In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the discredited notion that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread. And among those diseases could be COVID-19.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has promoted this dangerous myth on social media.
Over the years, Kennedy’s misguided idée fixe has snowballed and gained impressive momentum. He has propagated numerous falsehoods about the COVID-19 pandemic. He has been a mainstay at the AutismOne conference, which attracts fake experts convinced that vaccines cause autism. In his last appearance as keynote speaker, he incited attendees to evangelize for the anti-vaccination movement, concluding that he would see them “on the barricades.” Kennedy was asked to chair a “vaccine safety task force” for the Trump administration in 2017. (The task force would end up never materializing.) He also served as executive producer for the anti-vaccination “documentary” Vaxxed II: The People’s Truth. Now, his own corporation has released an anti-vaccine movie, one which is directed toward people of colour.
The movie’s title is sensational click-bait. Medical Racism: The New Apartheid. It is a project of CHD Films, a division of Kennedy’s Children’s Health Defense (formerly known as the World Mercury Project). As NBC News reported when the movie was released a month ago, its producers include the founder of a private school that boasts of not enforcing vaccination mandates; a Nation of Islam minister who falsely claimed that childhood vaccines are genetically modified to harm children of colour; and a nonprofit CEO who promoted the misinformation campaign of America’s Frontline Doctors.
