Is RFK Jr. "anti-vax"?

In his own words

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has frequently been called “anti-vax” by the media:

Some recent headlines about RFK Jr.

There’s no doubt that Kennedy has been critical of at least some vaccines; including, most recently, the COVID vaccines.

But is he actually “anti-vax”? Is he against all vaccines?

Instead of relying on media headlines, let’s hear what he has said about this.

Interviews

Let’s start with an interview he gave on April 2023. At around 48:37, he was asked about vaccines:

Excerpts (emphases my own):

INTERVIEWER: You’ve been opposed to vaccines for a long time, very heavily critical of the COVID vaccines.

KENNEDY: That’s not true.

INTERVIEWER: Well you’re not a vaccine denier, but you are very, very skeptical, a very public voice of skepticism about the efficacy of vaccines, would that be fair?

KENNEDY: What I’ve said is vaccines… I’m not anti-vaccine. I think vaccines should be subject to the same level of rigorous testing as other medications. And that is the only thing- my only position. Listen, I fought to get mercury out of fish for forty years and nobody called me anti-fish. I’m not anti-vaccine because I want safe vaccines. And I think everybody wants safe vaccines. And as we all now recognize the COVID vaccines were neither safe nor effective.

That was a recent interview, but what about in the past? Was he anti-vaccine then?

Here’s an interview from 2017:

INTERVIEWER: So this is such a taboo subject that I think a lot of people would hesitate to even bring it up but I’ve read a lot that you’ve written on it. I don’t agree with all of it but I don’t think you’re crazy. You’re not anti-vaccine, you say you’ve vaccinated your own children but you have concerns. Tell me first what the reaction is when you tell people you’re skeptical of the vaccine regimen of the United States.

KENNEDY: Well like you said I’m pro-vaccine and I’ve never said anything anti-vaccine, but I read the science and the science is very clear that some of the vaccines- and what you have to understand is that the vaccine regimen changed dramatically around 1989- the reason it changed… is that Congress, drowning in pharmaceutical money, did something they never did for any other industry.

They gave blanket legal immunity to all the vaccine companies so that… no matter how absent the quality control, no matter how toxic the ingredients or egregious the injury to your child, you cannot sue them. So there’s no depositions, there’s no discovery, there’s no class actions suits. All of a sudden vaccines became enormously profitable…

I got three vaccines… I’m sixty-three years old. My children got sixty-nine doses of sixteen vaccines to be compliant. And a lot of these vaccines aren’t even for communicable- casually communicable diseases- like hepatitis B, which comes from unprotected sex or sharing needles. Why do we give that to a child the first day of their life? And it was loaded with mercury.

INTERVIEWER: And we do give that to children.

KENNEDY: We continue to give it to them. Mercury has been taken out of three vaccines in this country, but it remains in the flu vaccine- 48 million flu vaccines- and it’s in vaccines all over the world…

Later on Kennedy says:

I’m called anti-vax all the time because the pharmaceutical industry is so powerful… they give 5.4 billion dollars a year to the media, and… they’ve gotten to the lawyers so there’s no legal interest in those cases, and they really have controlled the debate and silenced people like me…

In this interview from 2015 he again says similar things; that he considers himself '“pro-vaccine,” and says “vaccines do save lives”:

Stay tuned till the end of the video by the way, when he gets into a debate with a doctor the show brings on. Judge for yourself who did better in that debate.

The Children’s Health Defense website

Let’s also look at the website of the Children’s Health Defense, where RFK Jr. serves as Chairman.

There’s something called “The Vaccine Safety Project” on their website where RFK Jr. mentions his views on vaccines in a video:

From the transcript:

I want to start by saying that I am fiercely pro-vaccine. I had all six of my children vaccinated. I believe that vaccines have saved millions of lives.

He goes on to say:

But I want vaccines that are as safe as possible, I want science that is robust and I want to make sure that we have a regulatory agency that has unquestioned integrity and freedom of conflicts of interest and we don’t have those things today.

This seems consistent with what he’s been saying in interviews.

Has RFK Jr ever contradicted himself on vaccines?

On the Children’s Health Defense site, Kennedy’s statement on vaccines says, “I believe that vaccines have saved millions of lives.”

There is some tension between this, and something he says in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci. In chapter 9 of his book, Kennedy says that the dogma that vaccines have saved millions of lives, is not true:

A doctrinal canon of germ theory credits vaccines for the dramatic declines of infectious disease mortalities in North America and Europe during the twentieth century. Anthony Fauci, for example, routinely proclaims that vaccines eliminated mortalities from the infectious diseases of the early twentieth century, saving millions of lives... Most Americans accept this claim as dogma. It will therefore come as a surprise to learn that it is simply untrue.

Science actually gives the honor of having vanquished infectious disease mortalities to nutrition and sanitation. A comprehensive study of this foundational assertion published in 2000 in the high-gravitas journal Pediatrics by CDC and Johns Hopkins scientists concluded, after reviewing a century of medical data, that “vaccination does not account for the impressive decline in mortality from infectious diseases… in the 20th century.”

He mentions another widely cited study which found that “all medical interventions including vaccines, surgeries, and antibiotics accounted for less than about 1 percent- and no more than 3.5 percent- of the dramatic mortality declines.”

So in this area, there is some tension between some of Kennedy’s statements.

Now, maybe he believes vaccines have saved “millions of lives,” but not as many as popularly thought. Or maybe he doesn’t really believe that vaccines have saved millions of lives. Or maybe he once believed this, but has since changed his mind.¹

This is something that only Kennedy can answer.

So how should we think of RFK Jr?

It’s clear that Kennedy has called into question the safety of certain vaccines, and has said that we do not have a regulatory system that is conducive to producing safe vaccines.

Does this make him “anti-vax”?

• He’s explicitly said that he’s not “anti-vaccine.”

• He’s said that he wants “safe vaccines.”

• He’s said that he thinks vaccines should be subject to the same level of rigorous testing as other medications.

At the very least, it seems clear from his statements that Kennedy isn’t against the idea of vaccines and believes that vaccines could be safe.

When it comes to particular vaccines that are available to the public, it’s unclear which, if any, Kennedy would recommend, given that he thinks we don’t have a trustworthy regulatory system. Maybe he wouldn’t recommend any of them, or maybe he’d only recommend a few of them. Maybe he thinks that some of the earlier vaccines are safe, before vaccines were given a liability shield in the late 1980s. Again, only Kennedy can answer this.

Regardless, I encourage you to judge him by his own words, instead of relying on what the media says about him.

1. Speaking of changing minds: Kennedy has mentioned that he’s gotten all his kids vaccinated. Presumably this was all before he got interested in vaccines and learned of their safety issues. It’s possible that, given what he knows today, he would not vaccinate his kids, or at least limit the number of vaccines they got. It’s easy to imagine that this is something he’s changed his mind about.