Early polling in the presidential race has Robert Kennedy Jr getting up to a quarter of the vote in battleground states. In a New York Times/Siena poll released last month, Kennedy has the support of 24 percent of all registered voters polled. In key battleground states of Michigan and Arizona, the figure is 26 percent.
In the same poll, Donald Trump leads Joe Biden in five of the six states that swung blue and delivered the presidency to Biden in 2020.
Poll analysis shows slightly more support coming to Kennedy Jr from the Republican Party than the Democrats.
The support might just be an expression of a ‘none of the above’ mood in the US, especially among younger voters. How long this might last in the heat of the presidential race that begins in January with the primaries and ends with the presidential election in November is anyone’s guess but at this early stage, Kennedy Jr currently enjoys the highest levels of support among voters of all third-party candidates in modern US political history.
The notion of a fresh-faced youngster on the campaign trail is a case of perception overpowering reality. He’s younger than the two candidates most likely to be nominated by their parties but not by much. Kennedy will become a septuagenarian next month. Biden turned 81 in November and Trump will have his 78th birthday a week after the Republican National Congress in Milwaukee in June.
The allure of Robert Kennedy Jr cannot be underestimated. His father was Attorney-General in his uncle’s administration. He hints darkly at a swirl of unproven conspiracies of deep state involvement in his father’s and uncle’s assassinations. In a nation where government is often viewed with deep suspicion, his message is resonating.
He almost certainly won’t win but like the Greens in Australia who offer grab bags of policies they will never have to implement, Kennedy Jr has free rein to assemble a blithe collection of motherhood statements dressed up as policy.
RFK Jr. proposes almost a doubling of the minimum wage in the US to $15 an hour. His response to the American crisis on its southern border, he says, is both “tough and humane” by providing additional funding to speed up asylum claims while tightening border security.
In health policy RFK Jr pledged, “If I have not significantly dropped the level of chronic disease in our children in my first term, I do not want to be re-elected.”
What a lovely sentiment. The big problem is RFK Jr is indirectly responsible for preventable diseases like measles returning to the world.
UNICEF reported 30,601 confirmed cases of measles in Europe and Central Asia for the current year to December 4. In 2022, there were 909 cases in the same regions. The only reason for this huge spike – most of it coming in the latter half of the year, is a breakdown in immunisation programs.
In the US, measles outbreaks have declined during the pandemic from a spike in 2019 where 1274 confirmed cases were diagnosed in children, up by 1200 percent on cases in 2018. The cause was attributed to unvaccinated individuals spreading the disease.
In the same year, 5667 cases of measles arose in Samoa causing 19 deaths. The outbreak which made its way to New Zealand and as far away as Perth was indirectly attributed to anti-vaccination advocacy in New Zealand and the South Pacific.
Kennedy Jr is the pope of the anti-vaccination movement, not just in the US but around the world. He doesn’t like to talk about it so much these days but he finds it difficult for an interview to pass without mention of his anti-vaccine advocacy.
He has repeated a line that “there are no safe or effective childhood vaccines” on numerous occasions.
On CNN last week, he was asked about that specific statement and denied making it. The interviewer then ran the tape of RFK Jr saying just that less than six months ago. Confronted by the tape, he mumbled and stumbled his way to conclude that no childhood vaccines have been subjected to “a pre-licensing safety study” and hinted that vaccines should be subject to double blind placebo testing.
To a lay person, this may seem sensible. But it is a straight out lie. Newly introduced childhood vaccines which replaced existing ones, as in the Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccine, are subject to double-blind placebo testing.
One of the currently licensed vaccines against rotavirus was tested in a placebo-controlled, prospective, 11-country, four-year trial of more than 70,000 infants before being approved.
The only double-blind placebo testing that occurred where no safe and effective vaccines already existed is the 1954 study of the polio vaccine where 200,000 young children received the vaccine while approximately the same number were given a saltwater placebo. In the placebo group, 16 children died of polio and 34 were paralysed. They gave their lives and their health for a scientific study that should never have taken place.
But it is in this manner that RFK Jr deflects and spreads disinformation. His current concern is that childhood vaccines contain mercury. In a written Q & A interview with Health Magazine, STAT RFK Jr, responded that “some babies were being injected with 25 micrograms of methylmercury, which is part of a preservative called thimerosol that is used in multi-dose vials of influenza vaccine.” He claimed that amount to be “100 times” greater than the amount considered to be safe.
It takes a specialist to debunk this nonsense. In a written response to Kennedy’s misinformation in the STAT interview, Paul Offit, Professor of Paediatrics and Director of the Vaccine Education Centre at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, wrote:
“Babies typically ingest about 360 micrograms of methylmercury during the first 6 months of life, well before they will ever receive their first dose of influenza vaccine. If the 25 micrograms of ethylmercury in vaccines is 100 times greater than what Kennedy claimed is safe, then simply by living on Earth, by 6 months of age babies will have ingested an amount of mercury that is 1,440 times greater than Kennedy’s safety limit.”
According to Offit, the only way to avoid mercury which naturally occurs in water, and anything made from water including breast milk and infant formula, is to leave the planet.
But that’s the problem with Kennedy. There’s never a paediatrician around when he spreads his malicious and dangerous anti-vax messages. He rarely, if ever, gets called on it. And he is about to wander around spreading garbage on the biggest platform on Earth.
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