The Reality of RFK Jr.

T he Kennedy family’s most recent entrant into the political fray is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is challenging incumbent Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. Quite a few conservatives, especially those who opposed the harsh Covid restrictions imposed after the start of the pandemic, have become enamored of Kennedy’s stances against government intrusion on basic civil rights. But Kennedy’s long, embarrassing history needs closer examination.

Matthew Scully, in a recent NRO piece, makes the strongest argument for Kennedy’s rise:

Among his many provocations: Kennedy claims that pandemic lockdowns were calamitous for working people and for children; that citizens should choose for themselves whether to receive vaccines; that corporate influences on government are pervasive and corrupting; and that censorship contrived by the state is intolerable. Worse even than these outrages, during the pandemic this man called into question the conduct and veracity of Anthony Fauci. And this offense — challenging Doctor Fauci! — is still regarded as the most shameful assault on science since the persecution of Galileo.

Kennedy did speak out against lockdowns and largely opposed mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and school closures. He is not wrong about the damage that such policies did, especially for the poor, minorities, and schoolchildren. But many of the positions he took went directly against not only the sensible positions of scientists who opposed harsh Covid policies but the sensible positions of conservatives and Republicans, including then-president Donald Trump, that have held up to this day. Furthermore, the strange new respect for RFK Jr. papers over the reality of his mendacious anti-scientific past.

Kennedy’s support of the anti-vaccine movement started decades ago. In the late 1990s, a now-infamous study by British (now ex-) physician Andrew Wakefield and others asserted that there was a link between vaccines and the development of mental disorders in children, specifically autism. The study, published in the Lancet and later retracted, was highly flawed from the very beginning. It involved only twelve children (yes, you read that right), with no control for the population. As the media and conspiracy theorists quickly latched onto the fantastic findings of the study, a global scare took off, and parents feared that the rising number of autism cases was directly related to pediatric vaccines. An epidemic of diseases such as chicken pox and measles, many of which were thought to be almost extinct, came about as kids across the world were not kept up to date on their vaccine schedules. Scientific critics pointed out that the paper was a small-case series without controls, linked three common conditions, and relied on parental recall and beliefs. But the damage had already been done.

It was not until 2011 that the BMJ (British Medical Journal) declared the original study a fraud. The initial study was conducted “dishonestly” and “irresponsibly,” and the data were “bogus.” “Clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare,” the editors of BMJ said.

Such a scientific error is always damaging, but this one was especially so in that the media and many popular figures latched onto it. One of the most prominent of those figures was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Starting in the early 2000s, Kennedy used his position as a prominent environmental lawyer to attempt to initiate class-action lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies that produced vaccines. The goal was to make money off the vaccine scare. In 2005, he wrote an editorial, published in both Rolling Stone and Salon, alleging a massive conspiracy regarding thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that had long since been removed from most childhood vaccines.

I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine. . . . The scientists and researchers — many of them sincere, even idealistic — who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world’s poorest populations.

There was just one problem: The entire piece was based on lies and distorted interpretations of data and evidence, some of which simply didn’t exist.

In his piece, Kennedy completely ignored all immunization-safety reviews of thimerosal. He ignored numerous Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviews that had already taken place. He based his opinions on those of two scientists — the only two at the time who claimed to have data supporting the thimerosal claim. One was Mark Geier, a (former) physician and frequent paid witness in lawsuits alleging harm done by vaccines; the other was Geier’s son, David. These two charlatans were the basis for all of Kennedy’s vaccine claims and remain the sole basis for his claims to this very day.

In the years that followed, Mark Geier had his medical license revoked for putting pediatric patients at bodily risk by selling various risky therapies to treat autism. His son was eventually charged with fraud for pretending to be a physician though his highest degree was a bachelor’s of science.

In 2011, after many years of evidence and data accumulating, both Rolling Stone and Salon retracted Kennedy’s article, deleting it completely from their archives. Kennedy, to his everlasting shame, has not held himself to the same standard he demanded of the scientists he was then criticizing: He has never come clean on his errors or admitted that he was wrong.

Kennedy from the very beginning has been a charlatan and a fraudster, out to benefit only his own interests. On the thimerosal issue, he distorted the evidence, lied about the science, and then found charlatans who pretended to be experts to support his bogus conclusions. These facts are undeniable at this point and critical to evaluating Kennedy to this day.

The fact that Kennedy may have been right in some criticisms of pandemic policies doesn’t excuse the person he has been for most of his adult life: a man willing to lie to enrich and elevate himself. This is an incontrovertible reality that anyone evaluating him must deal with.

Those now trying to promote Kennedy as some kind of truth-teller are not alone. The media has long been aiding Kennedy in his crusade of falsehoods. In 2005, Kennedy appeared on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country. “We are injecting our children with 400 times the amount of mercury that FDA or EPA considers safe.” Kennedy stated that children were being given 24 vaccines, and that each one of them had thimerosal or mercury in them. This was a clear lie, one that the host, Joe Scarborough, allowed to pass without even the least bit of resistance. By 2001, no vaccines given to children in the United States contained thimerosal. “There’s no doubt in my mind,” Scarborough said at the time, “and maybe it’s two years from now, maybe it’s five years from now, maybe it’s ten years from now — we are going to find out thimerosal causes, in my opinion, autism.”

The media have failed the public for decades on these issues, helping create the disaster in the first place, and then being reluctant to hold anyone to account. The science has from the very start always been clear that there is no link between autism and vaccines.

It is critical for the media now to state clearly that there is no link between the truth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has shown himself time and again to be someone who will say anything to promote himself.

The fact that Kennedy now supports a position on Covid that conservatives generally agree with is simply a coincidence, and conservatives need not fall into the same trap Scarborough did. As someone who was very critical of our pandemic response, I assert that there are far better ways for us to support the science than allowing a charlatan like Kennedy to advocate for our position. We should always focus on the science first and foremost and ignore personalities that just ride the public wave of resentment.

Scully, referring to Kennedy’s criticisms of our pandemic response, says that “point for point, RFK Jr. makes a strong case and most everyone knows it.”

The constant disparagements that cling to RFK Jr. in news accounts — vaccine conspiracist, science-denying anti-vaxxer, and the like — are lazy and slanderous, telling us nothing about the merits of his arguments or about what has or has not actually been “debunked.”

Whether RFK Jr. makes a strong case or not on this specific point really should be irrelevant. Just as a broken clock is right twice a day, Kennedy stumbled onto some truth here, but this is no reason to praise a man who has gone out of his way to lie about science in order to benefit himself.

If we believe in our Covid positions, whether they be about closures, mandates, or vaccines, we should be able to defend those positions using the science, data, and evidence at hand. If we need to latch onto the words of a grifter who has no conscience or shame, then we surely deserve to lose the debate. RFK has repeatedly distorted facts that turned out to be wrong during the pandemic as well. For example, he claimed that one out of every 39 children were injured by the Covid vaccine, based on misunderstanding of the U.S. VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System) data. He went so far as to call the Covid-19 vaccine the deadliest vaccine ever made. As I myself have written, VAERS data does not work that way; it is a system simply to keep note of possible reactions, not confirmed ones, and only further investigation can confirm if the reports sent to VAERS are true adverse reactions or not. The vast majority of events are not related to the vaccines at all.

Conservatives don’t need a mascot for their positions on pandemic policies. We simply need to follow the data and evidence and always focus on those. Fanfare over Robert F. Kennedy Jr. simply makes us look pathetic and needy, as if our evidence-based conclusions aren’t sufficient. Kennedy has proven that he is not worthy of our support.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect that Kennedy’s interview with Joe Scarborough was in 2005, not 2011.