RFK Jr., page 24
Kennedy had already been lecturing about the dangers of mercury emissions to freshwater fish across the country for Riverkeeper. By 2005, he had added the dangers of thimerosal, a mercury-based compound used as a preservative in childhood vaccines to prevent the growth of bacteria.
The World Mercury Project had been founded in 2007 by the film producer Eric Gladen, who claimed to have experienced mercury poisoning after receiving a tetanus shot. In 2014, he made Trace Amounts, which premiered at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood in February 2015. Months later, the film had a special screening at the United Nations, with a panel discussion featuring Kennedy. Overnight, Kennedy seemed to become the chairman of the board of Gladen’s nonprofit, and by 2017, he was being paid a salary of just over $131,000 for part-time work with the group. (That number would increase exponentially as the group drew in millions of dollars in donations, thanks in large part to Kennedy’s participation.) By then the group had changed its name to Children’s Health Defense, and the following year Kennedy was listed as chairman and chief legal counsel with a $50,000 bump in salary, according to public documents. Annual donations to the nonprofit jumped along with his salary. In 2015, it had taken in about $165,000 in donations. In 2019, that number was more than $1 million. And in 2022, it drew in more than $22 million.
Kennedy said that he had been inspired to join the fight against mercury in vaccines by Bridges and the other “mercury moms”—many of them professional, well-educated women—whose children had suffered as a result of vaccines and sought him out after his speeches on the environment. “They said that if I was serious18 about eliminating the perils of mercury, I needed to look at thimerosal,” he said. “Vaccines, they claimed, were the biggest vector for mercury exposure in children. I really didn’t want to get involved because vaccines were pretty remote from my wheelhouse. I’d always been pro-vaccine. I had all my kids vaccinated and got my annual flu shot every year. But, I was impressed by these women.”
Kennedy might have thought back to Skip Lazell, his curmudgeonly high school biology teacher, when he took up the mantle of vaccine warrior. He had always admired independent thinkers and hadn’t been entirely stoned out of his mind at Harvard when he had taken classes taught by the biologist and conservationist Edward O. Wilson and Robert Trivers, another evolutionary biologist whom Time called one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century, whose theories on reciprocal altruism and parent-offspring conflict, developed while he was teaching Kennedy and others at Harvard in the 1970s, had rocked the scientific world. It was Trivers, with his unconventional views and lifestyle, who had had the most impact on Kennedy, who called him “the best teacher I ever had” in a June 13, 2001, diary entry. Trivers, who became a crusader for gay rights, joined the Black Panther Party and eventually moved to Jamaica, where he endured several near-death experiences, smoked marijuana, and studied lizards. He referred to himself as “the badass of evolutionary biology.” Among his most controversial theories is that self-deception is an evolutionary strategy, that human beings fool themselves to better deceive others, which makes lying an important human trait.
Once Kennedy started digging deep into the effects of thimerosal, he quickly became the badass of the anti-vaccine community. Could thimerosal-heavy vaccines have led to the explosion in autism in children? It was a question he wasn’t afraid to ask. “I was dumbstruck19 by the gulf between the scientific reality and the media consensus,” he said. “All the network news anchors and television doctors were assuring the public that there was not a single study that suggested thimerosal was unsafe or that it could cause autism. . . . The HMO [health maintenance organization] data clearly showed that the massive mercury doses in the newly expanded vaccine schedule were causing run-away epidemics of neurological disorders—ADD, ADHD, speech delay, sleep disorders, tics and autism among America’s children.” He said he was stunned that children attending school in the United States were required to have as many as seventy vaccinations—a far cry from the three that had been required by schools in various states when he had been a child.
In June 2005, he published “Deadly Immunity,” an article in both Salon and Rolling Stone, detailing a June 2000 secret conference of top government scientists and health officials organized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the Simpsonwood Methodist Conference Center near Norcross, Georgia. At the conference, experts in the field of epidemiology, autism, and vaccines had analyzed vaccine safety and the possible link between thimerosal and childhood autism. Kennedy claimed that the conference attendees, who had published their results three years later, in 2003, had withheld their findings from the public. He accused the government and big pharmaceutical companies of colluding to hide safety findings on vaccines and the possible link between thimerosal and autism.
Although the publications corrected several errors of science and fact made by Kennedy in the story, including that the rotavirus vaccine contained thimerosal and that one of the researchers had a patent on one of the vaccines, the article was eventually retracted and disappeared from the publications’ websites. But among the vaccine skeptic activists—“The Children’s Health Defense warriors,” as Kennedy once called them—the article was key to their struggle and continues to be passed around like a banned samizdat. If anything, the article’s disappearance only inflamed their convictions that there was a media conspiracy to keep the truth from families whose children had been injured by vaccines.
In between his work for Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy continued his environmental crusades, showing up at Standing Rock near the border of North and South Dakota in November 2016 with some of his children, other celebrities, and members of Native American groups to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. The pipeline, which would transport crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois, protestors said, would threaten sacred land of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, violate treaties, and contribute to climate change. Kennedy showed up when the Army Corps of Engineers threatened to evict the protestors. In photos distributed by the Waterkeeper Alliance, Kennedy, in a work shirt and faded blue jeans, pumped his fist in a show of defiance and stood with his son Conor at the Oceti Sakowin Camp amid a group of Sioux elders brandishing wooden staffs studded with feathers.
“On a recent trip to Standing Rock20, I saw truck mounted facial recognition equipment tagging protestors from surrounding hill-tops,” he wrote. “I experienced the jarring barrage of acoustic cannons. The state and private security forces deployed water cannons against protesters in sub-freezing weather endangering their lives, tear gas bombs, pepper spray, flash bang grenades which might cost one protester her arm, and plastic bullets which felled a Sioux elder the day I left.”
It would be one of his last high-profile environmental protests for the water protection nonprofits to which he had devoted so many years of his life. In March 2017, he resigned from Riverkeeper21, citing his new obsession with vaccines as well as his new living arrangements nearly three thousand miles from the Hudson Valley. “I now live on the West Coast, and the weekly commute has been hard on my family, to say nothing of my carbon footprint,” he wrote in his letter of resignation. “Furthermore, keeping up with the exploding growth at Waterkeeper Alliance and my work with World Mercury Project have been consuming, increasing bandwidth, leaving me little time to give Riverkeeper the attention it deserves.” Two months after his resignation, Bob Boyle, his old mentor and founder of the group, died of cancer.
Riverkeeper’s president, Paul Gallay, publicly thanked Kennedy, but behind the scenes the situation was very different. According to Boyle’s son, Alex, Kennedy was pushed out of Riverkeeper as he became increasingly shrill about the link between vaccines and childhood autism. “He broke with Riverkeeper because they were embarrassed about his vaccine stance,” Boyle said. “He was also forced to leave Riverkeeper because of his flirtations with politicians and commercializing water. He was asked to leave in January 2017. It’s normal for him to go from cause to cause. He’s all over the place.” By November 2020, Kennedy had also stepped down from Waterkeeper Alliance.
Kennedy, whose law firm began to take on lucrative litigation against pharmaceutical manufacturers, hooked up with the film producer Del Bigtree, who had founded an advocacy group called Informed Consent Action Network in Austin, Texas. The mandate of the group is to investigate the safety of medical procedures, pharmaceutical drugs, and vaccines, according to its federal filings.
Kennedy and Bigtree, among other CHD “warriors22,” attended a May 2017 meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), at the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC. The opportunity to meet with Fauci came after Donald Trump, who had been elected to his first term as president in 2016, asked Kennedy to chair the Vaccine Safety Commission, a new entity, which was compromised even before it got started after it was revealed that Trump had accepted $1 million from Pfizer for his inauguration. The meeting with Fauci didn’t go well, either, according to Bigtree’s account in the foreword to a book coauthored by Kennedy. Fauci and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, who was also at the meeting, allegedly refused to provide them with the studies they sought about sixteen new vaccines that had been added to the CDC schedule. “Nobody knew the true risk profile of these vaccines, and nobody could say whether they were averting more problems, deaths and illnesses than they were causing,” wrote Bigtree.
That first meeting with Fauci changed the course of the next several years for Kennedy and Children’s Health Defense. Kennedy seemed to be on fire, writing and speaking about the dangers of vaccines. Together with board members and volunteers from the nonprofit, he doubled down on the vaccine fight. Their big break came after March 2020, when the world was plunged into a deadly pandemic and the questions surrounding vaccines—especially COVID-19 vaccines—exploded.
Suddenly, Fauci, seventy-nine at the time, became a daily fixture on news programs and presidential briefings on COVID. After all, he was “America’s doctor” who had reigned over NIAID for thirty-six years, overseeing the country’s response to HIV/AIDS, Zika, SARS, and other epidemics. Many people saw him as a calming influence, and he was called upon to explain on national television the science behind the spread of COVID-19. He warned the country’s residents to “hunker down significantly more than we as a country are doing.” Millions of people diligently followed his social distancing safety protocols and masking advice to prevent the spread of COVID-19 even as President Trump challenged much of his wisdom during the pandemic’s darkest days. In one of his first tweets at the beginning of the pandemic amid widespread panic as the stock market collapsed and unemployment soared in March 2020, Trump posted on Twitter in capital letters: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE MORE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”
Trump wasn’t the only one hostile to Fauci, who held on to the claim that COVID-19 was a product of nature and not lab generated—which would be seriously questioned in the years after the pandemic. Among his fiercest critics were the members of Children’s Health Defense and Bigtree’s Informed Consent Action Network. Like Children’s Health Defense, Bigtree’s nonprofit grew exponentially during the pandemic. Its annual donations jumped from about $3.4 million in 2019 to nearly $13 million in 2021, a year after the beginning of the pandemic, according to federal filings. Children’s Health Defense grew into an even more powerful advocacy group, launching an internet TV channel and film studio, with chapters across the country and around the world. Its infrastructure was perfectly suited for a national political campaign, and before too long, Kennedy would find himself at the forefront of an exploding national movement that not only questioned the nature of vaccines and health care but was poised to expose what he saw as widespread corruption and lack of transparency in democratic institutions across the country.
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Kennedy’s attacks against Fauci created a deep fissure within his family. While he and the vaccine “warriors” attacked “America’s doctor,” his sister Kerry and his mother honored Fauci with the Ripple of Hope Award from the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation, where Kerry was president. The nonprofit had been founded by Ethel in 1968 to honor her husband after his assassination and gave out awards to those who worked to advance human rights and social justice. The award to Fauci was announced in the summer of 2020, just as Kennedy was putting the finishing touches on his bombshell book about Fauci. In December 2020, the awards ceremony went online for the first time in its more-than-fifty-year history because of the COVID-19 protocols, and a video uploaded to Facebook showed Kerry and Ethel holding up the prize—a bust of Robert Kennedy—in Ethel’s living room. Fauci was honored along with the civil rights leader and longtime Georgia Democratic congressman John Lewis and labor leader Dolores Huerta, both of whom had helped with Robert Kennedy’s presidential run in 1968. Awards were also handed out to Colin Kaepernick, an NFL quarterback and civil rights activist, as well as PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, among others. In his videotaped acceptance speech, Fauci spoke about having forged “a delightfully warm and productive friendship” with Ted Kennedy, “a steadfast supporter of NIH.” The “liberal lion of the Senate,” who had spent his life advocating for universal health care and helped pass landmark legislation to increase funding for cancer research and treatment, had died in 2009 after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. There is little doubt that Fauci’s mention of Ted Kennedy was a shot directed at his nephew, who was now openly questioning everything Fauci had done during his long career in public health.
Awarding Fauci such a distinction in their father’s name was likely seen as a blow aimed at Kennedy, who was upsetting his family in other ways. As the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination approached, Kennedy traveled to California to visit Sirhan Sirhan. He said he had spent months going over the investigation into his father’s death and felt he needed to meet his assassin in person. He left the three-hour meeting convinced that Sirhan had been falsely accused of killing his father and publicly demanded a new investigation into the assassination. Sirhan had originally confessed to the killing after his arrest, although he had also said he had no memory of the shooting. He was serving a life sentence at a correctional facility near San Diego.
“I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan23,” Kennedy said. “I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence.” Witnesses to the assassination had said that Sirhan had been standing in front of the presidential candidate in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, but an autopsy report had found that Robert Kennedy had been shot four times at point-blank range from behind. Kennedy pointed to new evidence showing that thirteen shots had been fired that night, but Sirhan’s gun had contained only eight bullets. The theory that there had been a second gunman in the hotel kitchen was backed by Paul Schrade, a labor leader and aide in the 1968 presidential campaign, who had been shot in the head by Sirhan. Schrade had spent decades analyzing the assassination and trying to force the Los Angeles Police Department to disclose a confidential trove of documents about the shooting. Schrade pointed to evidence from an acoustics expert who had examined an audio recording made by a reporter in the hotel pantry that revealed the thirteen shots. “Yes, he did shoot me24. Yes, he shot four other people and aimed at Kennedy,” Schrade said in an interview on the 50th anniversary of the shooting in 2018. “The important thing is he did not shoot Robert Kennedy. Why didn’t they go after the second gunman?”
Schrade and Kennedy believed that the second shooter had been a security guard who had been hired to protect Robert Kennedy on the night he was shot. Thane Eugene Cesar was standing behind Robert Kennedy when he was shot. Cesar, a plumber who worked for the Lockheed Aircraft plant in Burbank, was opposed to Kennedy’s policies, once saying that if elected he would sell the country to Communists and immigrants. When he was interviewed by the LAPD after the shooting, officers did not ask to see his gun, nor did they ever consider him a suspect. Although he admitted that he had a .22-caliber pistol, which was similar to the weapon used in the assassination, he claimed that he had sold it before the shooting. Years later, in 1972, William Turner, a former FBI agent and assassination researcher, tracked down the man who had bought Cesar’s gun. The receipt showed that Cesar had lied and had actually sold his weapon in September 1968—three months after the assassination. In 2018, Kennedy had arranged to meet Cesar in the Philippines, where he had retired, but had canceled the meeting after Cesar kept demanding payment to speak to him and increased the price every time Kennedy spoke to him. When he demanded $25,000 to speak, Kennedy canceled the meeting.
Both Kennedy and his brother Douglas supported parole for Sirhan at his California parole board hearing in August 2021. “While nobody can speak definitively on behalf of my father, I firmly believe that based on his own consuming commitment to fairness and justice, that he would strongly encourage this board to release Mr. Sirhan because of [his] impressive record of rehabilitation,” wrote Kennedy in a letter submitted to the board. “At 77, he is a gentle, humble, kind hearted, frail and harmless old man who poses no threat to our community. His release will be testimony to the humanity, compassion and idealism of our justice system to which my father devoted his life.” The two-person board agreed to recommend Sirhan’s release.
Kennedy and Douglas’s six other siblings were quick to condemn the decision. “Our father’s death impacted our family in ways that cannot adequately be articulated and today’s decision by a two-member parole board has inflicted enormous additional pain,” said a statement posted by Kerry Kennedy on social media. “But beyond just us, six of Robert Kennedy’s surviving children, Sirhan Sirhan committed a crime against our nation and its people. He took our father from our family and he took him from America.” A few days later, Ethel issued her own statement condemning the parole board’s decision to release Sirhan, on her son Christopher Kennedy’s Facebook page. “Our family and our country suffered an unspeakable loss due to the inhumanity of one man,” she said. “We believe in the gentleness that spared his life, but in taming his act of violence, he should not have the opportunity to terrorize again.”
