Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blamed RSV on a lab accident in two televised interviews, though the virus has circulated among humans for hundreds of years.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. brought up RSV on two recent television appearances. Nearly every child catches the virus before age two, and it usually feels like a cold. Instead of mentioning the vaccine, he told a story about a laboratory.
He says the virus came from a lab
Kennedy said on both CNN and Fox that RSV came from a laboratory, the result of a scientific experiment gone wrong. He has repeated this claim in his book and on podcasts for years.
His source is an article by Lyn Redwood, an anti-vaccine activist, that confuses chimpanzees with monkeys used to produce vaccines and suggests the virus reached children through polio vaccines.
The virus was around long before
The virus was indeed discovered in chimpanzees at a laboratory in Maryland, and a worker later fell ill. But evidence soon showed the virus had circulated among humans far earlier.
In 1957, Johns Hopkins researchers found that 80 percent of children in Baltimore had antibodies by age four. A 2007 study detected RSV proteins in lung tissue from a child who died in 1931, the earliest confirmed case.
Nineteenth-century medical records describe similar symptoms. Genetic analysis estimates the ancestors of today's virus have been circulating for hundreds of years.
Kennedy can't keep his stories straight
Kennedy first suggested the virus spread through vaccines, but an HHS spokesperson later claimed it moved directly from chimps to workers and then to the public. The two accounts contradict each other.
No researchers take his theory seriously. One expert laughed so hard he could not answer at first.
Why it matters
The country's top health official used national television to repeat a frightening fiction instead of pointing to a safe, effective vaccine. When the minister and his own department cannot agree on the story, what is the public supposed to believe?
Curated from high-quality sources, with concise summaries and key takeaways.
