RFK’s Anti-Vax Flock Turns on Him
RFK endorsed the MMR vaccine. His followers want to go MMA on him for it.
RFK’s biggest fans turn on him
For vaccine opponents, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment as secretary of health and human services represented something close to nirvana. It was a chance, finally, to take on Big Pharma and to bring their long-stigmatized beliefs into the political mainstream. Perhaps no one in the country has done more than Kennedy to convince people not to vaccinate themselves or their children. Now, he was going to be in charge of the country’s vaccine programs.
Those dreams came crashing down Sunday afternoon, when Kennedy visited the family of the second child to die in the Texas measles outbreak for a trip that was billed as an effort to better understand the federal response to the disease. Buried near the bottom of an X post about his visit, Kennedy conceded that the measles vaccine is “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.” He also said the government was providing “needed MMR vaccines.”
That statement went off like a bomb in MAHA-land, where it’s taken as scripture that basic sanitation and vitamin A are the real way to avoid measles, which (they add) isn’t that serious of a disease anyway. The replies to Kennedy’s tweet filled up with former supporters, prominent and not, who thought he had made a grievous error.
“There is no defense for this poorly worded statement,” wrote Sherri Tenpenny, a prominent anti-vaccine activist who has called concern about the measles outbreak “hysteria.”
Kennedy has a long history of criticizing the measles vaccine, which—to be abundantly clear—is empirically effective and may well constitute one of the great medical breakthroughs of the twentieth century. He said in a video recently released by his Children’s Health Defense group that it’s possible the measles vaccine is causing more deaths than measles itself. He’s been blamed for fueling anti-MMR vaccine sentiments in Samoa before and during a fall 2019 measles outbreak that ended up killing 83 people.
As recently as last month, Kennedy did an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity at a Steak 'n Shake where he expounded on the supposed dangers of the measles vaccine.
Still, Kennedy’s supporters were already growing restless in early March, when he wrote an op-ed amid the measles outbreak saying the vaccine should be available to people who want it. Given his previous claims that the vaccine was actually harmful, they wondered, why would he now want to make it available?
Others groped for conspiracy theories to defend Kennedy. Kim Iversen, a former host of the Hill’s daily talk show, speculated on her own show in March that nefarious forces were deliberately spreading the measles in Texas to make Kennedy look bad.
“Did somebody go and release measles?” she asked.
As early as December 2024, Dr. Mary Bowden, a Houston doctor who was suspended from her job for pushing COVID-19 misinformation, complained on a podcast that Kennedy was ditching attacks on vaccines for the more politically palatable, blander “Make America Healthy Again” movement. She and other anti-vaccine activists worried that he and the incoming Trump administration would be more preoccupied with eliminating “Red Dye no. 4” and seed oils from the food supply than on going after vaccines.
“He’s our nuclear bomb—we’re in World War III, he’s going to take down Japan,” Bowden said in the podcast interview. “All of a sudden, the nuclear bomb—the target has shifted to food.”
The fury has only grown now that Kennedy managed to eke out one wholly positive statement about vaccines—whether because of bad press or because the death of a second child during the outbreak brought about his Damascene conversion. Former One America News host Liz Wheeler, whose YouTube channel has more than 400,000 subscribers, accused Kennedy of no longer being “based.”
“What on earth is going on with Bobby Kennedy,” Wheeler wrote in a post on X. “We voted for based. We didn’t vote for ‘needed MMR vaccines.’”
This brewing discontent with Kennedy among the MAHA faithful is also one of the forces behind the obviously fake but increasingly popular “RFK blackmail” conspiracy theory I touched on last week. In this telling, Kennedy only stopped being “based” because someone—presumably Israel—is blackmailing him with some unspecified but damaging material.
This is flimsy stuff even by the standards of these conspiracy theories—but if Kennedy continues to acknowledge the reality of the measles outbreak and the value of vaccines, I think it’ll become even more popular.
DEI for me, but not for thee, in the VA gov race
Like many Republican officials, Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears is no fan of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
Earle-Sears, who on Saturday officially became the GOP nominee to succeed Glenn Youngkin in the governor’s mansion, has repeatedly blasted DEI initiatives.
“Democrats think minorities can’t succeed without DEI,” her campaign wrote in an X post in March. “I didn’t get here through victimhood—but through faith, education, and grit.”
But a few years ago, before DEI became the right’s most hated acronym, Earle-Sears was happy to participate in diversity programs.
The LinkedIn page for Earle-Sears’s now-closed company, an appliance and electric business, points out that hiring the business would be a solution for government contractors looking to fulfill DEI requirements.
“As a female-, veteran-, and minority-owned company, we are able to help federal contractors meet their diversity requirements,” the profile reads.
Earle-Sears’s campaign didn’t respond to my requests for comment.
In the intervening four years, DEI initiatives have become anathema to Republicans, and Donald Trump quashed diversity efforts across the federal government. Not surprisingly, Earle-Sears’s take on DEI also appears to have abruptly changed.
When I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, I knew people who got polio and measles. Parents were terrified and helpless. When vaccines became available, everyone got vaccinated. Nobody was stupid enough to tell them not to.
The misguided beliefs of the anti-vaxxers may be why Trump so dislikes formal education—dumb dasn’t object to dumber.