RFK Jr.’s vaccine misinformation campaign started after he ignored a Philly doctor

Paul Offit was surprised to hear Robert F. Kennedy’s voice when he picked up the phone at his office at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“He said he wanted to avail himself of my expertise,” said Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at CHOP, and coinventor of the rotavirus vaccine, which attacks the virus that can lead to fatal diarrhea in children, recalling the conversation 20 years ago.

Kennedy, 70, son of the slain senator and attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, had heard that thimerosal, a mercury-based vaccine preservative, could cause autism. “I assured him it was untrue — that it had been removed from all vaccines by 2001,” Offit said in an interview last week.

“We hung up and I said to my wife, ‘I think I really reassured him,’” Offit, 73, added. “I started kidding that I’d soon be tossing a football around with the Kennedys in Hyannis Port,” the site of the Kennedy family compound in Massachusetts.

But Kennedy, now a candidate for president as his father had been, didn’t proffer any invitations.

“Instead,” said Offit, the author of 13 books on vaccines and related topics, “he stabbed me in the back. He sandbagged me.

“And he became a bona fide source of disinformation — falsely saying vaccines cause autism — ever since.”

How Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, became an internationally known anti-vaccine advocate may have started, in part, with that phone call. And he’s ridden his reputation as a contrarian who supports conspiracy theories and espouses misinformation about vaccines, antidepressants and other topics into an independent candidacy for president.

That he’s currently garnering support from 10% of voters in Pennsylvania and in other swing states, according to a recent Philadelphia Inquirer/New York Times/Siena College poll, shows that Kennedy may possess enough influence to tip the balance of the election.

Offit said that seeing Kennedy ascend to the national stage worries him:

“He has a platform created by his father, and he can put people in harm’s way for saying that safe vaccines should be avoided.

“RFK Jr.,” Offit concluded, “is a dangerous man.”

Kennedy’s team did not comment after receiving a list of questions that it had requested.

According to Offit, Kennedy contorted the pediatrician’s words in an article Kennedy wrote soon after their conversation called “Deadly Immunity,” which appeared in Salon and Rolling Stone in 2005.

Much of the premise was based on the purported link between vaccines and autism written in 1998 in the British medical journal The Lancet. Not only was that work later retracted for containing faulty data, it was branded an outright fraud in 2011.

In his article, Kennedy claimed that the vaccine Offit created had been “laced” with thimerosal, even after Offit had told Kennedy that “not a bit” of the compound was used. Kennedy also baselessly asserted that Offit was “in the pocket” of the pharmaceutical industry. Offit said his work has been underwritten by the federal government only.

The article contained so many inaccuracies that, in 2011, Salon retracted it and Rolling Stone deleted it.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stated, “Scientific research does not show a connection between thimerosal and autism.” In fact, in the years since thimerosal had been removed from all childhood vaccines, the rate of autism continued to rise, according to SciCheck, part of FactCheck.org, a self-described “consumer advocate” for voters, and a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Nevertheless, the notion that vaccines hurt more than they help has lodged itself in the minds of many Americans.

Since the pandemic started, Kennedy has called COVID-19 vaccination shots “crimes against humanity.” And last July, Kennedy suggested that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

PolitiFact, which checks the accuracy of public statements for the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies, assigned the quote the designation “Pants on Fire,” meaning it’s “inaccurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”

Kennedy’s remarks against vaccines “resonate with people who want to believe conspiracy narratives,” Sunil Wattal, professor of management information systems at Temple University’s Fox School of Business, said in an interview. “But if you have a lot of followers and say unverified things, it can hurt people.”

Offit believes Kennedy did just that in Samoa in 2018.

Administering the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) to infants, nurses mistakenly mixed it with muscle relaxer rather than saline, killing two of the children, Offit said.

In 2019, Kennedy flew to Samoa, met with government officials and, along with other like-minded advocates, “flooded the area with misinformation” about vaccines, according to FactCheck.org.

Vaccinations were temporarily halted, 5,600 people contracted measles, and 83 children died.

FactCheck.org concluded: “Kennedy ... played a part in one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent memory.”

Kennedy has denied culpability, saying in the 2023 documentary Shot in the Arm: “I had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa. I never told anybody not to vaccinate. I didn’t ... go there for any reason to do with that.”

In 2018, Kennedy created Children’s Health Defense, a legal advocacy group that works to battle “the chronic disease crisis” facing children. As he runs for president, Kennedy is on leave from the nonprofit, which took in $16 million in 2021, according to the latest available figures. Kennedy’s salary was listed as $510,515 in 2020, nonprofit statements show.

CHD has been widely denounced.

In 2021, both Kennedy and the nonprofit were listed among the “Disinformation Dozen” by the Center for Countering Digital Hate for “spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation online.”

The pandemic helped make Kennedy a “powerful voice for misinformation,” said Jessica Myrick, a media studies professor at Pennsylvania State University. Myrick said he seems credible because he “doesn’t come across as someone wearing a tinfoil hat at first.”

Along with his autism propaganda, Kennedy — disavowed by his own family — has falsely said that antidepressants cause mass shootings and that chemicals in the water supply could “turn” children transgender. He has insisted that no childhood vaccines “have ever been tested in a safety study prelicensing and that the CDC, as well as the FDA and the World Health Organization, colluded with vaccine manufacturers to conceal data. Like his current rival for the White House, Donald Trump, he falsely said in 2020 that hydroxychloroquine is effective against COVID-19.

“I doubt he believes this stuff,” nursing professor Melanie Kornides from the Penn School of Nursing said in an interview. “I think he’s a politically savvy person who found that controversy works for him.”

Kornides, who specializes in combating medical misinformation, said that Offit is her mentor, and that “RFK Jr. brought anti-vaxxers against him, who sent letters and made three death threats.”

Offit, who concluded he was an “easy target” whom Kennedy used to arouse interest, said Kennedy “should apologize for endangering people, for putting my family at risk, and for just not seeming to give a damn.”

Staff writer Ryan Briggs contributed to this article.