Anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr files to run for president as Democrat

Anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr, the son of assassinated presidential candidate Robert Kenedy and nephew of John F Kennedy, has filed to run for president in 2024 as a Democrat.

Mr Kennedy, 69, filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission after announcing last month he was considering a run against Joe Biden, according to The Associated Press.

His late father was a former New York senator, US attorney general and 1968 presidential candidate, who was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles in June 1968.

“If it looks like I can raise the money and mobilize enough people to win, I’ll jump in the race,” Mr Kennedy Jr tweeted last month.

“If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children, and robbed us of our values and freedoms. Together we can restore America’s democracy.”

Mr Kennedy Jr’s views on vaccines have been strongly criticised by Dr Anthony Fauci, says who said in 2021 that the inflammatory rhetoric of the conspiracy theorist and others had “accelerated” violent threats and abuse directed at him and his family.

Mr Kennedy Jr leveraged his ties to the political family dynasty to lend his anti-vaccine campaign credibility and to draw fundraisers, recently published The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, in which he accuses the nation’s medical chief of launching “a historic coup d’etat against Western democracy.”

And in 2022 he was forced to apologise for referring to Anne Frank during an anti-vax rant comparing vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.

Mr Kennedy claimed imposing vaccine passports was similar to Nazi Germany in a speech at an anti-vax protest march in Washington DC in January 2022.

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” he told the crowd.

Those remarks provoked widespread condemnation.