A Study in Dishonesty: Jr. Kennedy and the Anti-vax Crusade

Sep 11, 2025

Jr. Kennedy’s canned responses when questioned about his views on vaccination are “show me the data” and “no vaccine is safe and effective.” If Kennedy has not seen the data, it is because he chooses to avert his gaze. The remark about safety and effectiveness is typical of his rhetoric on the subject. No one knowledgeable about vaccines claims that any vaccine is 100 percent safe and effective. An abundance of research data, shows that the benefit to public health far outweighs the risks. When individuals do in rare cases suffer serious side effects, they should be compensated, and there are provisions in place to do just that.

For years Kennedy has been at the forefront of a determined crusade by anti-vaccination activists to foster vaccine skepticism. Their campaign feeds into anti-intellectualism, disdain for education, and distrust of experts that has a long tradition in American life and culture with shoddy research and wild charges that the CDC and vaccine researchers are corrupt and in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. The intent is to cast doubt on valid research that demonstrates vaccine safety and effectiveness.

Every institution that conducts federally funded research with human subjects is required to have an institutional review board (IRB) that reviews and approves research studies. An IRB is an independent committee that must have at least five members and must include “at least one scientist, one non-scientist, and ‘one member who is not otherwise affiliated with the institution and who is not part of the immediate family of a person who is affiliated with the institution’ (§ 46.107(d))” (IRBs). The IRB’s mission is to safeguard the rights and welfare of research participants, ensure research is ethical, and ensure it is conducted in compliance with federal and state regulation and institutional policies. In this IRBs are guided by The Belmont Report’s summary of basic ethical principles identified by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research created in 1974 by the National Research Act. The Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972 is a grim reminder that it can also happen here, and in the not terribly distant past.

Attention to medical ethics in research grew out of the Nuremberg War Crime Trials and reported abuses of human subjects in biomedical experiments.

[T]he Nuremberg code was drafted as a set of standards for judging physicians and scientists who had conducted biomedical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. This code became the prototype of many later codes intended to assure that research involving human subjects would be carried out in an ethical manner. (Belmont Report)

The report identified three basic ethical principles “particularly relevant to the ethics of research involving human subjects”: respect of persons, beneficence and justice. These principles are taken into consideration as IRBs review a study’s protocol and research design to assess issues related to the informed consent of research participants, risks to participants and benefit for society sought in the research, and the selection of subjects.

Justice is relevant to the selection of subjects of research at two levels: the social and the individual. Individual justice in the selection of subjects would require that researchers exhibit fairness: thus, they should not offer potentially beneficial research only to some patients who are in their favor or select only “undesirable” persons for risky research…

For ten years I worked in the administrative office for an IRB. Toward the end of that stint I served as an IRB member. IRB members I worked with and met at conferences over the years shared belief in the importance of health care research and unwavering commitment to their ethical and regulatory responsibilities. I do not want to get too deep in the woods here. My point is that there is a framework for oversight to prevent the research misconduct Kennedy alleges without evidence is rampant. IRBs are part of that framework. Peer review is another.

Oversight mechanisms do not always get it right. Shoddy and sloppy research gets done. Results are sometimes fudged or fabricated. But for the most part health care research is conducted and overseen by capable individuals of integrity and conscience who hope their efforts will benefit humanity, just as people generally are decent and capable and want to do the right thing. I still believe this despite an abundance of contemporary evidence to the contrary. Maybe I am just not of a scientific bent. Funny, because I entered college thinking I would major in physics. I was already drifting toward the humanities when I took an introductory philosophy course taught by Dr. Mulvaney. I read Plato and Camus and realized I wanted to learn how to think.

CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) is a collaborative project between the CDC and health care organizations to monitor the safety of vaccines and adverse events (side effects or health problems) that occur after vaccination—for instance, each year when an updated flu vaccine becomes available. Adverse events occur with any vaccine. Almost all are minor. Occasionally, serious ones occur. The aim of VSD oversight is early detection of adverse events whose frequency and severity would warrant further research or discontinued use of a vaccine.

The asserted link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism goes back to an article by Andrew Wakefield, an English doctor, published in 1998 in The Lancet. Earlier this year Daniel Salmon, PhD ’03, MPH, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Vaccine Safety, interviewed Dr. Josh Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a faculty member in health policy, a pediatrician, and former secretary of Maryland’s Health Department, about the history behind Wakefield’s research and the ongoing dispute about vaccines and autism (Vaccines Don’t Cause Autism).

Sharfstein:

He [Wakefield] looked at 12 children, eight of whom the parents reported developing autism after getting the MMR vaccine.
The study was described as a consecutive case series—but it wasn’t even really that, because there was no control group or control period. But even a case series can’t tell you whether one thing causes another thing. It is simply a description.
But once that paper was published, Wakefield got a lot of press and told people that he had shown vaccines had caused autism, which again, that study couldn’t even do.
The paper was ultimately retracted. Within a short amount of time, several of the authors pulled their names.
There were lots of problems later found with what was published. For example, the cases were not consecutive [i.e., they did not include all of the children studied]. They were cherry-picked cases. And we know that, given that the age when children receive the MMR is also the age when some children regress into autism, there will be a temporal relationship; by chance alone, some children would develop autism after vaccination. So, from a scientific perspective, the paper didn’t show much.

A number of large epidemiological studies subsequently found no association between the MMR vaccine and autism.

Once it started to become clear that the MMR vaccine was not associated with autism, the hypothesis shifted from the MMR vaccine [as a cause of autism] to thimerosal, which at the time was used as a preservative in some childhood vaccines. Thimerosal was never used in the MMR vaccine, but it was used as a preservative in multidose vials of other vaccines.
That led to a number of large studies looking at thimerosal in vaccines and autism, and those studies also found no relationship. Then the hypothesis shifted again to the number of vaccines given at one time, so there were studies of that, which also found no relationship between vaccines and autism.
At this point, we have 16 well-conducted, large population-based studies, carefully designed, done by different investigators in different countries, using different but strong methods. And all have found no relationship between MMR vaccine, thimerosal in vaccines, or the number of vaccines given and autism. The evidence is compelling.

Sharfstein concludes the interview with a personal perspective:

I’m a scientist and I believe in the value of science. The science that has been done has shown that vaccines are very safe. They’re not perfectly safe; they do sometimes, very rarely cause adverse reactions.
But when it comes to autism, the science has already largely been done. If you gave me a pot of money and said, let’s do more vaccine safety research, autism would not be high up on this list because the existing science is already quite compelling.

Kennedy and his allies reject all of this. Researchers are corrupt, their findings fraudulent. CDC oversight is inadequate, captures only a fraction of adverse events, and the VSD has concealed information about vaccine injuries. Their evidence is shoddy, discredited, refuted research conducted by the anti-vaccination camp. Wakefield and the Geiers père et fils are prime examples. Mark and David Geier

were known for promoting a controversial treatment for autism, and for publishing papers on the purported harms of vaccines that experts dismissed as junk science. In 2004, the CDC accused them of violating research protocols. In 2012, the state of Maryland sanctioned them. And in 2025, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tapped one of them to investigate alleged wrongdoing in a crucial CDC database. (Bartlett, You Could Throw Out the Results)

Mark Geier’s medical license was revoked by the Maryland State Board of Physicians in 2012. In addition to the practice of medicine, Geier was an expert-witness entrepreneur with “a profitable sideline of testifying…in lawsuits that alleged injury from vaccines” (Bartlett). Son David, who is not a physician, was sanctioned by the Maryland board for practicing medicine without a license.

Another argument thrown at the science is the increase in autism diagnosis in recent years. Something must be causing the increase, says Kennedy, with vaccines a prime suspect, and Trump appears to be swayed by this. The Autism Science Foundation rebuts the argument with a list of explanations for it:

broader diagnostic criteria
improved screening
increased awareness
improved access for services
people having babies at older ages because babies born to older parents are at increased risk
increased survival rates for preterm babies because preterm birth is associated with higher risk for autism
a mix of environmental factors and genetic susceptibility

The subject deserves better than I can give it. The harm being done if the present course not corrected soon, and there is no reason to think that will happen, will be felt for generations, if there are generations around to feel it.

In spite of all,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Keep the faith. Hold the line.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt

David Matthews Portable Bohemia

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