by Seroll Burt
January 30, 2025
Think he will deny those claims?
Past comments made by Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about separate vaccine schedules for Black people resurfaced shortly after his Senate confirmation hearing began, the Washington Post reports.
The controversial claim happened in 2021 and was posted on the website of his anti-vaccine nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense. He promoted separate vaccine schedules for Black people due to better immune systems.
“Now we know that, you know, we should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to Whites, because their immune system is better than ours,” Kennedy said.
He also made false claims correlated to the autism rates of Black children.
There were approximately 36 times that Kenendy linked vaccines to autism despite having no scientific evidence to support his claims. In over 400 podcast appearances, he referred to vaccines as dangerous, with claims that the risks outweigh the benefits, in addition to misleading remarks about vaccine safety testing in about 114 of those interviews.
Before resigning from his post as chairman of the board and chief legal counsel following his appointment from President Donald Trump, Kennedy alleged vaccines “poisoned an entire generation of American children” and that doctors have “butchered all these children” by giving shots recommended by federal authorities.
Physicians and scientists have sounded the alarm on Kennedy’s claims long before Trump named him as HHS nominee. Physician Stanley Plotkin, known as the “godfather of American vaccine science,” said the statements prove he is not the right person to lead this important department. “Making statements is easy, but if you don’t have the evidence, it’s just baloney,” Plotkin, who created a vaccine against rubella and worked on vaccines for rotavirus and other pathogens, said.
Though many of his comments have proven false, Kennedy calls himself “an expert on vaccines.” Kennedy once refused to back down on any claims. “I’d actually like to see an example of something I’ve ever said on my Instagram, on the Children’s Health Defense, in my book, that’s not true,” the nominee said during an April 2024 interview.
“My book has 2,200 footnotes. I am an expert on vaccines. I’m not a doctor, but I can claim expertise because I have three best-selling books on vaccines.”
That is until he sat before dozens of state Senators — both Democratic and Republican — to potentially be confirmed as the next head of the department on Jan. 29. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) was one of several lawmakers to grill him on past remarks about COVID-19Lyme disease, and AIDS. Bennet pointed out that Kennedy once said COVID-19 was a “genetically engineered bio-weapon that targets Black and white people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people,” according to CNN.
When asked about remarks claiming “African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS,” the member of the famous political family said he wasn’t sure if he wrote that in his book.
After Kennedy’s statements about suddenly being “pro-vaccine” and admitting that his own children were vaccinated, Bennet said he wasn’t falling for it and believed that Kennedy was peddling “half-truths.”
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