Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has savaged Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over spreading his anti-vaccine rhetoric on government websites.
The paper’s editorial board slammed changes to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, tweaked to reflect RFK Jr.’s vaccine-skeptic beliefs.
The site had stated for many years that there is ”no link” between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder.
The new vaccine skeptic line claims “studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” and alleges health authorities have supposedly “ignored” research suggesting a link.
The changes to the site prompted five CDC workers to reveal to The Washington Post that the scientists responsible for vaccine-safety communications had no warning and no role in the new wording.
Sunday’s WSJ editorial begins, “Who decided to leave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. home alone at the Health and Human Services Department?” It claimed without “adults to supervise” his actions, RFK Jr. had “conscripted” the CDC into his anti-vaccine mission.
Referencing the site’s new claim that authors had “ignored” a link between vaccines and autism, the WSJ’s column clarifies that the studies have not been “ignored.”
The WSJ said, “They’ve been examined and found deeply flawed. The updated CDC website points to a study by a University of Colorado, Boulder, environmental scientist, who also happens to have written for the newsletter of Children’s Health Defense. That’s the anti-vaccine outfit that Mr. Kennedy previously ran.”
The editorial also references the header on the website, “Vaccines do not cause autism,” now having an asterisk next to it. The header remains in place solely because of an agreement with Sen. Bill Cassidy, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
“To win Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy’s vote for his confirmation, RFK Jr. promised not to remove that statement. Retaining the header is a lawyerly attempt to keep his word while flouting it in spirit,” the editorial reads.
“He is also breaking his pledge to Mr. Cassidy not to push vaccines for children off the market,” it stated.
The editorial states that RFK Jr.’s handpicked Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices is investigating aluminum adjuvants, which may result in their removal from vaccines. “That could force a dozen vaccines out of use.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the DHS for comment.
RFK Jr. has linked vaccines and autism several times this year. Last month, he claimed, “Children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, and it’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol.”
RFK Jr was also facing criticism from closer to home.
John F. Kennedy’s granddaughter, Tatiana Schlossberg, slammed her cousin in an essay revealing that she has less than a year to live following a terminal cancer diagnosis.
“Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly,” Schlossberg said of RFK Jr. in a New Yorker piece published Saturday.
And RFK Jr.’s brother, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, also attacked his older sibling in The Boston Globe last week.
“All those complicit in that betrayal have lowered themselves—not least my brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, who knows my father’s legacy as well as anyone,” Maxwell wrote.
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