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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhen will the Kennedys denounce RFK Jr.?
Could any image better signify how Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is dragging the legacy of his family through the mud with deadly consequences than his appearance as Ron Pauls Profile in Courage?
What does the family of the great Senator Robert F. Kennedy think of RFK Jr. convincing minority communities not to take the COVID vaccine, causing untold numbers of them to die?
What does John F. Kennedys family think of RFK Jr. letting Ron Paul honor him as a Profile in Courage?
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is no longer just the nutty anti-vax uncle who is a bit of an embarrassment to his family. He is now trading on the reverence that the minority community had for his father to convince minority communities not to get vaccinated for COVID. People are taking his advice, and it is killing them -- more and more every day.
:more:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/2/2043346/-RFK-Jr-to-appear-with-Ron-Paul-as-a-Profile-in-Courage-When-will-his-family-speak-out
JohnSJ
(92,372 posts)This is from a measles outbreak in 2019:
"Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long faced condemnation for spreading conspiracy theories about vaccines causing autism, a claim debunked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Academy of Pediatrics and many other leading health and science organizations around the world.
With the United States experiencing its worst measles outbreak in years, due in part to unvaccinated people contracting the virus, his own family is speaking out against his anti-vaccine stances.
On Wednesday, Kennedys siblings Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and former congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.), as well as niece Maeve Kennedy McKean, published an article in Politico Magazine accusing him of being complicit in a misinformation campaign.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases, they wrote. He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/05/08/he-is-wrong-robert-f-kennedy-jrs-family-calls-him-out-anti-vax-conspiracy-theories/
and on COVID:
"Robert F. Kennedys granddaughter is speaking out against her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and his controversial stance on COVID-19 vaccinations.
I love my uncle. But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong, Dr. Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, a granddaughter of the late RFK, writes in a New York Times op-ed published on Wednesday."
The Kennedy family has long spoken out against Kennedy Jr., 66, over his anti-vaccination beliefs. Last year, three members of the famed American political dynasty wrote an op-ed in Politico denouncing Kennedy Jr., the famed senator's second-oldest son, for pushing anti-vaccination theories online.
However, amid the long-awaited rollout of multiple novel coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccinations this month, the Kennedy family is again pushing back against their uncles anti-science opinions.
https://people.com/politics/rfk-granddaughter-speaks-out-against-uncle-robert-f-kennedy-jr-s-anti-vaccine-stance-hes-wrong/
hlthe2b
(102,343 posts)Mary in S. Carolina
(1,364 posts)why aren't the Kennedys flooding the airways denouncing this idiot?
comradebillyboy
(10,174 posts)Who's going to give some random Kennedy air time just because Teddy or RFK or JKF were players way back when?
Budi
(15,325 posts)You think he'll change his mind now after years of condemnation?
No.
Are the families of the others doing anything to silence their antivaxxer relative?
Kennedy has always been this way.
Who opened the door that gave him this voice now?
Who gave us tRump?
Who kept the antivaxxers posting priviledges rolling as the data begged the opposite?
The Kennedy family isn't responsible anymore for what Robert says.
They've long ago done their part.
Don't lay this bs on the Kennedy family as a scapegoat for the others more culpable, with far more power of the press than they have.
Upthevibe
(8,069 posts)Thanks for an important post....
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/13/996570855/disinformation-dozen-test-facebooks-twitters-ability-to-curb-vaccine-hoaxes
Celerity
(43,485 posts)The New Apartheid? Conspiracist Robert F. Kennedy, Jrs latest anti-vaccine film spins real history of medical racism to scare Black Americans into rejecting COVID shots
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/08/1004214189/anti-vaccine-film-targeted-to-black-americans-spreads-false-information
When a filmmaker asked medical historian Naomi Rogers to appear in a new documentary, the Yale professor didn't blink. She had done these "talking head" interviews many times before. She assumed her comments would end up in a straightforward documentary that addressed some of the most pressing concerns of the pandemic, such as the legacy of racism in medicine and how that plays into current mistrust in some communities of color. The subject of vaccines was also mentioned, but the focus wasn't clear to Rogers. The director wanted something more polished than a Zoom call, so a well-outfitted camera crew arrived at Rogers' home in Connecticut in the fall. They showed up wearing masks and gloves. Before the interview, crew members cleaned the room thoroughly. Then they spent about an hour interviewing Rogers. She discussed her research and in particular controversial figures such as Dr. James Marion Sims, who was influential in the field of gynaecology but who performed experimental surgery on enslaved Black women during the 1800s without anaesthesia.
"We were talking about issues of racism and experimentation, and they seemed to be handled appropriately," Rogers recalls. At the time, there were few indications that anything was out of the ordinary except one. During a short break, she asked who else was being interviewed for the film. The producer's response struck Rogers as curiously vague. "They said, 'Well, there's 'a guy' in New York, and we talked to 'somebody in New Jersey, and California,' " Rogers told NPR. "I thought it's so odd that they wouldn't tell me who these people were." It wasn't until this March that Rogers would stumble upon the answer. She received an email from a group called Children's Health Defense prominent in the anti-vaccine movement promoting its new film, Medical Racism: The New Apartheid. When she clicked on the link and began watching the 57-minute film, she was shocked to discover this was the movie she had sat down for back in October. "I was naïve, certainly, in assuming that this was actually a documentary, which I would say it is not. I think that it is an advocacy piece for anti-vaxxers," Rogers says. "I'm still very angry. I feel that I was used."
The free, online film is the latest effort by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the founder of Children's Health Defense. (He's the son of the former U.S. Attorney General Robert "Bobby" Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy.) With this film, Kennedy and his allies in the anti-vaccine movement resurface and promote disproven claims about the dangers of vaccines, but it's aimed squarely at a specific demographic: Black Americans. The film draws a line from the real and disturbing history of racism and atrocities in the medical field such as the Tuskegee syphilis study to interviews with anti-vaccine activists who warn communities of color to be suspicious of modern-day vaccines. At one point in Medical Racism, viewers are warned that "in black communities something is very sinister" and "the same thing that happened in the 1930s during the eugenics movement" is happening again. There is lengthy discussion of the thoroughly disproven link between autism and vaccines. For example, the film references a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism rates as evidence that African American children are being particularly harmed, but in reality the study did not conclude that African Americans are at increased risk of autism because of vaccination.
The movie then displays a chart claiming to use that same CDC data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request to make a connection between vaccinating Black children and autism risk. The findings in the chart closely resemble another study sometimes mentioned by anti-vaccine activists, but the medical journal later retracted the study, because of "undeclared competing interests on the part of the author" and "concerns about the validity of the methods and statistical analysis." (That study's author was also a paid independent contractor for Kennedy's group as of 2020 and sits on its board of directors.) The film also brings up a 2014 study from the Mayo Clinic that showed Somali Americans and African Americans have a more robust immune response to the rubella vaccine than Caucasians and Hispanic Americans. One of those interviewed in Kennedy's film then asks, "So if you have that process that could be caused by vaccines, why wouldn't there be a link between vaccines and developmental delays?" But the study's own author and leading vaccine researcher, Dr. Gregory Poland, says this conjecture is not accurate. According to a statement provided to NPR by the Mayo Clinic, the study demonstrated "higher protective immune responses in African-American subjects with no evidence of increased vaccine side effects" and that any claim of " 'increased vulnerability' among African-Americans who receive the rubella vaccine is simply not supported by either this study or the science."
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