RFK Jr. Tells Congress He’s Not Anti-Vaxx, Then Pushes False Claims Suggesting Covid Shots Killed People En Masse

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

The same day after telling Congress he was not anti-vaccine, Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested in an interview with the Washington Post that Covid-19 vaccines “contributed to the large toll of excess mortality in the second year of the pandemic.”

On Thursday, the political scion appeared before a House subcommittee to testify about censorship, while denying accusations of racism and anti-Semitism. Kennedy also told the committee that he was not anti-vaccination despite years of criticizing public health officials and linking vaccines to autism.

“I’m subjected to this new form of censorship, which is called targeted propaganda, where people apply pejoratives like ‘anti-vax.’ I’ve never been anti-vaccine,” Kennedy told Congress. “But everybody in this room probably believes that I have been because that’s the prevailing narrative.”

However, during an interview with WaPo on Thursday, Kennedy suggested that U.S. vaccination policy led to excess deaths after it was rolled out in 2021.

“We’re seeing in 2021 and ’22, this huge increase in excess deaths that nobody is asking about. Nobody is explaining, how is that happening?” RFK Jr. said.

WaPo reporters immediately fact-checked Kennedy and he responded by admitting he could be wrong on the issue:

Your author countered that excess deaths were higher in the first year of the pandemic than in the year after vaccines were widely available. Andrew Stokes, a Boston University researcher who has studied excess deaths, also emailed the Health 202 on Thursday night to say that his team found that in places where vaccine uptake went up, excess mortality in the second year of the pandemic went down.

“It is impossible to reconcile the exceptionally strong inverse relationship between vaccination and excess mortality with the possibility that the Covid-19 vaccines [have] contributed to the large toll of excess mortality in the second year of the pandemic,” Stokes added.

Faced with repeated questions — and disagreement — the presidential candidate stressed to Post reporters he was “not anti-vaccine” and would be happy to look at clinical studies.

“I’m open to the fact that I’m wrong,” RFK Jr. said. His years of questioning vaccine safety despite persistently being told that he’s wrong suggest otherwise.

Kennedy’s stardom with conservative audiences started to rise in 2021 after he wrote the book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. As a candidate, Kennedy said he would “look at” prosecuting Dr. Anthony Fauci.

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