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.
A leading anti-vaxxer is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign challenging President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination – set to be announced Wednesday in Boston – is too much for a family that defined the modern Democratic Party. They’re frustrated, sad and completely opposed.
They say they love him. They use words like “heartbroken” and “tragic.”
It’s the vaccine skepticism, which includes a book about “The Real Anthony Fauci” and saying Anne Frank was better off than Americans under supposed vaccine mandates because she could at least hide from the Nazis. It’s insisting that Sirhan Sirhan didn’t actually shoot Kennedy’s father, and breaking with many in the family years ago to argue for the assassin’s parole. Now, it’s going up against a president whose administration is stocked with Kennedys in prominent positions and who has decades of personal and emotional connections to multiple members of the family.
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“Which brother?” Chris Kennedy, a former gubernatorial candidate in Illinois, joked when asked by CNN about his thoughts on his brother’s campaign.
“This is a difficult situation for me. I love my older brother Bobby. He has extraordinary charisma and is a very gifted speaker,” Rory Kennedy, the filmmaker and youngest child of Robert F. Kennedy, told CNN. “I admire his past work as an environmentalist – because of him, we can swim in the Hudson. But due to a wide range of Bobby’s positions, I’m supporting President Biden.”
“I prefer not to talk,” texted Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Maryland lieutenant governor who’s now an adviser on retirement at the Labor Department, when asked about the frustration within the family about her brother’s run.
