FactChecking RFK Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense Keynote

Headlining a conference for Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit he previously led that regularly spreads vaccine misinformation, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a litany of familiar false and misleading claims, particularly about vaccines.

For a few months earlier this year, Kennedy had largely stopped talking about vaccines, reportedly at the request of the White House. Facing a surge of measles cases not seen in a generation, Kennedy had also at times offered a lukewarm recommendation to vaccinate, frustrating his hardline anti-vaccine supporters.

But in August, Kennedy appeared with President Donald Trump during the signing of an executive order that called for splitting up the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine. Trump inaccurately said the MMR vaccine is “quite lethal,” and Kennedy proceeded to falsely claim on cable television that there was new evidence to support breaking up the combination shot. The secretary also began an ongoing beef with Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania over measles-associated deaths in the state.

Then, on Sept. 17, Kennedy gave the keynote speech for the one-day conference of Children’s Health Defense in Washington, D.C. Children’s Health Defense describes itself as working to “restore and protect the health of children by eliminating exposures to environmental toxins.” But the organization is one of the biggest sources of inaccurate vaccine information.

Just three days prior to the conference, the group’s X account falsely said that for every vaccine, “your child is more likely to die from the vaccine than from the disease.” The same day, the group also wrote, “Anyone who still thinks the COVID vaccine wasn’t intentionally designed to cause infertility is the conspiracy theorist.”

Speaking for more than an hour, Kennedy, a former litigator, repeatedly suggested that vaccines were not safe, had not been tested properly, and that they were driving a dramatic rise in chronic conditions, including autism.

At one point, he showed the text of a package insert for a hepatitis B vaccine, highlighting the list of post-marketing adverse reactions.

“Many of these adverse events include diseases, chronic illnesses, that are part of the chronic disease epidemic. In other words, illnesses that became suddenly epidemic in our kids after 1989,” he said. Looking at all of the different vaccines given to children, he continued, “there are 454 adverse events listed. In total … they include almost all of the injuries, like diabetes, death, sudden infant death syndrome, anorexia, allergic reactions, allergies, asthma, autoimmune diseases.”

This is misleading. As we’ve explained before, the conditions that appear in package inserts have not necessarily been shown to be caused by vaccines. And in fact, after rigorous study, some of them have specifically been shown not to be due to vaccines.

Kennedy also conveniently left out the package insert’s own caveat, which explains, “Because these reactions are reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not possible to reliably estimate their frequency or establish a causal relationship to a vaccine exposure.”

Screenshot of Kennedy speaking at the CHD conference on Sept. 17

He also pushed a conspiratorial narrative in which he claimed scientists previously “weren’t doing the studies to find out … what the risks were of these products,” referring to vaccines. “And so we don’t know, and we are finding that out now.”

The HHS website itself says, “Every authorized or approved vaccine goes through safety testing,” including testing in clinical trials and continued monitoring after they hit the market.

Later, the secretary said that HHS was supporting new research and clinical trials and for the “first time” researchers were looking into several vaccination topics and “a range of health outcomes,” including autism. It’s unclear what specifically these studies will examine, but researchers have continuously studied vaccination. An extensive body of research hasn’t found any link between vaccines and autism.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield, the British physician who fraudulently proposed a link between autism and vaccines in 1998, and continues to make the false claim, spoke after Kennedy at the conference.

Despite the ongoing measles outbreaks in the U.S., and more deaths from the disease in the last two years than in decades, Kennedy only mentioned measles once.

“You care about every child who dies from measles. They get headlines,” he said. “Shouldn’t we, I’d ask you, care about children who are dying or suffering or being injured by vaccine injuries?”

The secretary also moved to reassure his supporters that he had their backs, while also seemingly asking for patience, because “the government moves slowly.”

“You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” he said. “We’ve accomplished in 19 months … things that would have seemed unthinkable two years ago.”

Indeed, Kennedy, along with the White House, has pushed to reduce the number of recommended childhood vaccines in the U.S. and reconstituted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent advisory board, filling it with several individuals who have previously spread vaccine misinformation.

Major medical associations — such as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians — have spoken out against the changes to vaccine recommendations, issuing their own guidance. (Many of the changes have been temporarily blocked by a court.)

Kennedy said HHS would be looking into the safety of electromagnetic fields and “chemtrails,” both topics of interest for Children’s Health Defense. The “chemtrails” conspiracy theory alleges that the commonly seen contrails, or the normal condensation trails left behind from airplanes, are actually chemicals that can harm or be used to control a population. There’s no evidence that “chemtrails” exist.

Many of the claims Kennedy made in his address are the very same claims has been making for years — and were ones we first wrote about in 2023 when he was running for president. Others are relatively new.

Here’s a round-up of the ones we’ve covered before.

Autism

Wisconsin study. Kennedy misleadingly juxtaposed data from a 1970 study in Wisconsin showing an autism rate of less than 1 in 10,000 with the national data showing a prevalence of 1 in 31 today. The data are not comparable. Much of the increase in autism is related to changes in diagnostic criteria, screening, available services and awareness of the condition, researchers have said.

UC Davis research. Kennedy also claimed that research from the UC Davis MIND Institute led by Irva Hertz-Picciotto showed that the autism “epidemic is real,” contrary to assertions that “we’re just noticing it more.” A 2009 study co-authored by the environmental health researcher found that one-third of the increase in autism diagnoses in California could be attributed to changes in diagnostic criteria, but the study did not examine all the factors that could lead to changes in recognition of the condition. The MIND Institute said in a September 2025 statement that the study “did not indicate that autism was an epidemic.”

‘Full-blown’ autism. The HHS secretary went on to claim that “I’ve never in my life seen somebody my age, a 70-year-old man, with full-blown, profound autism.” But researchers have said that while older people are less likely to have an autism diagnosis, many nevertheless meet the criteria for autism. “Many of them would not have been recognized as such but they absolutely do exist,” Catherine Lord, a clinical psychologist and autism researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, previously told us.

Read more: “What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About Autism”

Vaccines

Reporting of vaccine side effects. Kennedy claimed that a CDC study found that “fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries are reported.” He’s referring to a 2010 report from health insurer Harvard Pilgrim funded by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which briefly mentioned this figure for adverse events. Reported adverse events are not necessarily vaccine-caused. One of the authors told us that the 1% “takes into account that many adverse effects of vaccines are mild and expected so not worth reporting.”

Other research has found that the monitoring system Kennedy was referencing — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, which accepts voluntary, unverified reports — more completely identifies serious adverse events after vaccination. It’s also not the only way health authorities monitor vaccine safety.

Placebo-controlled studies. Kennedy misleadingly claimed that just one childhood vaccine — against COVID-19 — “was subject to a placebo-controlled trial,” adding that “we have no idea what the risk profile is for these products.” Various childhood vaccines were originally tested against placebos, including the polio, chickenpox and rotavirus vaccines. These claims rely on moving the goal posts on what constitutes a placebo-controlled trial, such as by asserting that placebos can only be saline. It’s also not always ethical or feasible to test a vaccine against a placebo. There are other valid ways of assessing vaccine safety.

Thimerosal in vaccines. Kennedy misrepresented the science on thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that has been phased out of most vaccines, blaming it for “devastating our children’s brains and causing a whole litany, a grim inventory, of physical and brain injuries.”

As we’ve written before, multiple studies have evaluated the safety of thimerosal, and there isn’t evidence it’s harmful to human health in low doses. (It contains a different, less toxic type of mercury than the methylmercury that accumulates in fish.) Nonetheless, it was removed from most vaccines in the U.S. as a precaution more than 20 years ago. Since then, no vaccines for children have used thimerosal, other than flu vaccines that come in multi-dose vials.

Healthy Eating/Obesity

Obesity rates. Kennedy pointed to falling obesity as evidence of the administration’s success. “Obesity rates have dropped 7.3% since 2022, most of it in this year — these two years,” he said, citing Gallup polling. Gallup surveys did find that obesity among American adults fell about 3.1 percentage points, or 7.8%, between 2022 and 2026. But three-quarters of the decline came between 2022 and 2024, before Trump took office.

Sales of real food. Kennedy also said, “Real food sales went up by 8% this year.” As we’ve explained before, this likely comes from a financial-industry analysis that reportedly looked at a handful of specific categories, including yogurt, nut butters and frozen foods, and concluded that sales of unprocessed or minimally processed products grew about 7% faster than highly processed products in those same categories. Experts previously told us those findings are too limited to say much about whether Americans are eating healthier overall.

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