Once a top environmental lawyer who led the charge to clean up the Hudson River in New York, the third eldest child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, [Robert F Kennedy, Jr.] has emerged as a leading voice in the campaign to discredit coronavirus vaccines and other measures being advanced by the Biden White House to battle a pandemic that was, near the end of February, killing close to 1,900 people a day.
Mr. Kennedy’s rise as the face of the vaccine resistance movement has tested as never before the solidarity of a family that has for decades remained resolute in the face of tragedy and scandal.
It has rattled the Hollywood and entertainment circles that he inhabits, while showing how the vaccine debate is upending traditional political alliances.
And it has left the Kennedys and his friends anguished and mystified about the dramatic turn in the often troubled life of a man who was a pallbearer at his father’s funeral when he was 14, who emerged from drug addiction to become one of the leading environmentalists in the country and who is regarded as among the most politically gifted Kennedys of his generation.
Mr. Kennedy has effectively used his talent and one of the most prominent names in American political history as a platform for fueling resistance to vaccines that could save countless lives.
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His conduct “undercuts 50 years of public health vaccine practice, and he’s done it in a way I’ve never see anyone else do it,” said Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “He is among the most dangerous because of the credibility of who he is and what his family name has brought to this issue.”
To the public distress of his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, Mr. Kennedy invoked Anne Frank, the young German-Dutch diarist who died in a Nazi prison camp, as he compared government measures for containing the pandemic with the Holocaust at a rally in Washington. He later apologized for that.
“Bobby’s lies and fear-mongering … were both sickening and repulsive,” Kerry Kennedy wrote on Twitter about the brother she so admired, after he invoked Frank.
