House Republicans Gave America's Most Prominent Anti-Vaxxer A Platform To Insist He Isn't Anti-Vaccine

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the leaders of the modern anti-vaccine movement, falsely insisted he was not opposed to vaccinations during a House hearing Thursday that quickly descended into a culture war circus.

The hearing, held by the chamber’s special subcommittee on the purported “weaponization” of the federal government to target conservatives, was meant to give Kennedy a chance to expound on a long series of complaints about social media platforms censoring his anti-vaccine views, as he mounts a long-shot bid to unseat President Joe Biden in the Democratic primary.

“I am being censored here,” Kennedy told lawmakers in Washington at one point during the hearing, which aired nationally on C-SPAN. Democrats had tried unsuccessfully to force his testimony behind closed doors.

Republicans spent much of the hearing promoting Kennedy while Democrats largely belittled him, peppering him with questions about his recent claims that the COVID-19 virus was “targeted” to be less dangerous to some Jews and to people of Chinese descent.

Kennedy’s statements had drawn condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League and prompted more than 100 House Democrats to sign a letter asking that he be disinvited from testifying, a request denied by subcommittee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

“In my entire life, I have never uttered a phrase that was either racist or antisemitic,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy, a San Diego resident whose presidential campaign reported roughly $6.4 million in contributions from February through June, appeared at the hearing flanked by a Breitbart News politics editor, an assistant Louisiana state attorney general and a leader of a civil rights group on the witness stand. 

But as one of the most high-profile skeptics of vaccinations in America, the son of murdered 1968 Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and, critics fear, a potential stalking horse to weaken Biden’s bid for reelection, Kennedy drew the most attention.

He used it to try to clean up his record, which so far has appealed far more to conspiracy-minded Republican voters than to anyone casting a ballot in a Democratic primary.

Kennedy also denied that he was anti-vaccine, saying he was up to date on his own shots aside from those against COVID-19.

“I have never been anti-vax,” he said. “I have never told the public [to] avoid vaccination.”

Kennedy has a long history of anti-vaccine rhetoric, including a retracted 2005 article in Salon falsely linking autism to vaccines. During a 2021 podcast appearance, he said he would tell people while hiking or grocery shopping not to vaccinate their children and encouraged other anti-vaccine activists to do the same.

“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated,’” Kennedy stated on the podcast.

Children’s Health Defense, a Kennedy-founded nonprofit, has a section on its website about “vaccine safety” featuring a video in which a mother blames a miscarriage and her daughter’s autism on a flu shot, despite overwhelming evidence that flu shots are safe and save lives.

Before HuffPost shuttered its unpaid contributor platform in 2017, Kennedy also wrote several blog posts denigrating vaccines; those posts, along with others spreading misinformation about vaccines, have since been removed from the site.

Kennedy’s conspiracy-mongering goes far beyond vaccines, however. In a recent video obtained by the New York Post, Kennedy told dinner party guests that the coronavirus was “ethnically targeted.”

“COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” he said. Kennedy added that “genetic differentials among the different races” meant the virus had been “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” and that those “who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

Kennedy told the Post that the dinner was supposed to be off the record. On Thursday, he said the reporting on it was part of a larger effort to discredit him. 

“I am being censored here through this target, through smears, through misinterpretations of what I’ve said, through lies, through association,” he told lawmakers.

“If you think I’ve said something that’s antisemitic, let’s talk about the details. I’m telling you, all the things I’m accused of right now by you, and in this letter, are distortions, they’re misrepresentations,” he added, referring to the letter signed by Democrats. “I didn’t say those things. There’s fragments that I said.”

Kennedy returned to that defense when asked directly by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) about his “ethnically targeted” remarks. He said that he was describing a study funded by the National Institutes of Health and led by the Cleveland Clinic, though his comments in the video contained no mention of either institution.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was being "used politically" to score points against President Joe Biden at a hearing Thursday.

Elsewhere in Thursday’s hearing, Kennedy again warned against trusting people with expertise.

“I’ll just say this one thing: Trust in the experts is not a function of science. It’s not a function of democracy,” he said. “It’s a function of religion and totalitarianism, and it does not make for a healthier population.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 has killed about 1.1 million Americans through mid-July and put more than 6.2 million in the hospital.

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said millions of Americans are alive now because of the COVID-19 vaccine and accused Kennedy of appearing before the committee as part of an effort to score political points.

“No matter what you may think, Mr. Kennedy, I revere your name,” he began.

“You’re not here to propound your case for censorship. You are here for cynical reasons, to be used politically by that side of the aisle to embarrass the current president of the United States, and you’re an enabler in that effort today. And it brings shame on a storied name that I revere.”