Is RFK Jr an anti-vaxxer?
Shared by The Real Truther on Twitter, adding it here for my own future reference
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
RFK Jr.'s Claims About Vaccines
They took that child to the pediatrician when he's two years old, he sees all the milestones and they get the shot. That night they have a fever 103 and they go into sleep three months later. And yet they try to say they are holocaust deniers. This is a holocaust. A million, 3.8 million ASD and tens of millions around the world where we're selling it poisoning people all over Africa and Asia and these countries all over the world. And it is a holocaust.
[Interviewer/Reporter]
If your kids were young now, would you give them the measles, the mumps vaccine?
RFK Jr.'s Stance on Vaccinating His Own Children
No.
[Narrator]
Right away, RFK is saying he wouldn't vaccinate his kids for measles. He's against the MMR vaccine, but how does that hold up against his previous statements?
[00:01:00]
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
I haven't seen years. I'm not anti-vaccine. You're not anti-vaccine. You say you vaccinate your own children. I had all my children vaccinated. I was fully vaccinated. I'm pro-vaccine. I've never said anything anti-vaccine. I have never been anti-vax. I have never told the public avoid vaccination.
[Narrator]
RFK Jr.'s Contradictory Statements on Vaccines
But in a 2021 podcast for Health Freedom for Humanity, RFK did just that.
[Unidentified Person]
I see somebody on a hiking trail with a carrying a little baby and I say to him, I better not get him vaccinated. And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won't do it. Maybe he will save that child.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
We created an entire generation with all these allergies by giving them these early vaccines. I have always been fiercely pro-vaccine. I had all six of my children vaccinated, and I believe that we ought to have policies that encourage full vaccination for all Americans.
[Andrew Wakefield]
You said, quote, there's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective. Do you still believe that?
[00:02:00]
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
I never said that. There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.
[Narrator]
Measles Statistics and Complications
Okay, starting off with some inconsistencies. Let's see what he has to say about measles.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
I got measles mumps when I was a kid. It was lots of people die from them, used to die from those. Well, you know what? They died in the 1900s or early 1900s. There were about 10,000 Americans a year. In 1964, there was about three or 400 who died.
[Narrator]
Pre-vaccination each year in the United States, measles led to 400 to 500 deaths, 48,000 hospitalizations and 1000 cases of encephalitis, which is swelling of the brain. 25% of the people who survive measles related encephalitis will suffer permanent neurological damage. And this is before talking about other complications like ear infections, which occur in about one of every 10 children with measles and can result in permanent hearing loss. Prior to vaccination, the measles virus accounted for five to 10% of cases of profound hearing loss in the United States. As many as one out of every 20 children with measles get pneumonia, the most common cause of death from measles in young children.
[00:03:01]
There's SSPE, which is a devastating measles complication that affects one in 609 infants who acquire measles. And it happens years after infection and is almost always fatal.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
RFK Jr.'s Misleading Claims About Measles Deaths
In 1964, there was about three or 400 who died and they were almost all malnourished kids, mainly from the Mississippi Delta. This was before the poverty program. So there was a lot of starving children in our country.
[Narrator]
Most of the measles deaths in 1964 were not children from the Mississippi Delta. Very, very hard to kill a healthy child with any infectious disease, but particularly with measles. The 1991 measles outbreak in Philadelphia killed nine children. They were not unhealthy or malnourished. They were unvaccinated. In 1962, one year before the first measles vaccine, author Raoul Dahl's healthy seven-year-old daughter died from encephalitis from a measles infection. The measles death rate has always been about one in a thousand. In the last big U.S. outbreaks between 89 and 92, there were 57,859 cases of measles during this time and 127 deaths, working out to almost exactly two deaths per thousand cases of measles.
[00:04:07]
We look at Europe in 2017, around one death per 1,200 cases in Italy and one death per 400 cases throughout the European Union. Europe in 2018-19, over 100,000 cases and 90 deaths in 47 of 53 countries. From 2000 to 2017, we saw an 80% decrease in global measles deaths thanks to vaccination. In the years following the licensure of the vaccine in 1963, the incidence of measles decreased by more than 95% in the United States. As for the risks of the disease versus the vaccine, there really is no contest.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
Vitamin A and Measles
The World Health Organization now says vitamin A is an absolute cure for measles, which we didn't know about back then.
[Narrator]
The WHO has never said that vitamin A is a cure for measles. In fact, they say there is no treatment or specific antiviral therapy for measles. But vitamin A supplements should be given to children with measles, as it can help prevent eye damage, blindness and or death.
[00:05:00]
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
Survivorship Bias and Measles
Every single kid got it and I had 11 brothers and sisters and we all got it and we were all fine.
[Narrator]
Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed the selection process while overlooking those that did not.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
The False Claim of Measles Leading to Better Health
And there are lots and lots of studies out there now that show that kids who get measles as a child are much healthier when they grow up.
[Narrator]
While there's no evidence to this claim, we do know that measles can cause immune amnesia, where measles can weaken immunity versus other infections for years after illness. And of course, if you die from measles, you don't grow up.
The Samoa Measles Outbreak
You went to Samoa, an outbreak resulted in 83 deaths.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
The Prime Minister of Samoa stayed the measles vaccine after it. Measles vaccines killed a number of people in Samoa, including members of his family.
[Narrator]
So when I went to Samoa, the ban was already in place. Prior to the outbreak, Samoa had notoriously low vaccine rates with data from the WHO and UNICEF estimating the country's national immunization coverage fell from 74% to 34% between 2017 and 2018.
[00:06:03]
At the time, the country was involved in a medical scandal involving the deaths of two Samoan infants who received improperly prepared MMR vaccines, which were administered by local nurses. Following the July 2018 deaths, the government halted its MMR immunization program until April 2019 while it investigated it. In early 2019, two nurses were sentenced to five years in jail for negligently preparing the vaccines by using a muscle relaxant instead of water to reconstitute them.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
RFK Jr.'s Involvement in Samoa
And I visited people in Samoa. I didn't make a, I didn't, no, there was no policy that resulted from my going to Samoa.
[Narrator]
During the time in which Vax coverage was dropping in Samoa, RFK visited the nation in June 2019 to help anti-vax advocates there who had been using the death of those two infants to help cause the drop in vax rates. He had a meeting with Taylor Winterstein, a well-known Samoan Australian anti-vax advocate. He even met with the Samoan prime minister to discuss his views on vaccines. In a 2021 interview with the Samoa Observer, RFK discusses the meeting with the prime minister and that he had personally concluded that the prime minister had doubts about a national immunization program after seeing what he believed was an adverse medical reaction to a vaccine.
[00:07:13]
RFK does admit that him and the prime minister had talked a limited amount about vaccines. He claimed the prime minister was curious to measure health outcomes following the natural experiment without vaccines. Samoa's choice had infuriated the global medical cartel, he wrote. These statements conflict with a later interview when pressed about his role in the Samoa measles outbreak.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
I never talked to the prime minister of Samoa about anything to do with vaccination.
[Narrator]
RFK Jr.'s False Claims About the Samoa Outbreak
Even worse, during the outbreak, RFK's group wrote to the prime minister and promoted his conspiracy theory that it was the vaccine not inadequate vaccine coverage that caused the outbreak.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
Nobody died in Samoa from measles, they were dying from a bad vaccine and the vaccine was imported from Australia and given to people who had measles which is not recommended.
[00:08:05]
[Narrator]
Now this is just an absolute lie. In August 2019, an infected passenger on one of the more than 8,000 annual flights between New Zealand and Samoa brought the disease from Auckland to Yupolu. A full outbreak began in October 2019 and continued for the next few months. The outbreak began before the vaccine campaign. Not to mention measles in Samoa was the D8 strain, a wild type measles virus which are naturally occurring and non-mutated as opposed to the attenuated or weakened strains found in vaccines. The outbreak was wild measles and here we have RFK lying that it was caused by the vaccine. The measles strain used to make the vaccine is different from the D8 strain that caused measles cases in Samoa. The vaccine strain does not cause measles disease. It has never been detected circulating the population during any outbreak and there's never been an outbreak in human history caused by the MMR vaccine.
The 2015 Disneyland Measles Outbreak
Now this wasn't the first measles outbreak where RFK had spread some questionable information.
[00:09:02]
Let's take you back to the 2015 measles outbreak in Southern California where 131 were infected 10 to 20 percent of which were hospitalized.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
Where is the measles coming from in the Disneyland outbreak? 39 percent of the kids who got measles a vaccine strain measles. What does that mean? It means they either got it from the vaccine or they got it from somebody who had the vaccine.
[Narrator]
During outbreaks the measles vaccine is administered to help control the outbreak and in those situations vaccine reactions may be mistakenly classified as measles cases. What the California Department of Public Health reported were recently vaccinated people who developed a febrile rash which is a common side effect of the MMR vaccine. This is not vaccine strain measles as it's a weakened form of the virus which does not spread or cause outbreaks and it also doesn't cause the severe consequences you can get from the actual measles virus.
The Success of the Measles Campaign in Samoa
The majority of the 83 deaths in Samoa were children under the age of four and none of the deaths were fully vaccinated with the MMR vaccine.
[00:10:02]
UNICEF delivered over 110,000 measles vaccines to Samoa and over 134,000 were vaccinated representing over half the population of Samoa. And finally what happened after the measles campaign in Samoa began on November 20th? You guessed it, the measles cases dropped dramatically because vaccines work. After over 130,000 vaccinations only one adverse related event occurred. One child was treated and fully recovered. No vaccine deaths, no cases of overnight autism.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
The Tonga Measles Outbreak
The same measles outbreak hit Tonga as the neighboring island and nobody died because they didn't get the vaccine.
[Narrator]
The reason that countries surrounding Samoa had minimal cases and zero deaths during the measles outbreak in 2019 was simply because they had higher vaccine rates. Preceding the outbreak the coverage of the MMR in Tonga was around 95 percent. RFK also lies that Tonga didn't receive the same vaccines as Samoa.
[00:11:03]
UNICEF actually delivered almost 20,000 measles vaccines to Tonga and through domestic and internationally coordinated efforts 44,605 individuals under the age of 24 were vaccinated by January 2020. Once again the vaccine didn't cause deaths, measles did.
The Impact of Age and Vaccination on Measles Deaths
And here's the clincher. Most of the children who died in Samoa from measles were under the age of four. In fact children aged 6 to 11 months were the most highly affected by the outbreak. These are the exact ages of children who were either too young to be vaccinated or who would have missed their vaccinations when the government paused the vaccine program. Contrast that with Tonga where most of the cases were aged 10 to 24 years old and in one specific island. Young children and babies in Tonga were protected by herd immunity from vaccination. It was a completely different outbreak than in Samoa. Nobody died in Samoa from measles.
[00:12:01]
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
They were dying from a bad vaccine.
[News Reporter]
Paolo and Faoso Tuivalepuedua are a young couple and until recently had five children. Now there's just the two older boys left, Edison and Louis. The family is sitting and praying on the fresh grave of three little ones that lost to measles. They weren't immunized.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
RFK Jr.'s Dismissal of Criticism
This is more propaganda by the pharmaceutical industry which is you know drumming up a lie who try to discredit me.
[Interviewer/Reporter]
Yeah cool story RFK. You still say that autism is caused by vaccines? Yeah autism is caused by vaccines.
[Narrator]
Vaccines and Autism: Debunking the Myth
Vaccines and autism. Let's break it down with first principles thinking and start off with the origin of the claim. One of the first claims that vaccines might cause autism was made in the book A Shot in the Dark by Harris Coulter and Barbara Lowe Fisher in 1991.
[00:13:02]
At the time very little attention was paid to this assertion. In 1998 Andrew Wakefield and 12 of his colleagues published a case series in the Lancet suggesting that the MMR vaccine may predispose children to autism. Despite the small sample size of 12 children, the uncontrolled design, the speculative nature of the conclusions, the paper still caused a firestorm in the media leading to more than 12,000 cases of measles, hundreds of hospitalizations, many with serious complications, and at least three deaths. All of this attributed to parents' fears after the publication of Wakefield's infamous paper. Later it turned out that Wakefield had failed to disclose financial interest. He had been funded by lawyers who had been engaged by parents in lawsuits against the vaccine producing companies. Wakefield was paid more than 400,000 pounds by lawyers trying to prove that the vaccine was unsafe and he had not disclosed this conflict of interest.
[Anderson Cooper]
You did have a lawsuit against manufacturers of the MMR vaccine, didn't you? I mean didn't you have a financial conflict of interest?
[00:14:02]
[Andrew Wakefield]
If I could just answer Anderson, the paper that was published in the Lancet received not one cent of funding from lawyers or litigants.
[Anderson Cooper]
Did you not have a financial interest though? Did you disclose that you were being paid by a law firm?
[Andrew Wakefield]
I disclosed in the relevant paper that I was an expert in MMR vaccine litigation, yes.
[Anderson Cooper]
You did disclose you were being paid though for a possible lawsuit against the vaccine makers that you were developing a patent for an alternate vaccine.
[Andrew Wakefield]
The purpose of this paper was nothing to do with the litigation.
[Narrator]
In February 2010, the Lancet completely retracted the paper. He was found guilty of deliberate fraud. In May of 2010, he was struck off the United Kingdom medical register losing his license. Journalist Brian Deer unearthed clear evidence of falsification in Wakefield's paper.
[Brian Deer]
Brian Deer's Investigation into Andrew Wakefield's Fraud
Dr. Wakefield, I'm sorry to interrupt Brian Deer Channel 4 television. Could I talk to you about your research and your commercial ambitions?
[Narrator]
He found that not one of the 12 cases reported in the Lancet paper was free of misrepresentation or undisclosed alteration and that no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, the diagnosis or the histories published in the journal.
[00:15:09]
[Andrew Wakefield]
My recommendation was that children continue to be vaccinated and I suggested the option of the single vaccine.
[Narrator]
Even more shocking, Brian Deer's investigation revealed that in June 1997, Wakefield had filed a patent for a supposedly safer single measles vaccine, giving him motive to discredit the MMR vaccine which he blamed for autism. Wakefield was given multiple opportunities to replicate the paper's findings or to say he was mistaken. He declined to do both. Wakefield was also held guilty of ethical violations. He had conducted invasive investigations on the children without obtaining the necessary ethical clearances yet subjected the children to unpleasant procedures including lumbar punctures and colonoscopies they did not need. He also took blood samples from several children in the study while at his son's birthday party without ethical permission. So what does RFK Jr think of Andrew Wakefield, author of one of the most damaging medical hoaxes of the last 100 years, named in Time Magazine in a list of great science frauds?
[00:16:08]
A man responsible for causing panic in the UK and all over the world, responsible for children's preventable illnesses, hospitalizations, even deaths. What does RFK think of this man?
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
In any just society, we would be building statues to Andy Wakefield.
[Narrator]
Correlation vs. Causation: Vaccines and Autism
Next, does a rise in vaccines correlate to a rise in autism? In the last 24 years outside of COVID in 2021, only one new vaccine for a new disease has been licensed in the United States for children under the age of 10 and that vaccine is the rotavirus which was licensed in 2006. Now keep in mind mercury was removed from childhood vaccines in 2001 yet reported autism rates continue to rise. So if the rise is real and caused by rising environmental factors, it's highly unlikely that it's vaccines. Now if you want to look at a more perfect correlation to autism, take a look at organic food sales.
[00:17:03]
Someone needs to investigate this. There's a reason we say correlation doesn't equal causation.
The Rise in Autism Diagnoses
Is the rise in autism real? Are we seeing a rise in people with autism or are we just seeing a rise in people diagnosed with autism?
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
We just weren't noticing it before. But if we weren't noticing it before and we're now down to 1 in 68 kids, where are all the 30-year-old autism?
[Narrator]
In 2011, researchers in England compared rates of autism in children to adults and concluded the rates were similar. In 2014, researchers published a paper that studied the global burden of autism. They found there was no clear evidence of a change in prevalence for autistic disorder or other ASDs between 1990 and 2010. In 2015, researchers published a study that looked at over 1 million children born in Sweden from 1993 to 2002. The number of children diagnosed with autism increased significantly, but the number of children who actually displayed symptoms remained stable.
[00:18:06]
In 2015, scientists at Penn State University published a paper that analyzed 11 years of special education data, an average of 6.2 million people per year. The researchers found no overall increase in the number of students enrolled in special ed from 2000 through 2010. They also discovered the increase in students diagnosed with autism was offset by a nearly equal decrease in students diagnosed with other intellectual disabilities that often co-occur with autism. In 2016, researchers studied the effects of ASD insurance mandates on the treated prevalence of autism. They concluded that implementing state ASD insurance mandates resulted in increases in the number of children diagnosed with ASD and those numbers increased each year after implementation. In 2017, researchers published a paper that estimated that 2.21 percent of adults over 18 in the United States have autism, which was consistent with estimates of autism in U.S. school-aged children. A 2018 study from Denmark showed that rates of autism in 1980 were similar to today when you account for those diagnosed after the age of 10 into adulthood.
[00:19:08]
And finally, what does the science say? Dozens of large-scale studies around the world have shown no correlation between vaccines and autism. In this meta-analysis, the gold standard of scientific evidence, five cohort studies involving over 1.2 million children and five case control studies involving almost 10,000 children were included and found no relationship between vaccination and autism. This 2019 nationwide cohort study of over 650,000 children, which once again show the MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism, included a fully unvaccinated group versus vaccinated. No difference in autism rates. One of the best studies of the MMR in autism was performed in Denmark between 1991 and 1998. The study included over 530,000 children representing over 2.1 million person-years of study. The risk of autism in the group of vaccinated children was the same as that in unvaccinated children. There was no association between the age at the time of vaccination, the time since vaccination, or the date of vaccination and the development of autism.
[00:20:05]
The Genetic Basis of Autism
So what is causing autism? A recent large-scale study published in 2019, five countries, over two million participants found 22,156 diagnosed with autism, which is about one in 90. The study discovered that autism is over 80% inherited from genetic factors.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
RFK Jr.'s Analogy to the Holocaust
No, so I can't tell you why somebody would do something like that. I can't tell you why a poor American was participating in the Holocaust. I can't tell you what was going on through the lines of justifications they used.
The Misrepresentation of the British Ratner Study
CDC's own data, they did a study called the British Ratner study in 1989, and they looked at the hepatitis B vaccine.
[00:21:06]
They looked at children, and from the biggest database in the world, the Vaccine Safety Datalink, they looked at children who got the hepatitis B vaccine during their first 30 days, and they compared those to kids who got it later or didn't get it at all. And there was a 1,350% elevated risk for autism among the people who got the vaccine.
RFK Jr.'s "Deadly Immunity" Article and Its Retraction
There may well be.
[Narrator]
There wasn't. RFK actually began his anti-vaccine advocacy back in 2005 when he published an article entitled, Deadly Immunity. It appeared simultaneously in Rolling Stone and Salon Magazine and alleged a large conspiracy that the CDC was hiding information that vaccines cause autism, specifically with thimerosal containing vaccines. In the article, Kennedy claims that the location for this CDC conference was chosen because it was nestled in wooded farmland to ensure complete secrecy.
[00:22:00]
In reality, the location was chosen because a series of previously scheduled conferences had booked up all of the hotel rooms within 50 miles of Atlanta. In order to shape his conspiracy theory that the CDC was covering up the truth about vaccines and autism, Kennedy relied on the 286-page transcript of the Simpsonwood meeting to sell his story. But whenever the transcript didn't actually tell the story that he wanted to tell, he simply cut and pasted until things came out right. In multiple times in the RFK switched when people said certain statements and flipped them around so it appeared that there was more of a conspiracy to hide the truth. The article was heavily criticized for doing things like quoting material out of context and both Rolling Stone and Salon eventually amended the story with corrections in response to these and other criticisms. This included a glaring error where RFK claimed in the article that the amount of mercury children received from thimerosal containing vaccines was 187 times higher than the EPA's limit for methylmercury exposure. This was false. On January 16, 2011, Salon announced that it was retracting the article.
[00:23:01]
But much like Wakefield before him, the damage was done. In September 2007, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions rejected allegations of any impropriety against the CDC. Addressing Kennedy's statement, the committee found that instead of hiding the Simpsonwood data or restricting access to it, the CDC distributed the data often to individuals who had never seen it before and solicited outside opinion regarding how to interpret it. The transcript of the discussions was made available to the public. So much for a conspiracy to hide the truth.
Thimerosal in Vaccines and Autism
But what about RFK's claims about thimerosal in vaccines and its potential link to autism? In RFK's article, Kennedy completely ignored the Institute of Medicine and their immunization safety review on thimerosal published the previous year which found no safety concerns regarding the link to autism. Kennedy also ignored the nine studies funded or conducted by the CDC that have taken place since 2003. Now, RFK is right that the CDC did do a study by Thomas Vestraten on thimerosal and vaccination. In 1999, Vestraten and three colleagues submitted an abstract for the EIS conference presenting results from the early stages of a two-phase study.
[00:24:07]
It was preliminary as many such submitted abstracts are. In the conference, we learned that phase one of the study looked only at raw numbers from a database, while phase two involved chart examination to confirm the diagnosis of each subject and added in an HMO. The second phase involved new data following on the study described in the 99 abstract. The chart review matters. This process was completely open and was not hidden at all. The final completed study showed no significant increased risk for autism or attention deficit disorder and no significant association between vaccination and neurodevelopmental outcomes.
RFK Jr.'s Reliance on Anti-Vaccine Researchers
So what did RFK do? Did he report on the phase two final findings of the study or did he find a researcher to cherry pick the phase one study and promote the idea that thimerosal containing vaccines have an increased risk for autism? I think we can all guess the answer to that question. Kennedy's claims of increased risk come from an analysis done by anti-vaccine researchers, including Mark and David Geer.
[00:25:07]
Since 2011, anti-vaccine researcher Mark Geer's medical license has been suspended or revoked in every state in which he was licensed over concerns about his for-profit autism quote-unquote treatments, which included chemical castration of children and his misrepresentation of his credentials to the Maryland Board of Health, where he falsely claimed to be a board-certified geneticist and epidemiologist. One of the other authors on the paper was Brian Hooker, an anti-vaccine researcher who in 2002 filed a claim with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program claiming his son got autism from a vaccine at 15 months of age. Medical records in court proved his son was actually showing delays at four months and this was confirmed by both his doctor and Brian Hooker himself. In May 2016, the court rejected his claim.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
RFK Jr.'s Book on Thimerosal
I've written a book if you're interested called Thimerosal Let the Science Speak that has I think 1,400 references and over 400 studies cited that link autism and other related neurological injuries to vaccines.
[00:26:13]
There's no question about it.
[Narrator]
RFK's book called for the removal of thimerosal, the mercury preservative, from childhood vaccines. The only problem is when that actually happened in 2001, autism cases continued to rise everywhere. The final nail in the coffin of a dead theory. So what happened after this data came out? Did RFK apologize or admit he was wrong? No. He simply changed the name of his group, the World Mercury Project, to Children's Health Defense and then hoped nobody would notice. One of the more insidious claims that RFK makes is that SIDS or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is caused by vaccines.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
SIDS and Vaccines: No Correlation
There are plenty of studies that make it clear that SIDS is caused by vaccines.
[Narrator]
SIDS really appeared following the first vaccine. The name SIDS was first proposed at the second international conference on the causes of sudden death and infancy in Seattle in 1969 by J.
[00:27:05]
Bruce Beckwith, a pediatric pathologist. Sudden death in seemingly healthy infants during sleep is not a phenomenon of modern times. One of the first cases of SIDS is mentioned in the Bible. The consensus around multiple replicated studies around the world is that vaccines and SIDS have no correlation. In fact, the only correlation that's been proven is vaccines reducing SIDS, which could be explained by the healthy vaccine effect, the difference in populations between vaccinated and unvaccinated. But the bottom line is that no credible evidence exists and supports a link between vaccination and SIDS. The trend in decreasing SIDS rates correlated with the 1992 American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation for infants to sleep on their side or back and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Back to Sleep campaign in 1994. This significant decrease in SIDS rates correlated to an exact time where the vaccine schedule significantly rose.
[00:28:00]
That's right, SIDS and infant mortality rates have dropped dramatically around the world and in the United States as we added more vaccines. The only year in recent memory where SIDS rates went up in the United States was 2020, where vaccine rates went down due to the COVID pandemic. The 2023 US infant mortality rate was 5.6 deaths per thousand. The 2023 Australia infant mortality rate was 3.1 deaths per thousand. The 2023 Israel infant mortality rate was 2.2 deaths per thousand. Australia and Israel use almost identical vaccine schedules as the USA. They are ranked as two of the healthiest countries in the world. So why the difference? Poverty, healthcare access and diet vaccines. Infant mortality and SIDS have a disproportionate effect on babies of color in the United States. Those same groups have the lowest vaccine rates. In 2017, American Indian and Alaska Native children were 10% less likely to be fully vaccinated with CDC recommended vaccines than non-Hispanic white children.
[00:29:00]
Only 66.5% of African American children age 19 to 35 months were fully vaccinated compared to 71.5% of white children. Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander children also trailed white children by approximately 6% in the combined seven vaccine series. Meanwhile, Asian American children have the highest overall vaccine rates and the lowest infant mortality SIDS rates. Infant mortality and SIDS is a poverty and healthcare access issue that highlights racial disparities in this country and not a vaccine issue. Anyone claiming otherwise is not only lying but ignoring the real issues we should be focused on.
Scientific Theories and the Truth About Vaccines
A scientific theory is a well substantiated explanation of the natural world based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment and then published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Peer-reviewed studies that are then replicated. Such fact-supported theories are not guesses but reliable accounts of the real world. They show us truth. This is exactly how we know that vaccines work and don't cause autism.
[00:30:00]
Established scientific theories withstand rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
RFK Jr.'s Attack on the CDC
The propaganda that CDC tells you yeah vaccines don't cause autism because it's propaganda. This is a captive agency that is intertwined and owned by the pharmaceutical industry.
[Narrator]
RFK Jr.'s Rejection of Scientific Truth
RFK Jr. has spent the last two decades rejecting the truth about vaccines in favor of conspiracy theories. He has masterfully created his own reality amongst his followers in which the truth is hidden by nefarious powers and can only be revealed by him. In his world established scientific theories are rejected in favor of his own beliefs and feelings. In his world replicated science does not show emergent truth but instead only the truth they want you to know about. Along the way he's amassed a large following millions of dollars and immortality that comes with fame.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
RFK Jr.'s Claims About Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated Children
And I will tell you this that every child is damaged all of these injuries that are invisible
[00:31:02]
from the vaccines and we know you know if you've ever compared an unvaccinated kid to a vaccinated kid you see the bright eyes and the engagement and the social interactions and the curiosity and the and the infection and the child even had one or two vaccines and they're completely different and those injuries don't get measured they're just a blight on on this they poisoned an entire generation of American children.
RFK Jr.'s Continued Contradictions on Vaccines
I'm pro vaccine I've never said anything anti-vaccine. People just keep chanting safe and effective safe and effective safe and effective and it doesn't cause autism it doesn't cause autism and of course they do cause autism of course they cause autism. I believe that we ought to have policies that encourage full vaccination for all Americans.
[00:32:04]
So for America's children right now do you recommend they take the MMR vaccine? Okay one last one question one last one.
[Interviewer/Reporter]
I had all my children vaccinated. If your kids were young now would you give them the measles the mumps vaccine? No.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
I have never been an anti-vax. How can I get my young adult kids to understand this information so they don't vaccinate their kids when the time comes? If you figure that out call me and let me know so I can talk to my kids. My views are constantly misrepresented. There's a lot of people who are what they call pro-vax and none and a lot of them are becoming now vaccine skeptics ex-vaxxers.
[00:33:00]
There's nobody who is an ex-vaxxer who then goes back and becomes a vaxxer. 17 years I'm not anti-vaccine. Oh you do the math we're gonna get bigger and bigger they're gonna get weaker and weaker and we are gonna win this battle and beat them and thank you for coming out and standing with us.
[Interviewer/Reporter]
Avoiding Live Interviews and Vaccine Science
I can see they want to avoid a live interview because you get into the weeds of vaccine science and they feel we feel not all of it's true.
[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]
Yeah well if it's not true then argue with me or post something afterwards.