Anti-vaccine advocate and health secretary for the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ordered the nonprofit he once chaired to delete a webpage that mimicked the design of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention while wrongly linking vaccines to autism. The New York Times earlier reported on the development.
RFK Jr. has long been an outspoken skeptic of vaccines, despite scant evidence supporting cause for concern. The mock website featured evidence both supporting and debunking a connection to autism, but much of the research making a connection was reportedly not peer-reviewed.
That is a common strategy with conspiracy theorists—espouse some mainstream views that are undoubtedly true in order to create an aura of legitimacy for the more dubious statements that follow. Bryan Johnson, the longevity guru, offers fundamental advice that is reasonable—i.e. get a full night’s rest, eat unprocessed foods—then veers into more fringe ideas not necessarily supported by empirical evidence.
But Children’s Health Defense, the non-profit that RFK Jr. led for years before stepping aside in 2023, took an egregious step in creating a fake website intended to look like a real CDC fact sheet. From Your Local Epidemiologist, an independent Substack:
Apparently even RFK Jr. felt the webpage went too far. Or maybe it is simply that now, as the newly confirmed Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, he wants to use the institution and his newfound power to control the narrative. The CDC recently said it will re-investigate the link between vaccines and autism.
It is also possible that deadly measles outbreaks across the United States have something to do with RFK Jr.’s move. The outbreaks have been concentrated in communities with low vaccination rates. In January, an unvaccinated “school-aged” child in Texas died from measles—the first such U.S. death reported in a decade. Measles is highly contagious, and roughly 94% of a population needs to be vaccinated in order to prevent widespread transmission.
“Secretary Kennedy has instructed the Office of the General Counsel to send a formal demand to Children’s Health Defense requesting the removal of their website,” the Health and Human Services Department told the NYT in a statement. “At H.H.S. we are dedicated to restoring our agencies to their tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science.”
RFK Jr. during his Senate confirmation hearing said the CDC would return to “gold standard science,” and said he would support vaccines if shown data backing their safety. But when presented with such evidence during the hearing, RFK Jr. would say he had not seen the data or would cite reasons to doubt it.
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