In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. And among those diseases could be COVID-19.
Antivaxxers are sometimes violent, often abusive, and always wrong.
Kennedy has faced much-deserved criticism for his anti-vaccination documentary, Medical Racism: The New Apartheid, which spreads lies about vaccines and targets Black people to make its points—and a lot of money. Particularly sinister is the reality that Black people, who have suffered from a long legacy of medical racism, disproportionately suffer and die from a host of diseases, including COVID-19. The film claims vaccines are harmful to the health of Black people and compares the “dangerous experimental” vaccination of Black people in Haiti, Africa and the U.S. to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. In Tuskegee, the U.S. government used Black men as guinea pigs, leaving their syphilis infections untreated and allowing them to suffer and die from the disease. Penicillin would have treated those Black people, just as the COVID vaccine is saving Black lives today—a vaccine Kennedy believes Black people should not take.
