In a past life, he was an environmental activist (although Dan Farber, whose work I admire, is a skeptic on that count, as well). But RFK, Jr. is also a prominent spreader of misinformation about Covid, vaccines, and Covid vaccines in particular. If his dangerous positions on these public health basics had been the official government policy, countless more people in this country would have died than the 1,137,057 who have died so far. Period. (Interestingly, there isn't a whisper about these issues on his official campaign website. Perhaps because media coverage has been dominated by questions about these issues to exclusion of much else on his issues list, and because just about the entire Kennedy family seems to be opposed to his positions. NYT, Aug. 6, 2023; Politico, April 19, 2023.)
FactCheck.org's SciCheck team has a three-part series on Kennedy's Covid and vaccine errors:
In our first article, Jessie addresses several of Kennedy's key talking points about vaccines in general. (See "FactChecking Robert F. Kennedy Jr.")
In a second article, Staff Writer Kate Yandell goes deep into some of his go-to arguments about vaccines and autism. (See "What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About Autism.")
[In] the third and final article, Staff Writer Catalina Jaramillo and Kate tackle Kennedy's numerous claims about the COVID-19 pandemic, many of which we’ve written about before and may be familiar to you already.
All three articles can be found on this page.
