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 on who gets which vaccines: Trump said at a rally last weekend that would leave RFK Jr. ‘going wild’ over health if he wins the White House. RFK Jr. said Trump I promised him control of the Department of Health and Human Services, where the CDC and FDA are housed; Trump’s campaign seemed to suggest it wasn’t written in stone.

A world where an anti-vax advocate would play a major role in shaping vaccine policy is kind of terrifying. While RFK Jr. makes extremely unpleasant comments, including about Covid-19 vaccinessome of Kennedy’s specific claims about vaccines may not be obvious unless you go looking for them.

Well, I went looking for them. Here are some of RFK Jr.’s statements about various childhood vaccines over the decades, most of which are usually required if you go to public schools. What is perhaps the most disturbing underlying factor of all his vaccine conspiracy theories is the suggestion that a dead child…vaccines save many lives— is better than being autistic or chronically ill, conditions he claims vaccines cause.

In a 2005 Rolling Stone articleRFK Jr. suggests that an increase in childhood vaccines has been linked to an increase in the number of children 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 guidelines, 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. of Andrew Wakefield retired Lancet the study linking the two, which was utter nonsense, should take much of the blame. But RFK Jr. still promoted the conspiracy theory that the measles vaccine was related to autism in a 2021 Fox News interview and in his 2023 co-written book Vax UnvaxKennedy also suggests that the measles vaccine is linked to Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

In the same Rolling Stone RFK Jr. essentially claimed that Americans poisoned their children with vaccines that contained thimerosal, which is they are no longer in routine childhood vaccinesexcept for some versions of the flu vaccine.

Tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated against hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth, and 2-month-old babies would be immunized against Haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

FDA say that thimerosal in vaccines has “declined significantly due to reformulation and development of new vaccines — not that the low amount in vaccines has been linked to autism or other health problems. Kennedy also claimed that receiving more DTP vaccines increased infant mortality (the 2004 study that Kennedy and Brian Hooker, his co-author, cite has not been replicated).

In a 2017 interview with Statistical newsRFK Jr. said the hepatitis B vaccine has not received enough testing. He seemed to find a new argument as to why the treatment was not when the thimerosal was removed:

Hepatitis B vaccines that are currently approved have had less than five days of safety testing. This means that if the child has a seizure on the sixth day, it is never seen.

People can also report a adverse event at any time.

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 supporting it.

The House Government Reform Committee found that four of the eight CDC advisers who approved the guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine “have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.” Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, admitted to me that he would “make money” if his vote eventually leads to a marketable product. But he rejected my suggestion that a scientist’s direct financial participation in the CDC’s endorsement might influence his judgment. “It doesn’t give me any conflict,” he insists. “I was simply informed by the process, not corrupted by it.”

In a 2023 Substantive postPaul Offit, the doctor referred to by RFK Jr. in that excerpt, debunked both Kennedy’s claims about himself and the bad science on which they were based.

Poliomyelitis

Type I diabetes is a serious disease — one that Kennedy raises fears about in his book Vax Unvax. The book claims that type I diabetes occurs in about 21 out of 100,000 polio-vaccinated children, more than double those who were not vaccinated, according to research conducted between 1990 and 2000. Kennedy and Hooker cite a single study to support their statement. that the typical polio vaccine given until the year 2000 was dangerous. But most other research rejects this claim. Vax Unvax claims to want to “let the science speak,” according to its subtitle, but fails to mention how polio can lead to permanent paralysis.

As you can probably tell by now, Kennedy likes to cherry-pick individual studies to support his narrative. In Vax UnvaxKennedy and Hooker point to a study that found children who received the seasonal flu vaccine were nearly four times more likely to be hospitalized.

Kennedy’s strategy on childhood vaccines is to instill fear supported by studies alone, claiming they can make children sick, as opposed to decades of research showing that childhood vaccines Stop children from getting sick – and let them avoid preventable long-term health effects.