Washington D.C. – STAT News reports that Trump health secretary RFK Jr is delivering the keynote address this week at a conference hosted by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the militantly anti-vax group he founded, marking Kennedy’s “first public embrace of the group since he took the helm of HHS.” RFK Jr’s public reunion with the cult he used as a platform to spread deadly debunked lies about vaccine safety around the globe is consistent with the Trump administration no longer pretending to back off its deadly anti-vax agenda and instead making it a top White House priority in the middle of a historic and now deadly measles crisis.
The word ‘extreme’ does not even do justice to Children’s Health Defense: A 2019 study found that “the majority of Facebook advertisements spreading misinformation about vaccines were funded by two anti-vaccine groups”, including CHD which was led at the time by RFK Jr. This is the group that invited an Idaho woman on their podcast to amplify her dubious claims that vaccines killed her 18-month-old twins, and continues to defend her since being charged with their murders. This is the group that used Facebook to exploit a nursing error to stoke fear in the MMR vaccine and ignite a measles crisis in Samoa in 2019 that ended up killing 83 people, mostly young children. This group’s Twitter feed reads like a greatest hits of science-devoid conspiracy theories and pathetic excuses for why measles cases are at a 35 year high in the U.S., after they contributed to the sharp decline in vaccination rates that caused it. The group’s latest blog post even recklessly makes the unhinged and fact-free case that measles is actually good for your kids. The group even disgustingly continues to sell “No Vax. No Problem” onesies for babies.
“When Donald Trump told his own pollsters to kick rocks and chose to wear his deadly anti-vax agenda on his sleeve, RFK Jr lost any reason to play coy about his own anti-vax roots and conviction,” said Brad Woodhouse, President of Protect Our Care. “Reuniting with the malignant anti-vax group he founded and used to do generational harm against public trust in life-saving vaccines is all about RFK Jr feeling free to be his true self: a total fraud that actively puts children in harm’s way. Together, Children’s Health Defense and RFK Jr. managed to jeopardize America’s measles elimination status when he was simply a celebrity. Now that the nation’s leading anti-vax group can openly flout their relationship again with the nation’s top health official, there’s no telling how many kids they can get needlessly killed with disinformation.”
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