Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was building up a following with his anti-vaccine nonprofit group, Children’s Health Defense , and becoming one of the world’s most influential spreaders of fear and distrust around vaccines.
Now, President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which regulates vaccines. Kennedy has long advanced the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism . He has also pushed other conspiracy theories, such as that COVID-19 could have been “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, comments he later said were taken out of context.
He has repeatedly brought up the Holocaust when discussing vaccines and public health mandates . No medical intervention is risk-free. But doctors and researchers have proven that risks from disease are generally far greater than the risks from vaccines.
Vaccines have been proven to be safe and effective in laboratory testing and in real world use in hundreds of millions of people over decades — they are considered among the most effective public health measures in history. Kennedy has insisted that he is not anti-vaccine , saying he only wants vaccines to be rigorously tested, but he also has shown opposition to a wide range of immunizations. Kennedy said in a 2023 podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told Fox News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea th.