Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaks at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention.Kevin Dietsch/Getty
If Donald Trump becomes president again, it looks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will have his say over who gets which vaccines: Trump said at a rally last weekend that he would let RFK Jr. “go wild” on health should he win the White House. RFK Jr. said Trump promised him control of the Department of Health and Human Services, where the CDC and FDA are housed; Trump’s campaign seemed to suggest that wasn’t set in stone.
A world where an anti-vax advocate would play a large role in shaping vaccine policy is kind of terrifying. While RFK Jr. does make extremely off-the-cuff comments, including about Covid-19 vaccines, some of Kennedy’s specific claims about vaccines may not be apparent unless you go looking for them.
Well, I went looking for them. Here are some of RFK Jr.’s claims about various childhood vaccines throughout the decades, most of which are usually required if you go to public schools. What’s perhaps the most disturbing underlying factor of all his vaccine conspiracy theories is the suggestion that a dead child—vaccines save a lot of lives—is better than an autistic or chronically ill one, conditions he claims vaccines cause.
Measles, Mumps, and Rubella
In a 2005 Rolling Stone article, RFK Jr. suggests that a rise in childhood vaccines was tied to an increase in kids being diagnosed with autism.
Before 1989, American preschoolers received 11 vaccinations—for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade. As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded.
RFK Jr. was not the first person to suggest a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Andrew Wakefield’s retracted Lancet study linking the two, which was total nonsense, should take a lot of the blame. But RFK Jr. still promoted the conspiracy theory that the measles vaccine was linked to autism in a 2021 Fox News interview, and in his 2023 co-written book Vax Unvax, Kennedy also suggests that the measles vaccine is linked to Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis (and Haemophilus Influenzae B)
In the same Rolling Stone piece, RFK Jr. essentially claimed that Americans had been poisoning their kids with vaccines that contained thimerosal, which is no longer in routine childhood vaccines, except some versions of the flu vaccine.
Tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth, and 2-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.
The FDA says that the thimerosal in vaccines has “significantly declined due to reformulation and development of new vaccines—not that the tiny amount of it in vaccines was linked to autism or other health issues. Kennedy also claimed that receiving multiple DTP vaccines raised infant mortality (the 2004 study which Kennedy and Brian Hooker, his cowriter, cite has not been replicated).
Hepatitis B
In a 2017 interview with Stat News, RFK Jr. said that the Hepatitis B vaccine hadn’t received enough testing. He seemed to find a new argument as to why the treatment wasn’t when thimerosal was removed:
The hepatitis B vaccines that are currently approved had fewer than five days of safety testing. That means that if the child has a seizure on the sixth day, it’s never seen.
Also, people can report an adverse event at any point.
Rotavirus
Back to the infamous 2005 Rolling Stone piece: RFK Jr. seems to suggest that people should not trust the rotavirus vaccine because of financial conflicts of interest in its advocacy.
The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisors who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine “had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.” Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that he “would make money” if his vote eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist’s direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. “It provides no conflict for me,” he insists. “I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it.”
In a 2023 Substack post, Paul Offit, the doctor RFK Jr. referred to in that excerpt, debunked both Kennedy’s claims about himself, and the shoddy science he relied on.
Polio
Type I diabetes is a serious illness—one that Kennedy stokes fears of in his book Vax Unvax. The book claims that Type I diabetes appears in about 21 of 100,000 kids vaccinated against polio, more than double the rate for those who were not vaccinated, according to research performed between 1990 and 2000. Kennedy and Hooker cite a single study to support their claim that the typical polio vaccine given until the year 2000 was dangerous. But most other research refutes this claim. Vax Unvax claims to want to “let the science speak,” per its subtitle, but doesn’t mention how polio can lead to permanent paralysis.
Influenza
As you can probably tell by now, Kennedy likes picking single studies to back his narrative. In Vax Unvax, Kennedy and Hooker point to one study that claims that kids who have gotten the seasonal flu vaccine are almost four times more likely to be hospitalized.
Kennedy’s strategy on childhood vaccines is to instill fear backed by lone studies, claiming they can make kids sicker, in opposition to decades of research that show that childhood vaccines stop kids from getting sicker—and let them avoid preventable long-term health effects.
