Bill Maher had Robert F. Kennedy Jr. his on Club Random podcast to discuss the White House hopeful’s controversial stance on vaccines. The often-unfiltered host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher then post a clip on Twitter with the headline, “Is @RobertFKennedyJr’s position on vaccines that unreasonable?”
Have a look and listen below, and judge for yourself.
In the clip, Democrat Kennedy cites a book he wrote that summarizes “over 450 studies.” Maher then asked about “the question for your campaign” before Kennedy interrupted as said, “I’m not talking about this stuff for my campaign, I’m just talking between you and me.” The host shot back: “That’s a ridiculous assumption. Of course you’re going to have to talk about it. RFK Jr. interrupted again, saying, “Well, if somebody asks me, I’m going to.”
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Maher raised his voice and said, “They’re all going to ask you — are you serious? This is all they’re going to ask you about.”
After a bit more back-and-forth about “the science” behind vaccines, Kennedy began arguing his point.
“Every medicine is required to do placebo-controlled trials … you give a group of people the medicine, and then you give a similarly situated [group] of people a placebo, and then you look at health outcomes over a four- or five-year period. Many of the outcomes are going to have long diagnostic horizons and long incubation periods, so you won’t see them immediately. You need to do it — Anthony Fauci said said eight years for a vaccine. You need to watch them for a while. … The only medicine that never gets tested are vaccines. And that is what I object to. … All I’m saying is, let’s test them the way we test other medicines. That does not seem unreasonable.”
Maher agrees, saying, “That is not unreasonable.”
“That’s my position,” Kennedy says as the clip ends.
But is it, though?
The son of the late U.S. senator and one-time Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy has been making arguments against vaccines for many years, long before Covid. In fact, in 2015, Kennedy said of kids who get childhood vaccines: “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of 103 [degrees], they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”
Kennedy later apologized for the comparison.
The comments came as Kennedy was promoting the documentary Trace Amounts, which blames the mercury-containing vaccine preservative thimerosal for the rise in autism in young children, even though it was removed from vaccines 16 years earlier. In addition, the international scientific community has discredited the link in recent years.
His sister Kerry Kennedy tweeted in response then: “Bobby’s lies and fear-mongering yesterday were both sickening and destructive. I strongly condemn him for his hateful rhetoric.”
In 2019, amid a measles outbreak, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Joseph P. Kennedy II and Maeve Kennedy McKean wrote an op-ed in Politico denouncing their brother and uncle’s views.
“He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines,” they wrote. “We love Bobby. … We stand behind him in his ongoing fight to protect our environment. However, on vaccines he is wrong.”
Dr. Peter Hotez a vaccine scientist and Nobel Prize nominee told MSMBC of Kennedy’s assertions last week on Joe Rogan’s podcast:
“I’ve discussed this issue with him [Kennedy] many times by phone and by email and the problem is he just keeps moving the goal posts. First, it was the measles/mumps/rubella vaccine that caused that caused autism. … Then it was the thimerosal preservative in vaccines. Then it was spacing vaccines too close together. Then it was aluminum vaccines. Then it was the HPV vaccine he said caused infertility or autoimmunity. Then, vaccines caused something called chronic illness. So you’re always playing this kind of game of whack-a-mole. You knock something down and it pops up. We’re moving the goal posts.”
Rogan later challenged Hotez to come on his show and debate Kennedy. While Hotez has been on Rogan’s show before and, by his own admission, debated Kennedy, he declined for fear of giving credence to Kennedy’s assertions.
Speaking of which, vaccines do get tested. The polio vaccine field trials of 1954 were among the largest and most publicized clinical trials ever undertaken. They included more than 623,000 schoolchildren who were injected with vaccine or placebo and more than a million others participated as “observed” controls. The results, showed that Jonas Salk’s killed-virus preparation was 80%-90% effective in preventing polio. Those vaccines were applied for decades, virtually eradicating the scourge of the crippling disease.
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