Washington D.C. – Children’s Health Defense – the RFK Jr.-founded anti-vax propaganda group that continues to sell “No Vax, No Problem” onesies for babies – is back in the news this week. The same group that inexplicably received a massive taxpayer-funded PPP loan from the Trump administration during the coronavirus pandemic has now “filed a citizen’s petition asking FDA commissioner Marty Makary to deem the Moderna and Pfizer COVID vaccines as “misbranded” and revoke their licenses “due to a lack of compliance with FDA regulations.”
The dark money astroturf effort comes on the heels of a barrage of conspiracy-driven ‘probes’ by the Trump FDA — now overseen by HHS Secretary Kennedy — into the safety of long-proven safe and effective preventive health treatments for COVID-19, hepatitis B, RSV, and other diseases. Meanwhile, Axios notes: “A recent review of more than 500 published studies on COVID, flu and RSV vaccines by the Vaccine Integrity Project at the University of Minnesota found that the shots have “reassuring safety profiles consistent with prior evaluations.” And a ‘large-scale’ French study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association confirmed the safety of mRNA vaccines.
“Children’s Health Defense was seemingly founded as a self-enrichment vehicle for RFK Jr. by trafficking in dubious pseudoscience and anti-vax conspiracy theories. This unserious group now serves as a useful tool for Kennedy as health secretary to advance their shared anti-vax agenda, which poses deadly serious public health consequences. With the public overwhelmingly souring on the Trump-RFK. Jr. plans to make the nation more vulnerable to disease, Kennedy can always count on support from his old grifting friends,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care.
Up until December 2024, Kennedy served as chairman for Children’s Health Defense while it grew into one of the largest online repositories of anti-vaccine and pseudoscience news articles, and e-books that promote conspiracy theories on supposed threats to public health, including unfounded claims that vaccines cause autism and that wireless technology emits harmful radiation. Just this week, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a new analysis finding zero link between vaccines and autism.
During Kennedy’s tenure, Children’s Health Defense teamed up with personal injury law firms such as Wisner Baum and Morgan & Morgan to create a lawsuit factory aimed at monetizing his anti-vaccine and wellness conspiracy theories with litigation against major companies, including Merck and Verizon. They helped fund other groups that peddle anti-vaccine misinformation and conspiracy theories, including $136,000 to a group with which it co-published a paper that used unverified VAERS data to cast doubt on COVID-19 vaccines’ safety.
During RFK’s tenure as HHS Secretary, Children’s Health Defense has continued to push his anti-vaccine agenda praising the Trump-RFK Jr. effort to cease recommending the hepatitis B vaccine for newborns despite outcry from the public health and science communities, and celebrating the “rewriting of a page on the CDC’s website to assert the false claim that vaccines may cause autism”
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