitic worms. Randomized clinical trials have found no effectiveness in ivermectin for treating mild cases of COVID-19.
Well, this is all quite conclusive. Although both of these chemicals seemed to show some efficacy against the SARS-CoV-2 virus in experiments using Petri dishes, neither HCQ nor ivermectin proved to be effective in treating COVID-19 in trials involving humans. All Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had to do was consult the most authoritative clinical trials on these two re-purposed drugs (HCQ is primarily an anti-malarial drug, and ivermectin is a medicine used to treat parasitic worms), and it would be crystal clear that neither of these drugs is at all effective in treating COVID-19. If the government had followed Kennedy, Jr.’s advice to rely on these drugs as preventatives or “cures” instead of investing in the rapid development of effective COVID vaccines, the pandemic would have claimed even more U.S. lives than its already deadly toll. Instead, RFK insists that both HCQ and ivermectin are extremely effective against the pandemic virus. He reaches these conclusions by rejecting strong evidence from randomized clinical trials, and instead relies on the assertions of fringe doctors who are pushing both a radical medical agenda, and also strongly politicized positions.
Kennedy treats these as “heroic doctors;” and he clearly accepts their arguments at the same time that he rejects the results of the largest, randomized, controlled clinical trials of the re-purposed medicines that they advocate for treating COVID. Let’s review the careers of some of the doctors whose claims are amplified by Kennedy.
Judy Mikovits:
One of Kennedy’s ‘experts’ is Dr. Judy Mikovits (Fig. V.4). In an earlier blog post we discussed Dr. Mikovits and her “theories.” Dr. Mikovits endorses a theory that vaccines have been contaminated with retroviruses from mice (the retroviruses supposedly arrived there because some vaccine testing has been done on mice). She claims that these mouse retroviruses are infecting Americans who are vaccinated, as well as through transfusions (as the retroviruses have also invaded our national blood supply). The U.S. medical community took Mikovits’ theories quite seriously – if they were correct, we would need major efforts to remove these retroviruses from our blood supply. They subjected Mikovits’ claims to a series of controlled experiments to develop tests for these viruses. Mikovits participated in some of those experiments. Not only did Mikovits’ theories fail the tests, but she demonstrated her incompetence as an experimental scientist. Judy Mikovits published her claims in a book called Plague of Corruption, and also in a video called Plandemic. Robert F. Kennedy provided a foreword for the book Plague of Corruption. Many reputable social media sites, including Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo, have banned Dr. Mikovits’ video Plandemic. Her scientific claims are rather easily shown to be false, and she supplements these with a web of conspiracy theories. No one should take Mikovits’ allegations seriously.
Figure V.4: Dr. Judy Mikovits is a conspiracy theorist regarding mouse retroviruses that she claims have contaminated vaccines and the U.S. blood supply.
Dr. Peter McCullough:
Another physician quoted repeatedly by Robert Kennedy in The Real Anthony Fauci is Dr. Peter McCullough, who is Vice Chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center and Senior Professor of Internal Medicine at the Texas A&M Health Sciences Center. McCullough is clearly a well-known physician, but he is also the proponent of highly controversial views about the COVID-19 pandemic and the new vaccines. Together with Harvey Risch, McCullough carried out tests using HCQ to treat COVID patients. They published a paper in the American Journal of Medicine in Jan. 2021. Their report called for a protocol of medications [to treat COVID] including zinc lozenges, hydroxychloroquine, aspirin and antibiotics. The editors of that journal have subsequently commented about this work: “What seemed reasonable last summer based on laboratory experiments has subsequently been shown to be untrue.”
Figure V.5: Dr. Peter McCullough, who touts ineffective treatments for COVID-19, and who claims that vaccines released by Pfizer and Moderna will produce catastrophic side effects.
But that has not stopped McCullough from making extremely strong statements about the pandemic, treatment for COVID, and the vaccines. In November 2020, Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, stated that “The clear consensus of the medical and scientific community, based on overwhelming evidence” is that HCQ is ineffective as a treatment for COVID-19. McCullough also asserts that ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID cases. McCullough claims that there is a conspiracy to prevent the use of ivermectin to treat COVID patients; he says, “To this day, hospitals across the United States flat-out refuse to use ivermectin … There’s a mass mentality of almost intentionally harming patients. There’s absolutely no grounds for doctors and administrators … to deny patients ivermectin. There is a global collusion, specifically in U.S. hospitals, to cause as much harm and death as conceivable.”
So there’s your conspiracy theory: American hospitals are “collu[ding] to cause as much harm and death as conceivable.” By the way, one part of Kennedy’s thesis is that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates are motivated by greed (the argument is that they make a fortune from pushing vaccines), and that they are also obsessed with a desire to control the population. These paranoid assertions are repeated ad nauseam in The Real Anthony Fauci. Now what about ivermectin – what is the evidence that it is effective in treating COVID? McCullough points to various colleagues who used it and report stunning success. But this is advocacy based on “Medicine by testimonial;” a doctor uses a drug and notes that people recover afterwards. The scientific way to answer questions about efficacy of a drug is through a large-sample randomized controlled test. Groups of patients are given the drug in question, while other “control” groups with as similar as possible characteristics are given a placebo, in double-blinded tests so that neither the experimenters nor the volunteer patients know beforehand which individuals received the medication. Such trials are able to distinguish between actual efficacy, and the hunch or whim of individual physicians or happenstance coincidences in small, poorly controlled tests.
Early tests of ivermectin were complicated by the presence of trials that claimed to include a large number of patients. Some of those trials, which seemed to show tremendous improvement using ivermectin, have now been retracted and are thought to be fraudulent. When those trials are removed, meta-studies of several different experiments now show that ivermectin has no benefit in treating COVID. For example, a recent meta-study of randomized trials of ivermectin by Roman et al. concludes “Ivermectin did not reduce all-cause mortality, length of stay or viral clearance vs. controls in COVID-19 patients with mostly mild disease. Ivermectin is not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients.” So, Dr. McCullough appears to be a respected physician, but a lousy scientist. He is willing to make exceptionally strong statements based on hunches from his colleagues. Furthermore, he accuses the medical establishment of conspiracies to prevent the use of these meds.
But what about the mRNA vaccines against COVID? McCullough claims that the dramatic reduction that we have seen in COVID hospitalizations and deaths (at least before the spread of the newer Delta variant) was due, not to the vaccines, but (immodestly) to his paper recommending at-home treatment of COVID. McCullough claims that the use of his at-home recommendations “Basically crushed the U.S. curve. We were on schedule to have 1.7 to 2.1 million fatalities in the United States, as estimated by the CDC and others. We cut it off at about 600,000 … We have saved millions of lives, spared millions and millions of hospitalizations.”
This is a strange statement, considering that the drop in cases and deaths occurred directly when the new vaccines were being administered to millions of Americans, and it occurred most prominently at first among the senior citizens who were first to receive the vaccines. And McCullough claims that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, that use mRNA techniques, are not only not helpful but are actually extremely dangerous. He claims that the medical establishment is deliberately ignoring his “at-home” treatment regimen as a means of “Promoting fear, suffering, hospitalization and death.” And yet, at the same time, he claims that his ignored ”at-home” treatments have halted the spread of the virus.
McCullough claims that there are overwhelming statistics that show dangerous side effects and even death from the new vaccines. (An Israeli analysis of a large sample of vaccine recipients and unvaccinated individuals shows that the risk of dangerous side-effects is much greater from COVID infection than from the vaccine itself.) Furthermore, he claims that the FDA and CDC are providing “nothing with respect to safety of individuals.” He claims that in some individuals, the “pathogenic” spike protein will “ravage the body” wherever that protein is produced. McCullough predicts a future epidemic of “local brain injury … myocarditis and cardiac injury … liver injury … lung injury … and kidney injury” caused by the mRNA vaccines. The COVID vaccination campaign, he claims “Will go down in history as the biggest medical biological product safety catastrophe in human history, by far. There’s nothing close.” In other words, he is predicting that the body’s immune system will often be unsuccessful in producing antibodies that attach to and kill the spike proteins. If this were true, the vaccines would also be of limited efficacy in preventing serious COVID infections, but the statistics of ongoing hospitalizations and deaths provide compelling evidence that the vaccine efficacy is very high. Furthermore, at the present time there are no indications that McCullough’s dire predictions of adverse effects of the mRNA vaccines are true.
Scientists and government agencies report that most side effects of the vaccines are small and/or transient. Figure V.6 from the Sage Institute, Nov. 2021, compares different vascular side effects from the COVID mRNA vaccines against the same side effects for people who were infected with the SARS CoV-2 virus. Not only are the vaccine side effects rare, they are much less frequent than for people with COVID-19. Cases of myocarditis and pericarditis among male youths are more than 30 times more likely for COVID sufferers than for those who received two doses of the mRNA vaccines; and blood clots were 200 times more likely for those contracting COVID than for those who received an adenovirus-vector vaccine.
Figure V.6: Vascular side effects of mRNA vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, compared with vascular effects from contracting COVID-19. Cases of myocarditis are more than 30 times more likely from COVID than from the vaccine, while blood clots are 200 times more likely from COVID than from the vaccine. From Nov. 2021.
Figure V.7: A study of patients who suffered a stroke within 28 days of their second mRNA vaccine shot. Of nearly 4 million who received two doses of the vaccine, there were 2104 strokes registered. This is essentially equal to the number of strokes (2207) expected without vaccination in the general population, among that large a sample with the same age distribution.
The American Heart Association carried out a study of strokes suffered by people within 28 days of receiving their second mRNA vaccine shot. The results are shown in Fig. V.7. Nearly 4 million people in this study received two doses of the mRNA vaccine. The number who experienced a stroke within 28 days of their second vaccine shot was 2,104 (or 0.05%) while the expected number from the general population was 2,207. Thus, there was no increased incidence of stroke following the vaccines. The results shown in Figs. V.6 and V.7 are completely at odds with McCullough’s prediction of an “epidemic” of brain injury and cardiac injury from the mRNA vaccines. They also completely contradict Robert Kennedy’s assertions that vaccines do far more harm than good, and that the mRNA vaccines were rushed onto the market before adequate testing had been done.
Pierre Kory:
Dr. Pierre Kory (Fig. V.8) is an American physician who gained fame as he advocated for off-label use of various drugs for treatment of COVID-19. Until May 2020, Kory served as the service chief for critical care at the University of Wisconsin Health University Hospital. Kory was the president and co-founder of a group called the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). Kory appeared on two occasions in 2020 at Congressional hearings on the pandemic. At the second of these he stated under oath that ivermectin was a “wonder drug,” and that it showed “miraculous effectiveness” against COVID. Kory was also a proponent of using intravenous injections of vitamin C against COVID – this has been a staple of treatment by ‘holistic’ physicians for any number of diseases.
Figure V.8: Dr. Pierre Kory. Co-founder of the group Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, he testified in a Congressional hearing that ivermectin was a “wonder drug” that showed “miraculous effectiveness” in treating COVID-19.
Now, since the best randomized clinical trials show that ivermectin has essentially zero effect in treating or preventing COVID infections, it would seem as though Kory would re-evaluate his position in this matter. Not so – Kory claimed that “the Gods of Science” were suppressing information that proved the efficacy of ivermectin and other re-purposed drugs. Kory claimed that government and research scientists were involved in a conspiracy to prevent the public from realizing the great benefits of ivermectin. Presumably, the purpose of this conspiracy was to control the dialogue regarding the pandemic, and also to maintain profits for people like Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates from the production of COVID vaccines. By the way, it should be noted that Kory has profited from the sale of his own off-label drugs for treating COVID. In 2022, Kory “opened a private telehealth fee-based service to evaluate and treat patients with acute COVID, long haul COVID, and post-vaccination syndromes.” Patients were charged fees for medical consultation, as well as for the ivermectin and other drugs that were “prescribed” for COVID. In fact, a paper on ivermectin and COVID by Kory was flagged because Kory failed to disclose his financial interest in sales of the drug that was being researched. The American Journal of Therapeutics issued an “expression of concern” over a review paper on ivermectin; the journal stated that “there were suspicions about the integrity of the underlying data on which the paper depended.” In June 2022, Dr. Kory was notified that the American Board of Internal Medicine might revoke his board certification because of the misinformation he was spreading. At this point he founded an “advanced COVID-19 care center;” that center charged between $1,250 and $1,650 for a series of three appointments. In November 2022, the FLCCC and Kory began marketing the “cocktail” of drugs they were prescribing for COVID for other viruses, the flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). This “cocktail” had as little evidence for effectiveness against these other diseases as it had for COVID. This cocktail was marketed for approximately $500.
Dr. Kory has since become more and more strident in his criticisms of vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories regarding the use of re-purposed drugs such as ivermectin and HCQ for COVID treatment. Here are a couple of Kory’s Tweets from December 2022. The first references Dr. Peter Hotez, one of the world’s leading authorities on vaccines. “[Dr Peter] Hotez and the WHO are doubling down, trying to bury the fact that, from the smallpox vaccine myth to the polio vaccine myth to now, it is actually “pro-vaccine activism” that is the major killing force globally. Immense data supports my conclusion.” And a second Tweet: “If I had young children today, not one would get even a single childhood vaccine. Thank you Twitter for allowing me to publicly state my data-driven & highly-researched interpretation of vaccine (non) science.”
So these are the “scientific heroes” whose theories and critiques Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. relies upon. They have two things in common. First, they endorse unproven medical regimens for the treatment of the coronavirus, while scorning the use of vaccines. It should be noted that even after the COVID vaccine was rolled out, the FLCCC did not mention the vaccine on its Website listing treatments for the pandemic. Second, these doctors were willing to make the most outrageous statements about the efficacy of their drug regimen for the pandemic. At the same time, they made incredibly strong negative comments about vaccines and the doctors researching and advocating for vaccines. They claim, without the slightest evidence to back it up, that instead of curing dread diseases and offering life and hope to millions of citizens around the world, that vaccines kill millions of people. And they all share with Kennedy, Jr. and other conspiracy believers the unfalsifiable conviction that anyone who provides scientific evidence debunking their claims is simply part of the ever-growing conspiracy. People like RFK, Jr. tend to refer to these “heroes” as direct descendants of brave maverick scientists like Galileo. Unfortunately, this analogy is completely false. In order to be lauded as a brave iconoclast, you have to be right and have scientifically compelling evidence to demonstrate that you’re right. Galileo had the evidence of astronomical observations gained with his own invention, the telescope. In this case, Robert Kennedy and his supporters are not only completely wrong, but their advice will lead to thousands and perhaps millions of deaths from those who accept their bogus arguments and refuse to be vaccinated.
Robert Kennedy is still promoting vaccine hesitation and denial. Just last month he held a “Health Policy Roundtable;” the flyer for that event is shown in Figure V.9. The photo shows Kennedy with a group of infamous anti-vaxxers including Shari Tenpenny and Pierre Kory.
Figure V.9: A flyer for a “Health Policy Roundtable” online discussion that was held on June 27, 2023. It included RFK Jr, together with a number of infamous anti-vaccination advocates, including Shari Tenpenny and Pierre Kory.
Kennedy and his followers claim that COVID vaccines are relatively worthless, because one can still catch the virus even after vaccination. However, they fail to acknowledge that the vaccines are extremely effective in preventing hospitalization or death for those who are vaccinated. Figure V.10 shows the rate of hospitalizations from COVID in August 2021, roughly eight months after the release of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines. Figure V.11 shows the rate of deaths from COVID, comparing vaccinated vs. unvaccinated patients. There was more than a factor of 10 difference between the rates of unvaccinated deaths vs. vaccinated. Figure V.12 is a study of excess deaths during the pandemic, sorted by their political party (only registered voters in Ohio and Florida were included in this study). Graph (A) is taken before the pandemic; graph (B) is during the pandemic but before COVID vaccines were available; and graph (C) is for May 2021, when vaccines were available to all voters. Graph (C) shows a significantly larger number of excess deaths for Republican voters than for Democratic, and the gap is largest in counties with the lowest percentages of vaccinated voters. Another way to demonstrate the much higher rate of COVID deaths among the unvaccinated is to note that Republicans were much less likely than Democrats to be vaccinated. Fig. V.13 shows the extraordinary positive correlation between the fraction of votes for Trump in a given county, and COVID death rates in that same county. Note that if Robert Kennedy is correct that vaccines kill more people than they heal, the curve should be reversed – Kennedy would predict that Republicans, with many fewer vaccinated voters, should have fewer excess deaths than Democrats.
Figure V.10: American hospitalizations from COVID from Feb. 2021 (when the mRNA vaccines became publicly available) to Aug. 2021, per 100,000 populations, sorted by vaccinated vs. unvaccinated patients. Nearly 20 times as many hospitalized patients were unvaccinated as those who were vaccinated.
Figure V.11: The rate of COVID deaths per 100,000 people per week, from May through October 2021. The death rate for unvaccinated people is more than a factor of 10 larger than for vaccinated individuals.
Figure V.12: Excess deaths for registered voters in Ohio and Florida (A) before COVID-19, (B) during COVID-19 but before vaccines were available; (C) In May 2021, when vaccines were available to all of voting age. In May 2021, the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than Democratic voters. The gap in excess death rates was larger in counties with lower vaccination rates.
Figure V.13: COVID deaths per 100 K residents from July 1, 2021 to Sept. 4, 2021. The graph shows an extraordinary positive correlation between the fraction of votes for Trump in a given county in 2020, and deaths from COVID-19 in that county
Since we know that HCQ and ivermectin are ineffective for COVID treatment, it follows that the observed drop in the death rate is due to the vaccines (the endorsement by some of the above of HCQ and ivermectin occurred right at the same time as the rollout of the vaccines). Next, it should be obvious that the anti-vaxxers are willing to make apocalyptic statements based on flimsy evidence. There have been some short-term negative effects from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, as shown in Figs. V.6 and V.7, but for the most part these are no larger than the incidence of these effects in the general unvaccinated population. Furthermore, these side effects are much smaller for vaccinated people than for unvaccinated individuals who contract COVID-19.
It appears that the mRNA vaccines are generally very safe and effective. A research group reviewed a number of studies of rare adverse events reported with the Pfizer mRNA vaccines. The types of events are summarized in Figure V.14. They include cardiovascular events, neurological events, herpetic events, thrombotic events, and deaths. The only events that seemed larger than for the general public were myocarditis; and as shown in Fig. V.6, the occurrence of myocarditis was far lower among vaccinated youths than was myocarditis following infection by COVID. Strangely enough, Robert Kennedy, Jr. provides almost no details on the health outcomes from the mRNA vaccines. He spends enormous time trying to prove that vaccines are ineffective and dangerous, and he criticizes the mRNA COVID vaccines as being unproven and insufficiently tested. However, his book contains almost no details regarding the effectiveness and safety of these new vaccines. The new vaccines prevent hospitalizations and deaths, and have very few adverse side effects, as shown dramatically in Figs. V.6, V.7, V.10, V.11 and V.14.
Figure V.14: Types of rare adverse effects from the Pfizer mRNA vaccine, studied by a research group. These included cardiovascular events, neurological events, thrombotic events, herpetic events and deaths. Of all of these, the only increased risk seemed to be from myocarditis. Otherwise, there were little negative effects from mRNA vaccines.
Unfortunately, the question of the appropriate U.S. response to COVID-19 became strongly politicized. After the virus first appeared in the U.S. at the beginning of 2020 (or, as we now know, slightly earlier than that), Donald Trump insisted that his administration had “shut down” the virus by limiting foreign flights into the U.S. Since Trump claimed that there was almost zero risk from COVID, his supporters refused to wear masks or to obey social distancing in order to slow the spread of the pandemic. And once the new mRNA vaccines were provided at the beginning of 2021, many Trump supporters refused to be vaccinated. The net result was that, after adoption of the vaccines by many Americans, most of the deaths from COVID were suffered by the unvaccinated. Although Robert Kennedy claims that his “hero scientists,” mavericks who pushed worthless remedies and denigrated the COVID vaccines, saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, the truth is exactly the reverse – those who listened to Kennedy and the maverick doctors died at a much higher rate than those who accepted the vaccine.
A curious feature of The Real Anthony Fauci is that Kennedy’s book almost never mentions Donald Trump, despite the fact that a major fraction of the book deals with the response to COVID-19. Although many analysts of U.S. COVID policy conclude that Donald Trump’s actions were a major factor in our high COVID death toll, Kennedy never alludes to Trump’s contribution to the death toll in America. In fact, at one point Kennedy muses over the fact that both the U.S. and Brazil suffered abnormally high fatalities from COVID – but he never mentions “Trump” or “Bolsonaro;” it stands to reason that both of these leaders– outspoken critics of the dangers of COVID and people who pushed HCQ and ivermectin as COVID “cures,” and who were scornful of the need for vaccination against the disease– were responsible for a large number of unnecessary COVID deaths in both countries. Fig. V.13 shows dramatically how Trump voters died at much higher rates from COVID.
HIV-AIDS Denial:
Nearly half of The Real Anthony Fauci is devoted to HIV-AIDS denial.
It is important to have some historical context regarding health crises such as AIDS or the COVID pandemic. Both of these represent situations where a new disease suddenly appears, prompting feverish attempts to understand and treat it. For example, in autoimmune diseases a patient’s immune system mistakes a healthy part of the body for a foreign invader, and targets and attacks that part of the body. AIDS, an acronym for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, was a disease that was first identified in 1981. It is now known that AIDS is caused by infection with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus. However, at the time it was discovered, the cause of AIDS was not known and the symptoms were both puzzling and frightening.
As scientists struggled to make sense of the growing AIDS epidemic, a number of different hypotheses were tried out. Since the pattern of AIDS was different in Africa from that in the U.S. (many more women were becoming infected in Africa, and the early AIDS epidemic in the States was strongly concentrated in gay populations), there were those who postulated that AIDS in Africa might be a completely different disease than in the Western world. There was also much early controversy over whether AIDS could be spread through vaginal sex (we now know that it can). Kennedy presents all of the early AIDS controversies in great detail. He strongly identifies with those who deny the link between HIV and AIDS. He also sympathizes with those who oppose using Zidovudine (also known as AZT), along with other antiretroviral drugs, to treat HIV. Furthermore, he spends an enormous amount of time deriding Anthony Fauci’s pioneering (but unsuccessful) efforts to develop an AIDS vaccine. And he claims that both Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates were so motivated by an urge to control the public and to profit from the situation, that they were willing to pursue policies that directly resulted in massive numbers of deaths, particularly in Third World countries.
Peter Duesberg, HIV-AIDS Denialist:
In the section of Robert Kennedy’s book that pushes HIV-AIDS denial, the scientific “hero” is Dr. Peter Duesberg. Duesberg was a noted oncologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Duesberg had received tenure at Berkeley at age 36 and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences at 49. However, in 1987 Duesberg published an article in Cancer Research that claimed that AIDS was not caused by the HIV retrovirus. Instead, Duesberg stated that HIV was simply a “harmless passenger virus,” and that AIDS was caused by continued use of recreational drugs, or perhaps was caused by antiretroviral drugs that were being taken to prevent AIDS from developing. Duesberg’s views aligned with Robert Kennedy’s hunch that vaccines and antiretroviral drugs were causing more harm than help in dealing with viruses. So Kennedy presents Duesberg as a courageous scientist, who bucks the medical consensus that HIV causes AIDS. Duesberg is compared with other brave mavericks who refuse to accept the consensus view of science, such as Galileo. Unfortunately for Duesberg, in order to be a 20th century “Galileo,” you need to be proven right. And in this case, Duesberg was totally wrong about the link between HIV and AIDS – HIV causes AIDS.
Figure V.15: Noted oncologist Peter Duesberg from University of California, Berkeley. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Duesberg is also a noted HIV-AIDS denier.
However, Kennedy’s book portrays Duesberg as a brave scientist locking horns with a scientific community determined to muzzle him. AIDS denier journalist Celia Farber describes Anthony Fauci’s purported role in silencing Duesberg: “The Fauci serf scientists were driven by fear that if they did not denounce Duesberg in sufficiently disgusted tones, and very publicly, they would themselves soon be punished by Fauci, possibly de-funded, or worse.”
Scientists have now shown beyond a doubt that HIV causes AIDS. In summary, the suspected cause (HIV) is strongly associated with the disease (AIDS), the suspected pathogen has been isolated and spread outside the host, and when the suspected pathogen is transmitted to a new uninfected host, that host develops the disease. We will just give a single example that demonstrates this link. Early in the AIDS epidemic, our nation’s blood supply became contaminated with blood containing the HIV virus. Thousands of people who were otherwise healthy contracted AIDS through receiving blood transfusions; one of the most notable was the tennis player Arthur Ashe, who subsequently died from complications of AIDS. Now, however, doctors are able to screen blood donations for the presence of HIV; they do not accept HIV-tainted blood. As a result, there is essentially zero amount of HIV in blood transfusions. And presently, there are almost no recipients of blood transfusions who go on to develop AIDS. This is because AIDS is caused by HIV, which is no longer present in the blood supply.
Peter Duesberg, however, has doubled down on his HIV-AIDS denial. As a result, Duesberg and several other HIV-AIDS denialists were appointed to a South African advisory panel on HIV/AIDS by President Thabo Mbeki, who himself was skeptical that HIV caused AIDS. A direct result of Duesberg’s advice to Mbeki was that for several years beginning in 2000, South Africa instituted policies that denied antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients. The South African government also withdrew support from clinics that used AZT as an antiretroviral to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV (the most common sources of HIV infection are unprotected vaginal and anal sex, transmission from mother to child, and sharing of needles by infected individuals). Mbeki called the antiretroviral drugs “poisons;” he appointed a health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who pushed herbal remedies such as garlic, beetroot and lemon juice to treat AIDS. The South African anti-AIDS health policies shunned antiretroviral drugs in favor of vitamins and “alternative” therapies such as “massage therapy, music therapy, yoga, spiritual care, homeopathy, Indian ayurvedic medicine, and light therapy.” Mbeki’s policies, urged on by HIV-AIDS deniers such as Duesberg and Harvey Bialy, have been blamed for the unnecessary deaths of between 343,000 and 365,000 South Africans. After an individual is infected with the HIV virus, it generally progresses to full-blown AIDS, generally in a period of 8-10 years. Eighteen years after diagnosis with HIV, without antiretroviral therapy 86% of infected individuals have developed AIDS.
But policies such as Mbeki’s are right up Robert Kennedy’s alley, as he relentlessly pushes “alternative” treatments that he claims strengthen the body’s immune system, instead of drugs which he insists are toxic and harmful. For example, Kennedy claims that reduction of“the frightening mortalities” from diseases such as “mumps, diphtheria, smallpox, cholera, rubella, measles, pertussis, puerperal fever, influenza, tuberculosis and scarlet fever” had been achieved by “dramatic improvements in nutrition, sanitation and hygiene,” rather than by medicines such as vaccines. In fact, as we saw in South Africa, it is the “alternative” regimens that turn out to be fatal, rather than the drug regimen that has by now saved millions of HIV-infected people from death by AIDS. Figure V.16 shows the number of global AIDS-related deaths each year (left-hand scale), and the number of people receiving HIV treatment (right-hand scale). Clearly, the number of global AIDS deaths is steadily declining while the number of people taking antiretroviral therapy (ART) has steadily increased. Even more dramatic evidence for the efficacy of antiretroviral therapy is shown in Figure V.17. The red curve shows the number of Americans who are infected with HIV from 1981 – 2008, while the blue curve shows the number of deaths from AIDS each year. There is a dramatic decrease in AIDS deaths beginning in 1995, the year that highly active antiretroviral therapy or HAART was introduced. This is dramatic evidence for the effects of the antiretroviral therapy – and yet one more thing one would never realize after reading Robert Kennedy’s book.
Figure V.16: Number of global deaths from AIDS per year (solid curve, left-hand scale), and the total number of people receiving antiretroviral therapy or ART (bar graphs, right-hand scale). The number of AIDS deaths has steadily declined, while the number of people receiving ART has climbed, and is now about 30 million people.
Figure V.17: Number of deaths from AIDS in thousands (blue, left-hand scale) vs. number of Americans living with HIV (red, right-hand scale). Note the radical decrease in deaths that corresponds with the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy in 1995.
The Website Our World In Data states that “Antiretroviral therapy has saved millions of lives from AIDS and could save more.” The UNAIDS group states that “At the end of 2020, 84% of people living with HIV knew their HIV status, 73% were accessing antiretroviral therapy and 66% were virally suppressed. Among the 37.7 million people living with HIV globally in 2020, an estimated 27.5 million people living with HIV were on treatment … The global roll-out of HIV treatment has saved millions of lives: an estimated 16.5 million AIDS-related deaths have been averted since 2001. In 2020, there were 680 000 deaths from AIDS-related causes, a decline of 58% from 2001 to 2020. At least 40 countries are on track to achieve a 90% reduction in AIDS-related mortality by 2030, including nine countries in eastern and southern Africa.” Of course, Robert Kennedy makes no mention of this fantastic success; he repeatedly states that AZT is “frighteningly toxic,” and claims that these antiretroviral drugs kill more people than they help.
Readers of The Real Anthony Fauci would never realize that the early confusion over the cause of AIDS has been solved – we know that HIV causes AIDS. Also, the African and Western forms of AIDS are identical. Kennedy also bashes the use of AZT as part of a suite of antiretroviral drugs – he repeatedly criticizes AZT for its “frightening toxicity.” In sufficiently high doses, AZT does have a number of side effects such as anemia, cardiomyopathy and myopathy. But Kennedy goes much further than these side effects. He reports that Duesberg and his AIDS-denialist colleagues “believe that AZT killed tens of thousands between 1986 and 1996 before less toxic chemotherapy drugs were introduced, causing far more fatalities than the immune deficiencies associated with the recreational drugs during the first wave of the AIDS pandemic.” In fact, a section of Kennedy’s book is titled “Is AZT Mass Murder?”
Early use of AZT to prevent HIV from progressing to AIDS involved significantly higher doses than are used today. Kennedy spends a great deal of time in claims that treatment with AZT created far more harm than benefit. Once again, he neglects to point out that today, AZT is an integral part of a suite of antiretroviral drugs that are given to patients with HIV. Generally, AZT is combined with a second reverse-transcriptase inhibitor and a third drug which is often a protease inhibitor. In this combination, known as Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy or HAART, AZT inhibits HIV replication without damaging the function of uninfected cells.
The combination of these three drugs now allows people with HIV to lead relatively normal lives. By taking the antiretroviral suite of meds, patients are able to prevent HIV from progressing to AIDS. Furthermore, they can lower the levels of HIV in their bodies to levels that are undetectable. In his book, Robert Kennedy constantly harps on the claim that we should rely on improved nutrition, sanitation and personal hygiene to combat viruses such as COVID-19 and HIV. If one wants to prevent HIV infection, one should avoid having unprotected sex, or sharing needles to inject recreational drugs. But if one has contracted HIV, then a regimen of vitamins, lemon juice, garlic and beetroot is unlikely to prevent HIV from progressing to AIDS. One is far better off to embark on a regimen of antiretroviral meds. The fact that Robert Kennedy denies the efficacy of these meds represents a threat to the health of millions of people. This makes him one of the more dangerous individuals on the planet.
In addition to the “hero scientists” who deny either that HIV exists or that HIV causes AIDS, and the “brave journalists” who support these scientists, there is another category of hero for Robert Kennedy and his colleagues in the AIDS denial business. These are the “living icons” who have AIDS, but who refuse to take the antiretroviral drugs. These people either take no medication or they advocate for “alternative medicines” or natural remedies. Probably the most famous of this group was the activist Christine Maggiore. She was HIV-positive, but after interacting with Peter Duesberg, she denied that HIV caused AIDS. She founded a group called Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives. In addition to recommending that people refuse to take antiretroviral therapies, this group also urged women who were pregnant and HIV-positive to refuse medication designed to prevent transmission of HIV to their child. Maggiore refused to take the antiretroviral meds when she was pregnant; she also insisted on breastfeeding her daughter, despite advice that this could increase the risk of passing HIV to her child. If she had taken the perinatal antiviral treatments and used formula feeding, she could have reduced her child’s chances of contracting HIV from 25% to 2%. Maggiore’s daughter Eliza developed symptoms of pneumonia. However, a holistic doctor claimed that she merely had an ear infection. But a few weeks later Eliza died of pneumonia at age three. A coroner’s post-mortem examination found protein components of HIV in Eliza’s brain and determined that she had died of complications due to advanced AIDS.
Figure V.18: Christine Maggiore, AIDS activist who had HIV but refused to take antiretroviral meds for herself, or to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Here she is pregnant with her daughter Eliza Jane Scovill, who would die from complications of AIDS at age 3.
In 2002 Maggiore wrote an article titled “My Bout of So-Called AIDS.” She stated that her doctors interpreted her abnormal Pap smear as evidence of AIDS. Instead of taking further recommended medical tests, she began a program of naturopathic treatments and these doctors later told she was free of AIDS. In December 2008, Maggiore died at the age of 52. As there was no autopsy performed, her fellow AIDS denialists dispute that she died of AIDS-related complications; however, it appears that she died of pneumonia, a common complication related to AIDS.
Despite the fact that both Maggiore and her daughter appear to have died from AIDS, she is considered to be a heroic figure by fellow AIDS denialists. Journalist Celia Farber wrote an article in 2006 in Los Angeles Citybeat defending Maggiore’s actions regarding her daughter; Farber alleged “incompetence, conspiracy and coverups on the part of the coroner, the mainstream AIDS community, the mainstream media, and the medical community.” However, a large number of HIV-AIDS denialists such as Maggiore have died from AIDS; a list of several of them can be found here. They include Casper Schmidt, a psychiatrist who published an article called The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS; this article claimed that AIDS was not an actual disease, but a product of “epidemic hysteria.” Schmidt claimed that AIDS would disappear in a couple of years once he had identified it as purely psychosomatic. Ten years later, Schmidt died from what he claimed was a non-existent disease.
Along the way, Robert Kennedy throws in some additional audacious conspiracy theories in The Real Anthony Fauci. For example, in discussing the global COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy states “An eyebrow-raising number of anti-vax political leaders were simultaneously expiring in Africa. The epidemic of untimely deaths among high-profile African heads of state and key government ministers and physicians who opposed Bill Gates/COVAX policies provoked a wave of conspiracy theories suggesting that these men were murdered to silence dissent.” In his usual style, Kennedy does not “endorse” these theories, he merely “reports” them – if he is challenged for spreading these rumors, he will deny that he ever made this claim himself. Later, in a discussion of the Depo-Provera contraceptive in Africa, Kennedy states that “Critics credibly suggest that these vaccines may have been secretly laced with a formula the Rockefeller Foundation developed to sterilize women against their will.” Kennedy also discusses an incident where members of Congress were sent letters laced with anthrax. Kennedy muses “We cannot exclude the possibility that someone in our government carried out a false flag attack against Americans as a provocation for some larger agenda.” In the minds of conspiracy theorists such as RFK, Jr., the conspiracies always expand to include not only the medical establishment, but also journalists, governments, scientists, anyone who debunks their claims, and for RFK, Jr., always Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci.
VI. More Denialism and Conspiracy Theories From RFK
In 2013, Kennedy edited the book Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak: The Evidence Supporting the Immediate Removal of Mercury – a Known Neurotoxin – from Vaccines. The book’s title is an example of Kennedy’s campaign of misinformation. Methyl mercury is indeed a neurotoxin; however, Thimerosal is ethylmercury, which does not have the same neurotoxic effects as methylmercury. In April 2015, Kennedy appeared as part of a Speaker’s Forum in connection with the release of a film Trace Amounts. That film claimed there was a link between autism and mercury in vaccinations. Kennedy was executive producer of the 2019 film Vaxxed II: The People’s Truth. This was the sequel to an anti-vaccine film made by notorious anti-vaxxers Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree.
Figure VI.1: The book Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, edited by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This claims that thimerosal, a mercury-based chemical that was included in some multi-use vaccines to prevent bacterial infection, has extremely toxic effects for children receiving these vaccines.
Figure VI.2: The DVD of Vaxxed II: The People’s Truth. An anti-vaccination propaganda movie directed by Brian Burrowes, its executive producer was Robert Kennedy, Jr.
In March 2021, Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense organization released a film Medical Racism: The New Apartheid. It is an anti-vaccine propaganda film aimed at the African-American community. It seeks to reinforce vaccine hesitancy among black Americans, by linking COVID-19 vaccines with earlier racist medical activities such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Since African-Americans have already suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic, this video has definitely endangered lives, as it will cause African-Americans to avoid taking the vaccine, the safest way to protect themselves against the coronavirus. The Medical Racism video was co-produced by Centner Productions. Its founder, David Centner, is the co-founder of the private elementary school Centner Academy. It became infamous in April 2021 when it required teachers who had received the COVID vaccination before April 21 to physically distance themselves from students, and prevented teachers who received the vaccination after that date from interacting with students.
Figure VI.3: An advertisement for the film Medical Racism: the New Apartheid, a 2021 film produced by Robert Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense group.
Robert Kennedy Jr. seems to be genuinely concerned about vaccine safety; however, he appears willing to make claims about vaccines that are demonstrably false. He also always highlights the rare cases of infections and deaths that result from (e.g., polio) vaccines, without providing the context of the much, much greater number of infections and deaths prevented by administration of the vaccines. Furthermore, his anti-vaccine rhetoric seems to be escalating. He recently claimed that noted vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit should be “jailed and the key thrown away” because of Offit’s role in developing and testing vaccines. Kennedy wrote the foreword for the 2020 book Plague of Corruption by Dr. Judy Mikovits. We pointed out the serious flaws in Mikovits’ work in an earlier blog post. Recently, Kennedy has endorsed unsubstantiated claims that 5G technology poses risks to human health, and he has repeated conspiracy theories about that technology and alleged links between 5G and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Robert Kennedy has been strongly criticized for spreading falsehoods and misinformation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Connecticut Attorney General Henry Tsong characterizes Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer material: “They’re putting people at risk. And they are getting people killed. This isn’t some fanciful public policy academic debate that happens in some safe space at a university. This is real life. Life or death. People indulging their conspiracy theories, people indulging ideas that are not based in science, people with alternative warped political agenda, to prevent people from getting vaccines is causing people to get sick and to die.” Dr. Jaimie Meyer, an associate professor of medicine and public health at the Yale School of Medicine says, “That’s what makes me the angriest about these disinformation campaigns, that often they are coming from people with no scientific knowledge, no credibility. There’s no evidence for anything.”
To the extent that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s campaign against vaccines is successful, he will be directly implicated in deaths from preventable epidemics in the future. This has already occurred. Kennedy was directly involved with anti-vaccination efforts in Samoa. Prior to the 2019 epidemic, an incident occurred where two nurses improperly mixed MMR vaccines with a liquid muscle relaxant instead of water. This mistake caused the deaths of two infants. Anti-vaxxers used this incident to imply that vaccines were dangerous. Vaccination rates in Samoa subsequently dropped from 74% in 2017 to around 33% before the epidemic. The resulting measles epidemic infected 5,700 people (about 3% of the total Samoan population) and caused 87 deaths, the vast majority of which were children four and younger. In the same year, a measles outbreak in Tonga infected 612 people; however, since vaccination rates in Tonga were roughly 99%, there were no Tongan deaths. After the high death rate in Samoa, Kennedy and anti-vaxxer Taylor Winterstein had the nerve to ask the Samoan government to investigate whether the MMR vaccine was responsible for the deaths! So, let’s re-cap. Samoa, vaccination rate 33%, sees 5,700 cases of measles and 87 deaths. Tonga, vaccination rate 99%, 612 cases of measles, same MMR vaccine as Samoa, no deaths. An open-and-shut case for vaccines, right?
Robert Kennedy Jr. is on a quest to prevent people from getting vaccinated. If he is successful he could dramatically increase the number of Americans who are unvaccinated, not only from COVID-19 but also from childhood vaccines such as measles, mumps and chickenpox. Contrary to the claims of some anti-vaxxers, diseases such as measles are incredibly infectious, and can be quite dangerous. The chance of getting seriously ill or dying from infection by the measles is about 1 in 1,000 in the Western world (it is substantially higher in Third-World countries); whereas, from the best available statistics, the odds of dying from an MMR shot range from about one in a million to one in ten million. And one shot of the MMR vaccine confers lifetime immunity from measles, mumps and rubella.
Robert Kennedy ends his book The Real Anthony Fauci with a quote from former CIA agent and anti-vaxxer Kevin Shipp. Shipp claims that government policies in the COVID-19 pandemic involve manipulation of the American public in a deliberate experiment “With Dr. Fauci playing the doctor in the white lab coat instructing us to ignore our virtues and our conscience and obliterate the Constitution.” A persistent theme in Kennedy’s book is the notion that public-health mandates during a pandemic are deliberate attempts to shred the Constitution and destroy our democracy. But Americans deal with many restrictions on our behavior that are designed to maintain the public good. We stop our cars at red lights and (mostly) obey seatbelt mandates. A requirement that children be vaccinated against highly contagious diseases such as measles and chickenpox (and, earlier, smallpox) represents a contribution to the public good. When people refuse to be vaccinated, they guarantee that measles epidemics will occur and that unvaccinated young children will die (see, e.g., the Samoan measles epidemic). Because a sufficiently large fraction of the population was vaccinated against measles, we were able to wipe out endemic measles in the U.S. However, if Robert Kennedy’s anti-vaccination campaign is successful, our country will once again be overrun with epidemics of these infectious and preventable diseases.
Robert Kennedy welcomes this scenario. His book, The Real Anthony Fauci, ends with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr’s stirring speech at the 1963 March on Washington. And he invites Americans “Join with us to take back our democracy and our freedom. I’ll see you at the barricades.” He could just as well have stated “Take my advice, and we can once again experience epidemics of measles and chickenpox, with massive deaths of young children. And stop taking those antiretroviral therapies for HIV, so more people across the globe can suffer needless deaths from AIDS.”
Unfortunately, in an age of disinformation-fueled politics, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is viewed as a “vote attractor” by some politicians. He was recently lauded by Republican members at a Congressional hearing, where RFK, Jr. claimed he had been “censored” by critics who point out the obvious falsehoods in his voluminous writings and events. Republican Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis recently proposed that, if elected, he would consider naming Kennedy to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration. This is madness. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has dug himself over decades into such a deep psychological hole that he now appears completely incapable of evaluating evidence on any policy subject.
Source Material for RFK, Jr Conspiracy Theorist
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Judy Mikovits and Kent Heckenlively, Plague of Corruption (Skyhorse, 2021), https://www.amazon.com/Plague-Corruption-Restoring-Promise-Childrens/dp/1510766588/
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Anjali Huynh, 5 Noteworthy Falsehoods Robert F. Kennedy Jr Has Promoted, New York Times, July 6, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/us/politics/rfk-conspiracy-theories-fact-check.html
Sara Dorn, RKJ Jr’s Family Denounces Claim That Jews, Chinese are Immune to COVID: Here Are All the Other Conspiracies He Promotes, Forbes, July 18, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2023/06/06/rfk-jr-makes-unfounded-claims-about-mass-shootings-covid-19-here-are-all-the-conspiracies-he-promotes/?sh=40c970683acc
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Small Arms Survey, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, https://www.smallarmssurvey.org/who_we_are
Lev Facher, Pharma is Showering Congress With Cash, Even as Drug Makers Race to Fight the Coronavirus, STAT News, Aug. 10. 2020, https://www.statnews.com/feature/prescription-politics/prescription-politics/
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Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy (Simon & Schuster, 2012), https://www.amazon.com/Panic-Virus-Behind-Vaccine-Autism-Controversy/dp/1439158657
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Andrew Jeong, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Apologizes For Saying The Unvaccinated Have Less Freedom Than Anne Frank Did, Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/25/rfk-kennedy-jr-anne-frank-anti-vax/
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Food & Drug Administration, FDA Cautions Against Use of Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine for COVID-19 Outside of the Hospital Setting or a Clinical Trial Due to Risk of Heart Rhythm Problems, July 2020, https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-cautions-against-use-hydroxychloroquine-or-chloroquine-covid-19-outside-hospital-setting-or
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Ed. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak – The Evidence Supporting the Immediate Removal of Mercury – A Known Neurotoxin – From Vaccines (Skyhorse Publishing, 2015), https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781634504423/thimerosal-let-the-science-speak/
Keziah Weir, How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Became the Anti-Vaxxer Icon of America’s Nightmares, Vanity Fair, May 2021, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/05/how-robert-f-kennedy-jr-became-anti-vaxxer-icon-nightmare
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Debunking Denial 