Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to say that he is not anti-vaccine, he is “pro-safety.” But when 1,000 of his supporters gathered in Austin, Texas, … for a celebratory conference to chart the future of their movement, they embraced a term — “anti-vax” — some once regarded as a slur.
“God is an anti-vaxxer, and he needs you to speak up,” declared Del Bigtree, a close ally of Mr. Kennedy who served as his communications director during his presidential campaign. Mr. Bigtree spoke during a session that looked back on his 2016 documentary asserting that there was a cover-up of a link between vaccines and autism.
That 2016 film was a propaganda pseudodocumentary disguised as a documentary, VAXXED, which rehashed the 2014 CDC whistleblower conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that the CDC had “covered up” results of a 2004 study supposedly showing an increased risk of autism in African-American boys vaccinated with the MMR. Del Bigtree produced the film, with which the godfather of the 21st century iteration of the antivax movement, Andrew Wakefield, made his directing review.
[What] was once fringe is mainstream, and now, with RFK Jr. in charge of HHS, his old org is no longer antivax enough, at least not according to the man who leads the MAHA Institute:
“I’ve come to this anti-vax conference with a message that we need to be more boldly anti-vax,” said Mark Gorton, the president of the MAHA Institute …. Mr. Gorton assailed the website of Mr. Kennedy’s former nonprofit as “some pretty weak anti-vaxxery.”
Related on the SLP
Viewpoint: RFK, Jr.’s ‘useful idiots’: His 6-point plant that undermines U.S. health policy rolls along
Viewpoint — Lysenkoism 2.0: RFK, Jr. is more dangerous than the 1930s Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko, whose crackpot views killed millions of people and set back Russian science for decades
Challenging Kennedy—MAHA skepticism disinformation: No, the vaccine schedule is not a haphazard, scientific mess
Children’s Health Defense, “some pretty weak antivaxxery”? I laughed out loud reading that. … It suggests to me that CHD is the past and that more radical antivax groups are the present and the future, which is profoundly depressing to think about.
Indeed, since taking over the reins of HHS, RFK Jr. has weaponized a funhouse version of the evidence-based medicine (EBM) paradigm against vaccines, misrepresented medical ethics to attack vaccines, dismantled the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), replacing the experts with antivaxxers, who immediately turned the committee into a clown car barreling through the vaccine schedule. There is no doubt in my mind that RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines as he remakes the FDA and CDC, continues to stack ACIP with antivaxxers, and demonizes vaccine adjuvants based on pseudoscience and hires formerly washed-up antivax activists like David Geier and Mark Blaxill.
