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.
More than half a century after his father sought the White House to end a calamitous war in Vietnam and to salve the country’s racial wounds, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a presidential campaign on Wednesday built on re-litigating Covid-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans’ faith in science.
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While polls show that up to half of Democrats want someone besides Mr. Biden as their 2024 nominee, no party leader has stepped up with a challenge, and past opponents have rallied to the president’s side. Mr. Kennedy is the latest in a history of fringe presidential aspirants from both parties who run to bring attention to a cause, or to themselves.
For Mr. Kennedy, that cause is vaccine skepticism, which he cloaked in terms of truth-seeking and free speech, a crusade that in the past led him to falsely link childhood vaccines to autism. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, he sought to undermine public trust in vaccines, comparing government efforts to impose mandates in some places to “Hitler’s Germany.” Both Facebook and Instagram took down accounts of a group he runs for spreading medical misinformation.
