RFK Jr. Refused to Say That Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism During Today’s Confirmation Hearing Before the Senate HELP Committee
Washington D.C. — Today in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Senate HELP confirmation hearing, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-NH) delivered a strong message about the damage of RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine extremism and the harm his views have on parents and families. As a mother of a son with cerebral palsy, Senator Hassan understands the search for answers. She slammed RFK Jr. for “continuing to sow doubt about settled science” and denounced him in the strongest possible terms for peddling the conspiracy theory earlier in the hearing that vaccines cause autism.
Background:
RFK Jr. has a long history of spreading the debunked lie that vaccines are linked to autism.
- LIE: Kennedy’s anti-vaccine conspiracy theories about autism date back decades. According to the Washington Post, “In at least 36 appearances, Kennedy linked autism to vaccines, despite overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the use of vaccination to protect people from deadly infectious diseases and refuting any ties to autism, The Post found in a review of more than 400 of Kennedy’s podcast appearances, interviews and public speeches since 2020.”
- January 2024: In a podcast appearance, Kennedy defended his past writings on autism and vaccines.
- November 2023: During a speech at a Children’s Health Defense conference in Georgia, Kennedy again linked vaccines with autism.
- July 2023: Kennedy told Fox News, “I do believe that autism comes from vaccines.” [Fox News, ‘Jesse Watters Primetime’, 7/10/23, VIDEO]
- January 2022: Kennedy called vaccination a “Holocaust,” repeating his previous claims about autism and comparing it to genocide. [Politico,
- 2019: Kennedy published a lengthy article through Children’s Health Defense railing against the HPV vaccine. In this article, he pushed false claims that the vaccine contains autism-causing toxins – a long-debunked trope he has pushed about all kinds of different vaccines.
- 2017: Amid a measles outbreak that was devastating Minnesota’s Somali-American community due to low vaccination rates, Kennedy continued to push his false claims that “science and anecdotal evidence suggest that Africans and African Americans may be particularly vulnerable to vaccine injuries including autism.”
- 2016: Kennedy became the chair of Children’s Health Defense, a group considered one of the main sources of misinformation about the dangers of vaccines, including supposed links to autism.
- 2005: Two decades ago, Kennedy wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine and Salon.com asserting that the government was conspiring to cover up the connections between autism and vaccines. Salon.com later retracted the article because of factual errors, and Rolling Stone deleted it.
FACT CHECK: Of course, none of these claims hold up. As the American Association for the Advancement of Science noted, “Suffice it to say that this connection has been investigated thoroughly for many years now, and that no such connection has ever been shown to exist…Kennedy’s views on science and medicine are not only wrong, they are actively harmful and destructive.”