Kennedy family feud as siblings rebuke Robert Jr for anti-vaccination stance

Three members of America’s Kennedy clan have publicly rebuked Robert Jr for his anti-vaccination stance.

Robert Kennedy Jr was berated for “sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines”. Picture: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Three members of the Kennedy family have issued a public rebuke to Robert F. Kennedy Jr accusing him of “sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines” with “heartbreaking consequences”.

In the past 15 years Mr Kennedy, 65, a longtime environmental activist whose father Bobby was the former US attorney-general and senator assassinated in 1968 aged 42, has become one of the most prominent Americans in the anti-vaccine movement.

He has questioned the safety of inoculations, implying that they were to blame for an “epidemic” of chronic ailments among children and alleging a cover-up by doctors and scientists. Now, in the midst of the worst measles outbreak since the disease was declared eradicated from the United States in 2000, two of Mr Kennedy’s siblings have accused him of scaremongering and endangering public health.

“He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation on social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the sciences behind vaccines,” wrote Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, 67, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland, and Joseph P. Kennedy II, 66, a former congressman for Massachusetts, in an article for the website Politico.

The brother and sister of Mr Kennedy Jr wrote the piece with Maeve Kennedy McKean, his niece who is executive director of a global health institute at Georgetown University. They cited statistics showing the correlation of outbreaks in the US with lower vaccination rates in certain communities, including a whooping cough flare-up in Maine, and a 300 per cent increase in measles cases around the world.

“More than 110,000 people are now dying from measles every year,” they write. “These tragic numbers are caused by the growing fear and mistrust of vaccines, amplified by internet doomsayers. Robert F Kennedy Jr … is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases.”

He was an “outlier” in the Kennedy family, they said. His uncle, President John F. Kennedy, signed the Vaccination Assistance Act to protect millions of children from preventable diseases.

Mr Kennedy Jr said his family had “a long and continuing history of involvement with the public health agencies”, adding: “It is very difficult for any of us to accept that any of those officials would be less than candid about vaccine risks. I am not anti-vaccine. I want safe vaccines with robust safety testing.”

The Times