Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has wrongly claimed that COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than all vaccines 'over the past 30 years...
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has wrongly claimed that COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than all vaccines 'over the past 30 years,' citing incomplete self-reported data that doesn't account for patients' actual causes of death.
The environmental lawyer and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy, Jr. made the wild claims Monday on Fox News' Tucker Carlson Today.
He cited figures from the Centers for Disease Control's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a self-reporting tool that the CDC itself says may 'contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable.'
Kennedy, 67, was banned from Instagram in February 'for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.'
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. claimed COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than all other vaccine combined while speaking to Fox News's Tucker Carlson on Monday
The attorney and law professor has been a vaccine skeptic for years, repeating the often-debunked claim that mercury in vaccines causes autism
The Centers for Disease Control maintains that COVID vaccines are safe and effective and recommended for everyone ages 5 and up
'There have been 17,000 deaths reported to VAERS from the Covid vaccines,' Kennedy, a professor at Pace University, said Monday.
'And that’s more, in the last eight months, than all vaccines - the billions and billions of vaccines - combined over the past 30 years.
'This vaccine appears to be killing more people than all vaccines combined.'
The CDC says COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective and recommended for everyone aged 5 or older 'as soon as possible.'
Dr. Pradheep J. Shanker, a radiologist from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has warned that making assessments on the safety of COVID vaccines based on VAERS data is 'not accurate' in an interview with Mediate.
'VAERS was intended to cast a wide net to capture any possible or potential complication that even has the remotest possibility of being related to the vaccine,' Dr. Shanker said.
'Any adverse event is considered reportable. This ranges from direct symptoms, such as fevers or hematomas, to events such as death from blunt trauma in a car accident (which, of course, is highly unlikely to be related to the vaccine).
Kennedy cited figures from the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which encourages patients to self-report side effects and may contain unverifiable information
'With hundreds of millions of doses, the likelihood of some percentage of those people dying (especially among the elderly) after vaccination is a certainty.'
As of Monday, 58.8 percent of the US population has been fully vaccinated, according to the CDC, with 68.4 percent having at least one dose.
There are about 80,000 new cases a week, down from a late summer high of about 164,000 attributed to the highly contagious Delta variant.
Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, has expressed anti-vaccine views long before the COVID-19 pandemic.
He previously lobbied Congress to allow parents who do not want to vaccinate their children exemptions from state mandates to do so.
His organization, Children's Health Defense, says it does not oppose vaccines, but is dedicated to questioning their safety.
A heading on a recent post read, 'Vaccine Mandates: An Erosion of Civil Rights?'
The group, which was originally named the World Mercury Project, promotes claims generally not accepted by medical experts that mercury in vaccines can cause autism.
At a public event in February 2017, Kennedy alleged that vaccines had 'caused an autism epidemic.'
His siblings, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Joseph P Kennedy II, and his niece, Maeve Kennedy McKean, slammed Kennedy in an op-ed in Politico Magazine in 2019, citing the rise of measles in the US.
Kennedy is the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy, left, and the son of former US attorney general and senator from New York Robert Kennedy, second from left
'Robert F Kennedy Jr - Joe and Kathleen's brother and Maeve's uncle - is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases,' they wrote.
'He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.'
Kennedy is married to actress Cheryl Hines of Curb Your Enthusiasm, who met him through her on-screen husband Larry David, according to their New York Times wedding announcement.
The vaccine skeptic suffers from spasmodic dysphonia, a lifelong condition with an unknown cause that causes a person's voice to spasm.
He is the nephew of JFK and the son of Robert, or Bobby, Kennedy, a former US attorney general and senator from New York.
JFK and Bobby were both assassinated in separate and notorious incidents.
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