5 Remarkable Falsehoods That Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promoted

He has promoted a conspiracy theory that coronavirus vaccines were developed to control people through microchips. He has endorsed the false idea that antidepressants are associated with school shootings. And he has pushed the decades-old theory that the CIA killed his uncle, former President John F. Kennedy.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, is a leading vaccine skeptic and purveyor of conspiracy theories who relied heavily on misinformation in building his long-running campaign for the 2024 Democratic nomination.

But as voters voice their discontent over a likely rematch between President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Kennedy has as much as 20 percent of the vote in the recent Democratic primary.

Mr. Biden and the Democratic National Committee have not publicly acknowledged Mr. Kennedy’s candidacy and have declined to comment on his campaign. Nevertheless, the public scrutiny that comes with a White House bid has raised other questionable beliefs and statements that Kennedy has put forth over the years.

Here are five of the many baseless allegations Mr. Kennedy has spread on the campaign trail and beyond.

He has falsely linked vaccines to various medical conditions.

Mr. Kennedy has promoted many false, misleading or unsubstantiated claims aimed at public health and the pharmaceutical industry – most notably the scientifically discredited belief that childhood vaccines cause autism.

That idea has been rejected by more than a dozen peer-reviewed scientific studies in multiple countries. The National Academy of Medicine reviewed eight vaccines for children and adults and found that, with rare exceptions, the vaccines are very safe, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Seen by many as the face of the vaccine resistance movement, Mr. Kennedy claims he is “not anti-vaccine” and is trying to make vaccines safer. But he has promoted misleading information about vaccine ingredients and distributed retracted studies linking vaccines to various medical conditions.

At a meeting last year in Washington, he compared vaccination records that some called “vaccination passports” to life in Germany during the Holocaust, a statement he later apologized for. And he falsely told Louisiana lawmakers in 2021 that the coronavirus vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”

Children’s Health Defense, an organization Mr. Kennedy originally founded as the World Mercury Project, has regularly campaigned against vaccines. Facebook and Instagram removed the group’s accounts last year for espousing vaccine misinformation, and Mr Kennedy has since often lamented the dangers of “censorship” in campaign speeches.

He has made unfounded claims about a link between gender dysphoria and chemical exposure.

In an interview last month with Jordan Peterson, a conservative Canadian psychologist and public speaker, Mr. Kennedy falsely linked chemicals in water sources to the identity of transgender people.

“Many of the problems we see in children, especially boys, are probably underestimated as to how much of it is due to chemical exposure, including a lot of the sexual dysphoria that we see,” he said. He was referring to research on a weed killer, atrazine, in which scientists found it “induces complete feminization and chemical castration” in certain frogs.

But there’s no evidence that the chemical, typically used on farms to kill weeds, causes the same effects in humans, let alone gender dysphoria. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention“Most people are not regularly exposed to atrazine.”

He has falsely linked antidepressants to school shootings.

Based on longstanding dubious claims, Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly endorsed the idea that mass shootings have increased because of the increased use of antidepressants.

“Kids always had access to guns, and there was no time in American history or human history when kids went to schools and shot their classmates,” he told comedian Bill Maher on a recent episode of the podcast, “Club Random With Bill Maher.” “It really started to happen simultaneously with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.”

While both antidepressant use and mass shootings have increased in recent decades, according to Ragy Girgis, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, the scientific community has found “no biological plausibility” to support a link between the two. .

Antidepressants often have warnings that refer to suicidal thoughts, Mr Girgis said. But those warnings refer to the possibility that people who already have suicidal thoughts may be able to share pre-existing beliefs out loud once they take the drug as part of their treatment.

However, Mr. Kennedy has pointed to such warnings as evidence of the false idea that the drugs could induce “homicidal tendencies”.

Several prominent figures, including Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have reinforced similar claims following recent mass shootings.

Most school shooters weren’t prescribed psychotropic drugs before committing acts of violence, a 2019 study found. And even when they were, researchers wrote“no direct or causal relationship has been found.”

He has supported a conspiracy theory that the CIA killed his uncle.

Mr. Kennedy has long promoted a conspiracy theory that the CIA assassinated his uncle, President John F. Kennedy.

He claimed, without evidence, during a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity in May that Allen W. Dulles, the director of the CIA at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination, helped cover up evidence of the organization’s involvement.

Referring to a 1976 House committee inquiry, he said, “Most of the people in that inquiry believed it was the CIA that was behind it because the evidence was so overwhelming to them.”

But even that investigation, which found that President Kennedy was “probably” the victim of some kind of conspiracy, concluded bluntly that the CIA “was not involved.”

And the Warren Commission, convened in 1963 to investigate the Kennedy assassination, found that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone and was not connected to any government agency.

And he has said that the Republicans stole the 2004 presidential election.

Mr. Kennedy told The Washington Post in June that he still believed John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, had won the 2004 presidential election.

Mr. Kennedy first promoted that idea in a 2006 Rolling Stone article, claiming that Republicans had mounted “a massive, coordinated campaign to undermine the will of the people” and the re-election of President George W. Bush to assure. He claimed that their efforts “stopped more than 350,000 Ohio voters from casting their ballots or having their votes counted.”

But it’s one thing to complain about vote suppression; it is another to show that Mr. Kerry won more of the votes cast.

Mr. Bush defeated Mr. Kerry by a 35-vote national electoral college margin; he carried Ohio and its 20 electoral votes by more than 118,000 votes.

The Times reported in 2004 that an electronic voting machine malfunction in Ohio added 3,893 votes to Mr. Bush. That error was caught in preliminary vote counts, officials said. But the event, among other nationwide voting controversies, sparked widespread questions about election integrity that appealed to the likes of Mr. Kennedy.

However, Mr Kerry conceded the race a day after the election.