CNN's Jake Tapper refused to allow Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to pretend to be following sound science on vaccine safety.
Kennedy, a longstanding vaccine conspiracy theorist who has baselessly linked vaccination to autism and frequently overstated the risk of legitimate side effects, tried to put all of that aside this week as a measles outbreak in Texas sickened more than 600 people and killed two children. Posting to social media, he wrote, "The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine."
But that seems hard to square with Kennedy's activism against that very vaccine, Tapper pointed out on his Monday show.
"Before the U.S. Senate confirmed Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services ... in a 52 to 48 vote, mostly along partisan lines, Kennedy had made several comments, at the very least skeptical, surely ignorant, and in many cases just false, about vaccines such as these," said Tapper.
"There's no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective," said Kennedy in one clip. "You go into negative efficacy. So you are if you got vaccinated, you're more likely to get sick, you're more likely to get severe illness, and you're more likely to die than if you are unvaccinated," he said in another.
"False, false, false," said Tapper.
In fact, Tapper continued, Kennedy has been accused of directly worsening a measles outbreak in American Samoa in 2019.
"RFK Jr., who visited the island and boosted the anti-vax contingencies there, sent a letter to the Samoan prime minister suggesting that a vaccine may have been responsible for causing the outbreak, which is not the case. He wrote, quote, 'There's also the possibility that children who received the live measles virus during Samoa's recent vaccination drive may have shed the virus and inadvertently infected vulnerable children. It's a regrettable possibility that these children are casualties of Merck's vaccine.' The children were not casualties of Merck's vaccine."
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