TL;DR
Kennedy used his office as health secretary to endorse the anti-vaccine movement he founded, while a measles outbreak kills people in Pennsylvania.
The man in charge of American public health went to an anti-vaccine conference and told the crowd, 'You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House.'
The 'moderate' version is gone
Since becoming Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had denied opposing vaccines and softened his language. He kept his distance from Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group he founded, which tells parents that vaccines threaten their children.
At its keynote, the old Kennedy returned: complaining about safety studies, floating the long-disproven vaccine-autism link, and more or less declaring himself an anti-vaxxer.
He counted side effects, not lives saved
His claim: 'We have no idea what the risk profile is for these products.' In his strangest moment he read out the hepatitis B vaccine's list of possible adverse events, anaphylaxis among them — roughly one case per million doses. He never mentioned the benefit: infections fallen sharply, millions of deaths projected to have been prevented.
He was introduced by CHD's current chief, and shared the stage with the author of the retracted 1998 paper linking autism to the MMR vaccine.
Measles is killing people right now
Pennsylvania is in a measles outbreak: 731 official cases since April, 117 in the past week, four deaths since mid-August, two of them infants. It is concentrated in the Amish community, where immunisation runs around 25 percent in Lancaster County.
Kennedy once praised the Amish for refusing vaccines and said Americans should 'think more like the Amish think'. This past month he has argued with the governor over how to define a measles death, and the CDC he leads has listed none of them.
His only mention of measles onstage was a complaint that such deaths get headlines while the alleged dangers of vaccines are ignored.
The room understood: he is still one of them.
Can one person be both the regulator and the salesman? He seems to think so.
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