Children's Health Defense's Wacko Conference

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.  A top antivaxxer is HHS Secretary RFK Jr. He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

 At The Atlantic, Tom Bartlett reports on the annual conference of Children’s Health Defense, RFK Jr's antivax organization.

They want Kennedy to investigate their belief that the government supposedly colluded with Big Pharma to hide the harms of vaccination. In a session on Saturday afternoon, former Republican Representative Dave Weldon, whose nomination to become CDC director was withdrawn in March amid outcry over his criticism of immunizations, called for the creation of an independent body to investigate vaccine-safety data and report only to Kennedy and President Donald Trump. “If it’s in the hands of the CDC, you’ll never get the answers you need,” he told the crowd. During a session titled “The Enduring Nightmare of COVID mRNA Technology,” Sherri Tenpenny, a veteran anti-vaccine activist who once said that one goal of COVID vaccination was to turn people into “transhumanist cyborgs,” called for the mRNA-based vaccines to be taken off the market: “It’s just the next level of atrocity of how they want to damage us and make us customers for life.” Mark Gorton, the founder of LimeWire who is now president of the MAHA Institute, a think tank, favors stopping routine shots altogether until they’ve undergone further testing. “The medical establishment will scream that plagues will sweep across the land,” he said from the stage. “We need to counter that their plague of vaccine poisoning is already amongst us.”

As noted before, the antivax movment overlaps with right-wing conspiracy theory.

The forces aligned against Kennedy, everyone at the conference seemed to agree, are formidable. Leslie Manookian, the president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund and the author of a recently passed Idaho law that makes vaccine mandates illegal, railed against the “pit of vipers” that Kennedy must deal with in Washington. In a session titled “Sustaining the Promise of Freedom Through Action,” the crowd applauded when Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, announced that the reporters from The Atlantic and The Washington Post in the room “represent forces who are working toward the enslavement of humanity”—though he allowed that he had “nothing against them.” (As The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, told the Post, “In fact, The Atlantic is not working towards the enslavement of humanity, but I appreciate his concern.”) Ladapo spent most of his speech expounding on his experience with psychotherapy and his relationship with his wife. The day after Brand declined to speak with me and called me a Nazi, Alex Jones posted a two-hour interview in which a bathrobe-clad Brand dismissed the allegations against him as a “governmental and media operation.”

Geier's Monkey Business

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.

A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.

 Another leading anti-vaxxer is presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.  Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism.  He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen." He helped cause a deadly 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa.

He is now Trump's secretary of HHS. 

Liz Essley Whyte and Dominique Mosbergen at WSJ:

An antivaccine activist recently hired by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has started hunting for proof that federal officials hid evidence that inoculations cause autism, according to people familiar with the matter.

David Geier, a longtime vaccine opponent hired this spring as a contractor in the health department’s financial office, is seeking Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that antivaccine activists, including Kennedy, have alleged was buried because it showed a link between vaccines and autism, the people said.

...

Geier is seeking access to a database known as the Vaccine Safety Datalink, or VSD, which Kennedy referenced in his 2005 Rolling Stone article. But before joining HHS, Geier was barred at least twice from using the database because officials said he had misused it.
...

The health secretary has said Geier isn’t managing autism research but that he would look into whether data is missing from the database. “There has been a lot of monkey business with the VSD,” Kennedy told lawmakers last month.

Children’s Health Defense, the antivaccine nonprofit Kennedy once led, will host an online event Friday marking the 25th anniversary of what they call the “autism coverup.” Kennedy was slated to speak, according to an earlier version of a schedule posted online. His name was later removed.

...

In 2004, Geier and his father were prohibited from accessing the VSD after CDC officials determined they had misrepresented what they were going to do with the data. The CDC kicked the Geiers out of the VSD again in 2006.

Geier, at a 2015 conference, lamented that his access to the VSD had been suspended. “They think that that is been completely debunked and the science that we’re doing is no good,” he said.

NIH researchers have been asked to help Geier, people familiar with the matter said. NIH employees recently requested that the CDC send over the entirety of the VSD—an ask that set off alarm bells at the CDC and among researchers at the healthcare networks, who worried whether their patients’ private health information

Posthumous Medal of Freedom to RFK SENIOR

  In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.

A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.

 Another leading anti-vaxxer is presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.  Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism.  He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen."

He is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

Michael Shear at NYT:

[Today,] Mr. Biden will award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 Americans, including some of the brightest lights of the old guard that Mr. Trump wants to tear down. In doing so, the 82-year-old outgoing president is sending an unmistakable message of support for a democratic order he has said is threatened by Mr. Trump’s re-election.

Among those receiving the award are Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, senator and secretary of state whom Mr. Trump threatened to jail; Robert F. Kennedy, the assassinated senator whose son has embraced Mr. Trump; and George Romney, the late father of Senator Mitt Romney, the Republican from Utah who repeatedly rejected Mr. Trump’s actions and philosophy.

...

His decision to give the medal posthumously to Mr. Kennedy could be read as a rebuke to Mr. Kennedy’s son, a member of perhaps the country’s most famous Democratic family. The decision by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to endorse Mr. Trump during the campaign — despite denunciations from most of his relatives — helped lead to Mr. Trump’s choice of him to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

The John Birch Society, an old ultra-right group of conspiracy theorists, plugged Robert Kennedy Jr.'s bogus claims about vaccines, including the toxic myth that they cause autism.  He even appeared on one of the group's podcasts.

His father criticized the Society.  From NYT (4/7/61):  -- "Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy termed the John Birch Society "ridiculous" today. He said people should stop paying so much attention to it."

RFK Linked Vaccines to Holocaust, Called for Jailing Dr. Paul Offit

In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.

A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.

 Another leading anti-vaxxer is presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.  Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism.  He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen."

He is now Trump's nominee to head HHS.

Brandy Zadrozny at NBC:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a dark view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2019, he called the federal agency’s vaccine division a fascist enterprise and accused it of knowingly hurting children. He also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harms from the child vaccination program to the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

“The word ‘fascism’ in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is the bundle is more important than the sticks,” Kennedy said in previously unreported remarks in 2019 to a private audience at AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children. “The institution, CDC and the vaccine program, is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect.

...

Kennedy made these remarks and others — most previously unreported — over years of appearances at AutismOne. The comments, dating back to 2013, include claims that the CDC is a “cesspool of corruption,” filled with profiteers, harming children in a way he also likened to “Nazi death camps.”
...

At the 2013 AutismOne question-and-answer session, when asked about the CDC’s motives for failing to acknowledge autism as an epidemic, Kennedy made a comparison to the Holocaust.

“To me this is like Nazi death camps, what happened to these kids,” Kennedy said of the rising number of children diagnosed with autism and what he described as a link to vaccines — which had been debunked over a decade earlier. “I can’t tell you why somebody would do something like that. I can’t tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust.”

He also gave more detail on the people he believed belonged in prison.

“I don’t think this is going to happen because they always manage, the bad guys somehow manage to weasel their way out of it,” he said. “But I would do a lot to see Paul Offit, all these ‘good people,’ behind bars.”

Dr. Paul Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. He currently serves on a Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory committee. Asked for comment, Offit said Kennedy had targeted him and others on government vaccine panels for nearly two decades as main characters in baseless conspiracy theories, attacks that have invited harassment and threats.

RFK Jr and Misinformation

 In The Politics of Autism, I analyze the myth that vaccines cause autism. This bogus idea can hurt people by allowing diseases to spread.    Examples include measles, COVID, flu, and polio.

A number of posts discussed Trump's support for the discredited notion.

 Another leading anti-vaxxer is presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.  Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism.  He is part of the "Disinformation Dozen."

He is now running for president as an independent

Kennedy is a case study of how antivax sentiment overlaps with conspiracy theory and antisemitism.

Anna Merlan at Mother Jones:

Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign hosted an online panel Wednesday on the future of AI moderated, for some reason, by Ian Carroll, a self-styled journalist with a history of antisemitic statements.

In the course of the conversation, Kennedy admitted that he “gets manipulated by AI all the time.”

“Somebody will send me something and I’ll go ‘Holy cow, did you see this?’,” he said, describing how he credulously forwards fake content to his children, only for them to have to correct him. (Kennedy said that, unlike him, his children can identify fake images “immediately.”)

...

Neither Kennedy’s campaign nor Carroll responded to requests for comment about why Carroll was chosen to helm the panel or his prolific and bigoted internet history. As the publication Jewish Insider pointed out on Wednesday, just a few weeks ago he proclaimed on X that the US is “controlled by an international criminal organization that grew out of the Jewish mob and now hides in modern Zionism behind cries of ‘antisemitism.’”

Carroll has also tweeted that popular understanding of the Holocaust is characterized by “lots of bad numbers and misreporting,” and suggested in March that there’s something suspicious about the three marriages Shanahan has shared with Jewish men, while promising he would dig into the matter. (It’s not clear he did, and, even before Wednesday’s panel, Shanahan had since appeared on his podcast.)

Antivaxxers and Antisemites

 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.

RFK Jr. has floated the lunatic theory that COVID is a bioweapon that somehow spares Ashkenazi Jews.

There are deep links between the antivax movement and antisemitism. 

From the Anti-defamation League:

Since 2020, various white supremacist groups have incorporated anti-vaccine and COVID-19-related messaging into their propaganda.

The Goyim Defense League (GDL), a network of antisemitic provocateurs and white supremacists, has distributed fliers incorporating antisemitic anti-vaccine and COVID-19-related messages on at least 188 occasions since September 2021. For example, following reports that 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., during a July 2023 event, suggested COVID-19 had been “engineered” to spare Ashkenazi Jews, GDL created a flier featuring his quote along with the message, “Does COVID-19 target Blacks and Whites?”

Other white supremacist groups – such as the National Socialist Movement (NSM), Active Clubs, Patriot Front, the New Jersey European Heritage Association (NJEHA) and Hundred Handers – have also incorporated anti-vaccine and COVID-19-related messaging into their propaganda since 2020.

...

Extremists and QAnon supporters have frequently participated in far-right political conferences that prominently feature anti-vax narratives, such as the “Reawaken America” tour in 2023. These events allowed convicted January 6th insurrectionist Dr. Simone Gold and Ann Vandersteel, a QAnon influencer and sovereign citizen, to rub elbows, and to hobnob with elected officials, political candidates and advisors to former President Trump, like Michael Flynn and Eric Trump. The appearance of political leaders and elected officials at these types of events lends legitimacy to anti-vaccine and other conspiratorial beliefs, helping to normalize and further propel them into the mainstream.

Axis of Crackpots

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.

Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers.   Even before COVID, they were fighting vaccine mandates and other public health measures. 

The anti-vax movement has a great deal of overlap with MAGA, QAnon, and old-school conspiracy theory.

Kate Briquelet at The Daily Beast:

The sister of Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and a band of conservative anti-vax activists are running for the board of a renowned public hospital in Florida under the banner of “medical freedom.”

If they win, they’ll hold a majority over Sarasota’s award-winning facility where one of their allies—elected in 2022 with two other “health freedom candidates” to the nine-member panel—is already trying to peddle vaccine misinformation.

The rogues’ gallery includes Mary Flynn O’Neill, who directs her brother’s nonprofit and routinely appears on right-wing shows with QAnon conspiracy theorists; Tanya Parus, the president of Moms For America’s Sarasota chapter and co-owner of a “freedom-based” health clinic, and Tamzin Rosenwasser, a dermatologist who once railed against the Federation of State Medical Boards’s warning to doctors who spread COVID vaccine misinformation, comparing the organization to Stalin’s secret police.

Michael Flynn posted this picture today. I was finally able to locate a full view of the board behind him. (Telegram) (1/2) pic.twitter.com/y7vTg9TFXa

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) July 6, 2021

The list includes familiar figures from the antivax movement:

• Del Bigtree (now RFK Jr.'s comms director)
• Rashad [sic, Rashid] Buttar
• Charleen [sic, Charlene] Bollinger
• Robert Kennedy, Jr.
• Judy Mikovits
• Sherry [sic, Sherri] Tenpenny
• Dr. [Andrew] Wakefield

There may be others whose names are too hard to read in the photograph.

Antivaxxers, Conspiracy Theories, Christian Nationalists -- and RFK Jr.

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.

Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers.   Even before COVID, they were fighting vaccine mandates and other public health measures. 

The anti-vax movement has a great deal of overlap with MAGA, QAnon, and old-school conspiracy theory.  T

A prominent champion is the infamous RFK,Jr. He has repeatedly compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust.  Rolling Stone and Salon retracted an RFK article linking vaccines to autism. he John Birch Society plugged one of his books. 

 David Corn and Dan Friedman at Mother Jones:

On March 23, Steve and Tracy Slepcevic hosted a fundraiser for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the San Diego area. Tickets started at $575, and those who paid $2,750 were to be treated to a “private sunset reception” before RFK Jr. would chat with the assembled and pose for photos. It was hardly surprising that the Slepcevics were supporting Kennedy, given that Tracy is a long-time anti-vaxxer prominent within the autism community. But the personal politics of the Slepcevics illuminate the weird currents propelling Kennedy’s White House bid, for the pair have hobnobbed with QAnoners, Christian nationalists, election deniers, and other pro-Trump extremists. Steve, who has a checkered past as a businessmen that includes an arrest (but not a conviction) for allegedly defrauding victims of Hurricane Katrina, was in the crowd of Trump devotees outside the Capitol on January 6.

Last year, Tracy Slepcevic published a book called Warrior Mom about her years raising a son with autism that she blames on routine childhood vaccines. The book was endorsed by Kennedy and championed by Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser for President Donald Trump who has become a QAnon-friendly Christian nationalist and a leader within the far-right patriots movement. The Kennedy campaign sells signed copies of the book for $150 a pop. Tracy has been an ally of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vax nonprofit that Kennedy ran before entering the 2024 contest. In November, she spoke at CHD’s annual conference in Savannah, Georgia, where she hawked her book and palled around with Kennedy, a longtime peddler of Covid and vaccine misinformation. On Facebook, she declared, “Had a great time at the CHD conference in Savannah with some amazing people…I’m so blessed to be on this journey with each and every one of them.” In promoting her book and activism, she has shared platforms with Stew Peters, a far-right anti-vaxxer who has been tied to QAnon advocacy and has spread (according to the ADL) antisemitic tropes, and with Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced scientist who wrote a discredited paper linking autism to vaccines.

 SEE THE 2021 LINDELL WHITEBOARD.

Antivaxxers Push Infertility Myths

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.

Unfortunately, Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers.   Even before COVID, they were fighting vaccine mandates and other public health measures. 

The anti-vax movement has a great deal of overlap with MAGA, QAnon, and old-school conspiracy theory.  

Some kooks link vaccination to "The Great Replacement" theory, suggesting that they are part of a plot to reduce white populations.

Tara C. Smith and David H. Gorski have an article at Vaccine titled "Infertility: A common target of antivaccine misinformation campaigns." 

Abstract:

Misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories about vaccines are key drivers of vaccine hesitancy. A repeated false claim about COVID-19 vaccines is that the vaccines cause female infertility. Dating back decades, various conspiracy theories have linked vaccination programs with infertility and thus harmed vaccination programs in Africa, Asia, and Central America, particularly against polio and tetanus. In the United States, Europe, and Australia, human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccines have been falsely blamed for infertility and primary ovarian insufficiency (POI). After distribution of COVID-19 vaccines began in December 2020, almost immediately there arose conspiracy theories claiming that these vaccines cause menstrual irregularities, miscarriages, and infertility, promoted by noted antivaccine activists Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Andrew Wakefield among others. Here we will explore the history of this antivaccine narrative, how it has been promulgated in the past and repurposed to COVID-19 vaccines, and strategies to counter it.

From the article:

In 2022, RFK Jr.’s antivaccine group Children’s Health Defense released a documentary entitled “Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda” [52], with Kennedy serving as executive producer. Co-producers included Mary Holland, a lawyer who has long promoted the false claims that vaccines cause autism and that HPV vaccines cause infertility, and Andrew Wakefield, the UK physician who has been one of the most famous antivaccine activists in the world since he published his now-retracted case series in The Lancet in 1998 that claimed to find an association between the MMR vaccine and autistic enterocolitis, arguably the main spark behind the late 20th century resurgence of antivaccine sentiment. Infertility has been characterized as a “docuganda”; i.e., a documentary propaganda [53], a genre which includes prior anti-vaccine films “The Greater Good” and Andrew Wakefield’s previous directorial effort, the 2016 film “VAXXED: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe”.

Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda is is largely an updated rehash of a 1990s-era disinformation campaign that spread fear about a push to prevent neonatal tetanus in developing countries by vaccinating young women, and one of the earliest antivaccine campaigns to use the Internet as a powerful tool to spread such fear. As part of this fear-based campaign, antivaccine advocates conflated ongoing clinical trials of an experimental antifertility vaccine, which conjugated a subunit of human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG) hormone with diphtheria or tetanus toxoid proteins, to ongoing tetanus immunization programs led by the World Health Organization [54]. Though there was no connection between the immunization program and the clinical trial, the confusion between the two led to distrust of the tetanus vaccines. Once such distrust spread, tetanus vaccines were tested for the presence of hCG. However, ordinary pregnancy tests were used, which were not appropriate to test for this hormone within vaccine vials, leading to false positive results and further misrepresentation of the outcome by groups opposed to the tetanus vaccine campaign. Vaccines tested by reputable laboratories did not find presence of the hormone [54].

52. A. Wakefield
Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda
Children’s Health Defense Films, United States (2022)
Google Scholar

53. Jarry J. Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda Is Anti-Vaxx Sleight-of-Hand Propaganda (2022). McGill University Office for Science and Society. Accessed at https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking-pseudoscience/infertility-diabolical-agenda-anti-vaxx-sleight-hand-propaganda on November 14, 2023.
Google Scholar

54. J. Milstien, P.D. Griffin, J.-W. Lee
Damage to Immunization Programmes from Misinformation on Contraceptive Vaccines
Reprod Health Matters, 6 (1995), pp. 24-28

 http://www.autismpolicyblog.com/2024/01/antivaxxers-push-infertility-myths.html

 

Trump, Autism, and Conspiracy Theory

 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.

Before his presidency, Trump pushed the idea, hard and repeatedly.

Unfortunately, other Republican politicians and conservative media figures are increasingly joining up with the anti-vaxxers.   Even before COVID, they were fighting vaccine mandates and other public health measures. 

The anti-vax movement has a great deal of overlap with MAGA, QAnon, and old-school conspiracy theory. 

Caitlin Owens at Axios:

Driving the news: Trump's comments about drugmakers, posted in policy proposals and videos on his campaign website, have largely flown under the radar as his campaign speeches have doubled down on extreme rhetoric, like his use of anti-immigrant language and praise of foreign authoritarians over the weekend.

Details: One of the "Agenda47" proposals on Trump's campaign website — "Addressing Rise of Chronic Childhood Illnesses" — cites an "unexplained and alarming growth in the prevalence of chronic illnesses and health problems, especially in children."  [The next line: "We’ve seen a stunning rise in autism, auto-immune disorders, obesity, infertility, serious allergies, and respiratory challenges."] Trump in a June video that was also posted to Truth Social questions whether the food we eat, environmental toxins, or the "over-prescription of certain medications" is contributing to this increase.

• "Too often, our public health establishment is too close to Big Pharma —they make a lot of money, Big Pharma — big corporations, and other special interests, and does not want to ask the tough questions about what is happening to our children's health," Trump said in the video.
• "If Big Pharma defrauds American patients and taxpayers or puts profits above people, they must be investigated and held accountable," he said.
• Trump goes on to call for a "a special Presidential Commission of independent minds who are not bought and paid for by Big Pharma" to investigate the rise in chronic illness.

The intrigue: Trump's language around childhood illness is reminiscent of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic who's running for president as an independent and has been praised by Trump as a "common sense guy."

• In a video on his campaign website, Kennedy promises to "end the chronic disease epidemic in this country."
• Kennedy has promoted the discredited theory that vaccines cause autism, though he doesn't directly make this claim in the video. But he previously tied "the children's health crisis" to "environmental toxins" and vaccines in an e-book published by the Children's Health Defense, which he founded.
• Kennedy is "pleased" that Trump is highlighting the rise in childhood disease, said Kennedy campaign spokesperson Stefanie Spear. Trump's attention to the issue "testifies to the success of Children's Health Defense and many other activist organizations in putting the chronic disease epidemic on the political radar," she said.