The FINANCIAL — In 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earned more than $500,000 as the chairman and top lawyer at Children’s Health Defense.
The website Media Bias/Fact Check calls Kennedy’s corporation, Children’s Health Defense, “a strong conspiracy and quackery level advocacy group.” An academic paper published in January 2020 reported that Children’s Health Defense chaired by Kennedy was one of two buyers accounting for 54% of anti-vaccine advertising content on Facebook. Kennedy himself is part of the Disinformation Dozen, a gaggle of influencers generating two-thirds of anti-vaccination content on Facebook and Twitter, according to a recent assessment. Instagram banned him from their platform earlier this year, although his corporation’s account remains active.
“The sad reality is vaccines cause injuries and death,” Kennedy wrote in a letter to President Joe Biden that was published in The Defender on March 17. “In the two and one-half months since the U.S. began our COVID vaccination program, there have been 31,079 injuries and 1,524 deaths reported after COVID vaccine.” These statistics, pulled from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) do sound dire, but a simple search of that website proves clarifying: These “injuries” tend to include headache, fever, muscle aches, nausea, and other issues clearly delineated by the CDC and DOH as common side effects of the vaccine.
As Children’s Health Defense has worked to expand its influence, experts said, it has targeted its false claims at groups that may be more prone to distrust the vaccine, including mothers and Black Americans. It’s a strategy that experts worry has deadly consequences during a pandemic that has killed more than 5 million people, when misinformation has been deemed a threat to public health. The death toll in the United States hit 800,000 this week, and nearly a third of those people have died since vaccines became available to all adults in the U.S. Unvaccinated people are 14 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than those who get the shot, according to the CDC.
As vaccines have become a wedge political issue, Kennedy’s opposition to the shot has at times brought him close to anti-democracy forces on the right who have made common cause with the anti-vaccine movement. The scion of the country’s most prominent Democratic family has appeared at events that pushed the lie that the 2020 election was stolen and associated with people who have celebrated or downplayed the violent Jan. 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Kennedy’s father was Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, brother of President John F. Kennedy. Both men were assassinated.
Kennedy originally ran in the Democratic primary against President Joe Biden before deciding to launch an independent bid. He then suspended that campaign earlier this year and endorsed Trump, who has repeatedly praised Kennedy, promised him influence in a future administration, and vowed to “Make America Healthy Again.”
Discussion about this post