 The nonprofit Children's Health Defense, which warns of the possible dangers posed by vaccines, used to receive a modest 119,000 monthly visits to its website. When COVID happened, public skepticism of the medical establishment exploded, and the site's web traffic went wild, peaking at 5 million monthly visits. So who's behind this group that warns of the dangers of electromagnetic radiation and the global cabal attempting to ban meat? The group's chairman, chief legal counsel, and highest compensated officer is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has moved out of the fringe after launching a long-shot bid to become president of the United States. RFK Jr. is not worthy of the rehabilitation tour he's been getting from pundits, podcasters, and tech luminaries. He's built a career as a professional contrarian. He pushes tabloid quality reporting, and he wildly extrapolates from little grains of truth. This frequently implies that the establishment is corrupt at best, evil at worst, and he winks at the existence of puppet masters pulling the strings of major institutions. His organization, Children's Health Defense, gives opponents of vaccine mandates and government overreach a bad name by lumping us together with anti-vaxxers. That's why most of the polio today, 70% of the polio today is vaccine polio that came from the vaccines. By the way, 80% of the polio cases on Earth today, according to the WHO, are vaccines from polio. That means people got it from vaccinated people. In 2022, Children's Health Defense made the same point in a peace-headlined polio, why vaccines are to blame for rising number of cases. It claimed that cases have been on the rise globally since 2016, and the resurgence is related to the use of vaccines. Actually, global polio cases fell by 99% between 1988 and 2022 and were extremely close to eradication, thanks to vaccines. What Kennedy said is technically true, but misleading. He is referring to polio spread through untreated sewage by a form of the vaccine that uses live virus. Not only has that version of the vaccine been retired, but it can only cause an outbreak in unvaccinated communities such as some acidic neighborhoods of New York City and outlying areas. In one ultra-Orthodox community in Rockland County, a voluntary vaccine drive mostly solved the problem. For the last 18 years, Kennedy has been a leading figure in the anti-vax movement. My principal objective is that vaccines, the childhood vaccines are immune from pre-licensing safety testing. Pharmaceutical drugs are now the third biggest killer in America after heart attacks and cancer. Oh no, I do not intend to make it easier to get drugs to market. This is a rhetorical ploy to make his vaccine fearmongering sound reasonable. The Food and Drug Administration is, if anything, overly cautious with vaccine testing. Bringing a vaccine to market generally takes 10 to 15 years and costs several billion dollars. It's ridiculous to argue vaccines are insufficiently tested. Of the 72, when I was a kid I got three vaccines. My children got 72 doses of 16 vaccines. RFK is playing fast and loose with the numbers. About 30 doses are on the childhood immunization schedule, with fewer required to attend most state's public schools. The reason he didn't get vaccines that prevent measles and mumps when he was a kid is that they didn't yet exist, which is a shame because they mostly eradicated those serious diseases in the U.S. In 1989, we experienced a chronic disease epidemic in this country and it's unlike anything in human history. I mean, neurological disease that I never saw when I was a kid, ADD, ADHD, Spatial A, Language Lake, TICS, Tourette's Syndrome, ASD, Autism, Narcolepsy, all of these suddenly appeared. Autism rates went from one in 10,000 to one in every 34. Peanut allergies suddenly appeared. Food allergies, eczema suddenly appeared, anaphylaxis and asthma, you know, which had been around, but it exploded. He's correct that food allergy, asthma, and childhood obesity rates are increasing, but there's no evidence it's caused by vaccines. RFK is once again flubbing the particulars in order to pin blame on a single culprit. Kennedy frequently mistakes correlation for causation, gets the numbers totally wrong, and portrays complex trends as simpler than they really are with easily identifiable villains. Last year, he produced the documentary Infertility, a Diabolical Agenda. It was directed by Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor who wrote a 1998 article in The Lancet presenting evidence that vaccines cause autism. Yesterday, a respected British medical journal retracted a study that said the MMR vaccine may trigger autism. Over the past 12 years, the science used to back up his conclusions has also been discredited, with more than 25 other studies finding no link between the vaccine and autism. Kennedy has frequently pointed to thimerosal, a preservative that's mercury-based and was removed from vaccines out of an abundance of caution back in 1999 as the main culprit for increasing autism rates. But thimerosal has been removed from many childhood vaccines since then, and we haven't seen autism rates trend downward. Because of vaccine skepticism, which Wakefield and Kennedy helped stoke, a measles outbreak in 2014 and 2015 and one in 2019 were caused by a drop in vaccination rates. As for the film that Kennedy and Wakefield collaborated on, it recycles long debunked myths from the 90s that tetanus vaccines administered in Kenya were deliberately laced with a hormone blocker that caused infertility. This, they say, is part of the World Health Organization's depopulation plot, but the Catholic bishops who were the source for that claim never presented conclusive evidence. Libertarians who understand the incompetence of government entities should be more skeptical that the World Health Organization would be so effective at carrying out its nefarious scheme. Kennedy has chaired Children's Health Defense for the last eight years, speaking at events all over the country on its behalf. He used his famous last name to add the veneer of respectability to the anti-vax cause. In fact, he's been focused on this single issue for decades now. In 2005, he first became obsessed with the preservatives and vaccines, writing an article for Salon on the danger of vaccine additives that needed five corrections appended to it and was later retracted, alleging a link between autism and the preservative Ethel Mercury. But what do you think happens when you get into office? Like if you're talking about your uncle who's assassinated and you believe the intelligence agencies were a part of that, what happens to you? Well, I've got to be careful and I'm aware of that and I'm aware of that danger. He's actually not a persecuted truth teller, although recent attempts to go after Rogan for having him on or to cut him out of public debate feed that myth. The real issue is that RFK Junior's bold claims don't hold up to scrutiny, even when examined by people who don't have a dog in the fight. So what would RFK Junior be like as president? Part of his appeal to libertarians, at least, is that he's staunchly anti-war and a huge critic of COVID lockdowns and mandates. But he's fundamentally a big government liberal. He supports Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal. He favors heavy-handed government intrusion in the realm of environmental policy. He's anti-nuclear energy. He wants pharmaceutical companies to burn in hell. And he seems to believe in an almost Alex Jones-esque dramatized concept of the deep state. He also favors massive wealth redistribution. I don't think these huge disparities in the world are healthy for our country or healthy for democracy. He correctly points out that government and big business have an unholy alliance. The CIA is ultimately working for industry like the oil industry, the coal industry, and the military contracts. I mean, USDA is run by Cargill, Smithfield, Monsanto, Low Pilgrim, John Tyson. But he doesn't understand that too much regulation is the root cause. He just thinks large companies are inherently bad. He says he's concerned about government spending and throws out wild figures to make his point. We spent $16 trillion on the lockdown. We wasted, got nothing for it. $8 trillion on the Ukraine war. That's $24 trillion that they had to print to pay for nothing. But he's actually no better than any establishment Republican or Democrat in his unwillingness to scale back eldercare entitlements that are actually responsible for driving the federal government into bankruptcy. I would say it's a red line for me to touch Social Security or Medicare. What's surreal about libertarians and conservatives now embracing RFK Jr. is that he's publicly fantasized about jailing his political opponents and cracking down on free speech for years. At the People's Climate March in 2014, Kennedy said this. Do I think they should be in jail? I think they should be enjoying free hots and a cot at the Hague with all the other war criminals who are there. Do I think the Koch brothers should be prosecuted for reckless and dangerous? Absolutely. The First Amendment does not protect fraudulent speech. If you say something that is fraudulent, you're not protected. It just seems like that way madness lies, because the government will always come up with a pretext for saying your speech is not just wrong, it's criminal, and you need to be shut down. Well, yeah, I don't know, but I do believe that prosecutors and judges make decisions about what's fraud all the time. He's not a real free speech advocate and he's not especially thoughtful about the principles or people he endorses. After all, this is a man who once heaped praise on the socialist dictator Hugo Chavez, touting his bogus literacy programs and commitment to democracy. So what would RFK Jr. do in the White House, and is it fair to hold 15-year-old sound bites against him, as some of his fans that I've sparred with have claimed? One thing I'll say for RFK Jr. is that unlike most politicians, he's been extraordinarily consistent in his views. He thinks the world is divided into heroes and villains, and he makes wild, unsupported claims that portray things as simpler than they really are. The difference is that he's no longer a widely ignored crackpot environmental lawyer. He's asking you to vote him into the White House.