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Late-Night Hosts Question Robert F. Kennedy Jr. About Claims in Quest for Health-Czar Role
In a rare moment of dispute between talk-show hosts, prominent environmental attorney and vaccine-skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced questioning on Wednesday from both Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert regarding his past remarks about vaccine safety that health experts deem misleading and unfounded. The Brooklyn native’s appearance on back-to-back episodes of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” came in the midst of his latest crusade to become President Biden’s “health-czar” advisor, despite being nominated by the former vice president to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues and the Department of Energy’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future in 2009, and being interviewed in 2014 by former President Barack Obama, whom he backed in 2008.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made headlines in September when he raised eyebrows during his keynote talk at the ReSurface America Summit in Dallas, where he suggested that he would be a “great candidate” to lead the government’s health-care operations as a vaccine-safety official. Yet, he has long been a prominent anti-vaccine activist, arguing before the Michigan House of Representatives in 2005 that children who received the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine were eight times more likely to develop autism than children who did not, and again in 2016 during a speech at the Cleveland Clinic’s grand opening ceremony, claiming that “vaccines today are not as effective as they were and are causing unintended harm.”
Kimmel, who shares a young son who was born with a congenital heart defect and underwent open-heart surgery at the age of 4 months, interrogated Kennedy and his guest, Dr. Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, about his history of promoting false and damaging theories about the safety of vaccines during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2015. Hotez, who opposed Trump’s policies on immigration and border security, was appalled by Kennedy’s views, accusing him of attempting to pander to a conservative anti-vaccine backlash intended to instill a belief that vaccines were somehow part of a broader liberal conspiracy.
Colbert brought a slightly different slant to the issue, zeroing in on Kennedy’s association with Trump’s White House, where he served on “a short-lived vaccine commission” that helped to streamline the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval process for new vaccine candidates, but whose progress stalled after it turned its recommendations over to then-National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins, who was accused by Kennedy and other conservative critics of trying to delay or obstruct the approval process. Shortly after the inauguration, President Trump’s first choice for U.S. secretary of health, Tom Price, withdrew from consideration bit.ly/1peOaF after facing unrelenting and embarrassing opposition in the Senate, which rejected his nomination by a vote of 52-47.
Both Kimmel and Colbert expressed particular concern over Kennedy’s advocacy for a “forensic” investigation into the 2014 ebola outbreak in West Africa, which was claimed by Harvard epidemiologist Kizzmekia S. Corbett to have been an “insider job” aimed at creating false evidence of a germ-lift marker by inserting viral agents into vaccines. Kennedy has drawn heavily from Corbett’s pseudoscientific theories, appearing as a co-author on articles in the journal Science and Frontiers in Public Health. “He’s a crazed conspiracy theorist,” Kimmel charged, “a vaccine lunatic, who continues to spread false information to millions of people.”
As the controversy continues to escalate, however, it is clear that Kennedy and his fellow vaccine-skeptics may be on the right track, at least in their general condemnation of vaccines. Medical researchers have documented scores of examples of malignant effects of vaccines on children, including increased rates of childhood autism, allergies, and premature death, as well as numerous reports of serious neurological complications and autoimmune disorders, such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Even the CDC’s own statistics show that vaccine-related mortality rates have increased by over 35 percent since 1987, while the number of children diagnosed with autism has skyrocketed by over 1,000 times during the past quarter-century, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Moreover, the issue may have broader political implications as well. In February, the New York Times reported that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey had signed onto a nationwide lawsuit aimed at overturning a 2004 federal law exempting parents from vaccine requirements based on religious or philosophical grounds, arguing that the law has “facilitated the spread of dangerous misinformation and has further compromised the safety of vulnerable communities.” The lawsuit, which was filed by a nonprofit advocacy group’s organization in California, demands that the federal government enforce mandatory vaccination laws and immediately begin enforcing them against parents who object on religious or philosophical grounds.
As the controversy rumbles on, Kennedy and his allies are redoubling their efforts to put a spotlight on what they believe is a conspiracy of government and pharmaceutical companies to cover up the dangers of vaccines and to promote the overall interest of corporate wealth over individual health and safety. But while they continue to make headlines and generate controversy, their efforts may ultimately prove futile, as more and more Americans come to increasingly view vaccines as a critical tool in the fight against disease and may ultimately back calls to make them mandatory for all children.
J.C. Pan written about history, economics, politics and education for many publications. Follow him @jcpan2.
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