What to Know About RFK Jr., Trump’s HHS Cupboard Decide

A longtime anti-vaxxer, Kennedy has promoted conspiracy theories in regards to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kennedy has lengthy espoused anti-vaccine views, suggesting a flu vaccine might have triggered his voice dysfunction (he has spasmodic dysphonia, a uncommon neurological dysfunction).

In 2005, he wrote an article printed in Salon claiming that the mercury-based thimerosal compound in vaccines causes autism. After issuing a number of corrections, Salon ultimately retracted the piece. Kennedy later based the anti-vaccine group Youngsters’s Well being Protection, initially named the World Mercury Mission, in 2011.

Kennedy rose to prominence in the course of the pandemic for his opposition to COVID-19 vaccines.

At a press occasion held at a New York Metropolis restaurant in July 2023, Kennedy informed the gang that COVID-19 might have been “ethnically focused” to assault sure teams of individuals.

“COVID-19 is focused to assault Caucasians and Black individuals,” he stated. “The people who find themselves most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese language.”

“We do not know whether or not it was intentionally focused or not, however there are papers on the market that present the racial and ethnic differential and affect,” he continued.

The Anti-Defamation League referred to as Kennedy’s remarks “deeply offensive,” saying they fed into the “sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories about COVID-19 that now we have seen evolve during the last three years.”

At Kennedy’s Senate affirmation listening to on Wednesday, he stated a few of his earlier feedback had not been precisely represented.

“I am not anti-vaccine,” Kennedy stated throughout his opening assertion.

He stated he wouldn’t restrict entry to vaccines if he had been to guide the Division of Well being and Human Providers.

“I help the measles vaccine,” he stated. “I help the polio vaccine. I’ll do nothing, as HHS secretary, to make it troublesome or discourage individuals from taking it.”

When requested about his statements about COVID-19, Kennedy stated he didn’t say it “intentionally focused” some individuals, and that he had been referencing a broadcast research in his remarks.