RFK Jr. disparaged vaccines dozens of times in recent years and made baseless claims on race (original) (raw)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’snominee for the nation’s top health post, has repeatedly disparaged vaccines, falsely linked themto autism and argued that White and Black people should have separate vaccination schedules, according to a Washington Post review of his public statements from recent years.

In at least 36 appearances, Kennedy linked autism to vaccines, despite overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the use of vaccination to protect people from deadly infectious diseases and refuting any ties to autism, The Post found in a review of more than 400 of Kennedy’s podcast appearances, interviews and public speeches since 2020.

Kennedy, who is scheduled to face a Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday,criticized vaccines more broadly in at least 114 appearances, calling them dangerous, saying the risks outweigh the benefits and making misleading claims about vaccine safety testing or discrediting vaccine efficacy.

Long considered among the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century, vaccines have beat back infectious diseases including polio and measles and saved more than 150 million lives around the world, according to the World Health Organization. But a Gallup poll shows Americans have become less likely since 2019 to say it is important to have their children vaccinated, a decline that came against the backdrop of concerns about coronavirus vaccine mandates.

A dozen vaccine experts, physicians and public health leaders said they were alarmed that someone who could shape vaccine policy as health and human services secretary failed to recognize reams of scientific data showing vaccines are safe and effective.

Kennedy, who has been critical of vaccines for years, founded Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group.

Podcast episode

False statements about the safety of vaccines pepper Kennedy’s appearances on podcasts, TV, radio and the website of Children’s Health Defense (Kennedy’s ethics disclosures note he resigned his position as chairman of the board and chief legal counsel in December after Trump picked him for the HHS job). He asserts that vaccines “poisoned an entire generation of American children” and that doctors have “butchered all these children” by administering shots recommended by federal authorities.

Kennedy has linked the rise of chronic disease, autism and food allergies in the United States to the “exploding vaccine schedule.” Medical experts say that more vaccines are available now to combat more diseases and that his link has no basis in evidence. Kennedy says he wishes he could go back in time and not vaccinate his children: “I would do anything for that. I would pay anything to be able to do that.” On Tuesday, Caroline Kennedy offered her own criticism of her cousin, warning senators he has been hypocritical in telling parents not to vaccinate their children when his have received shots; a Kennedy spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Stanley Plotkin, a physician who is among the inventors of vaccines againstrubella, rotavirus and other pathogens, said Kennedy’s statements showed he did not possess the scientific reasoning needed to lead HHS.

Post reporters who reviewed remarks by President Donald Trump’s pick for the top U.S. health post found Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeatedly disparaged vaccines. (Video: Drea Cornejo, Joyce Koh/The Washington Post)

“Making statements is easy, but if you don’t have the evidence, it’s just baloney,” said Plotkin, widely regarded as the godfather of American vaccine science.

Plotkin, who is 92, bemoaned that people had forgotten the scourge of diseases he has lived through — he contracted whooping cough and was hospitalized as a result of influenza as a child — that vaccines now combat.

Kennedy and the Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment. In public statements, Kennedy has repeatedly said he is not anti-vaccine. “I will provide Americans with transparency and access to all the data so they can make informed choices for themselves and their families,” Kennedy wrote on X after Trump said he would nominate him.

Children’s Health Defense also did not respond to requests for comment.

When previously confronted with his statements, Kennedy has pointed often to his writings on vaccines.

“I’d actually like to see an example of something I’ve ever said on my Instagram, on the Children’s Health Defense, in my book, that’s not true. My book has 2,200 footnotes. I am an expert on vaccines. I’m not a doctor, but I can claim expertise because I have three best-selling books on vaccines,” Kennedy said in an interview in April with KLCS, a California PBS station.

Several of the studies Kennedy points to in his public comments do not conclude what he says they do — or have been retracted. Georges C. Benjamin, a physician who leads the American Public Health Association, said that’s part of a larger pattern for Kennedy.

“He continually takes information that may be factual in one situation with a bunch of caveats and makes bad correlations with it,” Benjamin said.

Race also threads through many of Kennedy’s comments unearthed by The Post, with several misleading claims about Black Americans, including false claims about Black children’s autism rates after vaccination and comments on their immune systems.

“Now we know that, you know, we should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to Whites, because their immune system is better than ours,” Kennedy said in a 2021 appearance posted on the website of Children’s Health Defense.

Several experts said no scientific basis exists to support that claim.

While some research found a higher immune response to rubella and measles vaccines in Black people relative to White populations, there was no evidence of increased vaccine side effects or injuries, according to the studies. Plotkin, the inventor of the rubella vaccine, said the study of that shot does not imply that Black people are harmed by the recommended doses of vaccines or that they would be more or less susceptible to the disease itself.

It is vital to have someone in charge of health policy who understands science, said Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a health nonprofit, and former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“To have a secretary of health who would put forth such a false and racist statement is very concerning,” he said.

Here are five statements Kennedy has made about vaccines that medical experts said lack a basis in science. Listen below:

“ … the current state of the science that shows clearly that vaccination is causing autism, that it’s one of a suite of autoimmune diseases that is really, that is ultimately coming from vaccines.”

— July 2020 episode of Children’s Health Defense show “TRUTH” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Federal authorities and vaccine safety experts say vaccines are not linked to autism.

About the same time children go to their pediatrician for the first dose ofthemeasles, mumps and rubella vaccine — typically when they’re about 1 year old — signs of autism can appear, leaving some parents to mistakenly believe the two events are related. Top peer-reviewed journals in recent decades have published more than a dozen studies rejecting the hypothesis that the vaccine widely known as MMR causes autism. The authoritative Institute of Medicine, now known as the National Academy of Medicine and considered a top independent evaluator of medical science, declared there is no link between autism and vaccination in a landmark 2004 report.

Additionally, a decade-long study of more than half a million children in Denmark published in 2019 added to the constellation of studies showing that the MMR vaccine does not cause autism.

Bruce Gellin, an adjunct professor of medicine at the Georgetown University School of Medicine and former director of the National Vaccine Program office at HHS, said it was alarming that Kennedy continued to promote the debunked link.

“If he still believes it, the question is why, when the body of evidence that’s been looked at — up, down and sideways — says it’s not there,” Gellin said.

In 2022, Kennedy was listed as a plaintiff’s attorney on a $75 million medical malpractice case brought against a Tennessee pediatrician and medical practice alleging the doctor caused a child’s autism by giving routine vaccinations. A jury returned a unanimous verdict in favor of the defendants.

Disparaging a cancer-preventing vaccine

“Your chance of dying, according to those data, your chance of dying from the [HPV] vaccine is 10 times the chance of you dying from cervical cancer. What kind of bargain is that?”

— July 2020 episode of Children’s Health Defense show “TRUTH” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Shortly after this statement, Kennedy went on to say the rate of death was 37 times, not 10.

Medical experts told The Post the vaccine against the human papillomavirus, commonly known as HPV,has dramatically reduced cervical cancer rates among people receiving it, and there is no evidence to support claims that it increases risk of death.

“It sounds like more made-up anti-vaccine studies,” said David Gorski, a Wayne State University School of Medicine professor of surgery and oncology and managing editor of Science-Based Medicine, which debunks misinformation in medicine. “The data out there do not support such a statement by any stretch of the imagination.”

In Scotland, a 2024study showed that no cervical cancer was detected in any women who received the HPV vaccine at 12 to 13 years of age. Australia has launched a government effort to eliminate cervical cancer in the country by increasing vaccination rates. And a study in England shows HPV vaccination is associated with a “substantially reduced incidence of cervical cancer.”

In the United States, about 13 million people, including teens, get infected with HPV each year, with 36,000 people developing HPV-related cancers. The CDC recommends adolescents between 11 and 12 get vaccinated to prevent up to 90 percent of HPV-related cancers.

Kennedy played a key role in ongoing litigation against Merck regarding its HPV vaccine,Gardasil, arguing that the vaccine causes dangerous side effects, according to Reuters. He promoted the case to his followers on social media in a search for plaintiffs.

Clouding the coronavirus vaccine

“There’s a poison in there that’s going to kill people.”

— February 2021 episode of Children’s Health Defense show “TRUTH” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In a 2021 appearance at the Louisiana Capitol, Kennedy falsely called the coronavirus vaccine “the deadliest ever made.” He said that vaccine was killing more people than it helped in several clips reviewed by The Post, noting he had told Peter Marks, the top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, about this “poison” in 2020.

Experts say no evidence exists to support Kennedy’s claims about the coronavirus vaccine, widely viewed as the Trump administration’s top achievement in the fight to end the pandemic. Federal regulators and physicians have assured the public that the vaccine is safe, effective and recommended to prevent severe illness and death, especially in the elderly and immunocompromised. Study after study has shown the vaccine’s effectiveness.

“He’s got a fixed idea, almost like a religious fixed idea, against vaccines,” said Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease physicianand senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “He’s just going to say anything he can to disparage them.”

Vitamin A, chicken soup for measles

“What is the cure for measles, the treatment? Vitamin A and chicken soup.”

— February 2021 episode of Children’s Health Defense show “TRUTH” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy often argues that the risks of vaccines outweigh their benefits. For measles, he says the disease is treatable. Experts say vitamin A is far from a cure for measles but can be given to patients deficient in the nutrient if they contract the disease. Chicken soup can be beneficial but is not a cure.

Before a vaccine became available in 1963 that nearly eradicated measles, more than 3 million people contracted the viral disease annually in the United States. About 400 to 500 people each year — many of them children — died, while 48,000 were hospitalized with severe rashes and other complications in the time before a vaccine, according to the CDC.

But amid rising rates of families choosing not to vaccinate their children, outbreaks of measles have soared, with 16 outbreaks and 284 cases last year.

“People like Kennedy have helped bring it back to some extent,” Plotkin said. “Do we want children to have measles? I don’t think so.”

‘Specious disinformation’

“The polio vaccine contained a virus called simian virus 40, SV40. It’s one of the most carcinogenic materials that is known to man. In fact, it’s used now by scientists around the world to induce tumors in rats and guinea pigs in labs. But it was in that vaccine, 98 million people who got that vaccine in my generation got it. And now you’ve had this explosion of soft tissue cancers in our generation that kill many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did. So if you say to me did the, was the polio vaccine, was it effective against polio, I’m going to say yes. If you say to me, did it kill more people? Did it avert, cause more deaths than it averted? I would say I don’t know because we don’t have the data on that.”

— July 2023 appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast

Kennedy is failing to acknowledge the rigorous vaccine safety monitoring that the polio vaccine has gone through after its release in the United States, vaccine experts said.

The original polio vaccine, which was developed using monkey kidney cells, was found to contain simian virus 40, an animal virus that can cause tumors. After that discovery, the vaccine was screened to ensure new batches of the polio vaccines did not contain SV40, according to the CDC.

The scientific community commissioned several studies to monitor whether the SV40 in that polio vaccine affected people who received it. It is an example of how the scientific community monitors for rare vaccine safety events and, if any emerge, scrutinizes them to make sure the benefits of vaccines outweigh potential risks.

Multiple studies showed no such rise in cancer.

Last month, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) forcefully condemned attempts by a Kennedy ally to limit access to a widely used polio vaccine. McConnell, who survived polio as a child, said vaccines against polio have “saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease.”

“I have never flinched from confronting specious disinformation that threatens the advance of lifesaving medical progress, and I will not today,” McConnell said in a statement. “Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed — they’re dangerous. Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming Administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”

Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.

Methodology

The Post created a database of 421 separate appearances Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made across podcasts, TV, radio, his own Children’s Health Defense shows and public events. The appearances ranged from May 2020, the start of one of Kennedy’s first Children’s Health Defense shows, through August 2024, when Kennedy ended his presidential campaign. That includes all episodes of Kennedy’s “TRUTH” and “The Defender Show,” the two shows hosted on Children’s Health Defense’s website, as well as all listed media interviews on his campaign website.

Post reporters transcribed these appearances with the assistance of AI tools and identified all instances in which Kennedy spoke about vaccines. Reporters then manually reviewed all of these mentions to identify examples in which Kennedy specifically disparaged vaccines or linked vaccines to autism. Statements were considered to disparage vaccines if they included any of these: (1) calling vaccines broadly dangerous; (2) describing how vaccine risks outweigh their benefits (for example, saying they cause specific diseases); (3) making false claims about vaccine safety testing; or (4) discrediting tenets of vaccine efficacy.

This did not include mentions of individual vaccine injuries, claims of profit incentives linked to vaccine development, commentary about vaccine mandates and censorship of vaccine criticism, or loose correlations between vaccines and poor health outcomes. Statements were considered to link vaccines with autism if they made a clear mention of “autism” or “ASD” and a direct link between vaccines and autism. Statements were not counted if they included references to autism-associated symptoms or related conditions, individual descriptions of vaccine injury or comments about censorship around studying vaccines being linked to autism. The Post counted the number of overall appearances in which Kennedy disparaged vaccines or linked them to autism, not individual mentions.