Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes a variety of incorrect or misleading claims about vaccines, COVID-19 and other health-related topics. But his views on vaccines rose to prominence when he began to advance the thoroughly debunked idea that they cause autism.
Studies have found the rate of autism is the same in vaccinated and unvaccinated children. But the false claim that vaccines are associated with the disorder persists. A prominent spreader of COVID-19 misinformation wrongly told legislators in Pennsylvania that autism is virtually nonexistent among the unvaccinated, citing the Amish population.
Breast cancer in younger women has been increasing gradually in recent decades. But a social media post misrepresents case number projections for 2022 and 2023 to falsely claim they show a dramatic rise in early-onset breast cancer — and then baselessly ties its faulty comparisons to COVID-19 vaccines.
Clinical trial data for Pfizer’s maternal vaccine to protect babies from RSV support the vaccine’s safety and efficacy, according to a vote by an FDA advisory committee. The FDA could soon approve the vaccine. But a popular social media post makes misleading claims about the trial findings.
For decades, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, has been exploited by people opposed to vaccination. Here, we’ll explain how VAERS works and run through five misconceptions that anti-vaccination activists wield to mislead people about vaccines.
COVID-19 vaccines substantially reduce the risk of dying from COVID-19, and serious side effects are very rare. Excess deaths among working-age adults in 2021 and 2022 were due to COVID-19 and other factors, not vaccination. Faulty logic underlies claims that vaccines caused mass disability and economic harm.
Since his diagnosis in 1991, NBA player Magic Johnson has repeatedly said he contracted HIV through sexual transmission. But a viral social media post by a spreader of vaccine misinformation falsely claims that Johnson was exposed to the virus from a hepatitis B vaccine.
A 62-year-old bodybuilder who had heart disease died after contracting COVID-19. But vaccine opponents are falsely suggesting that he died from the COVID-19 vaccine. He didn’t. He’d been vaccinated 18 months before his death.
A rigorous vaccine safety monitoring system has shown that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and only rarely have serious side effects. But an article shared on social media falsely says that CDC data show more than 18 million people “were injured so badly” by a Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine “that they had to go to the hospital.”
The state of Florida recently announced that it was no longer recommending that younger males receive mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, based on an unpublished analysis that purportedly found an increased risk of cardiac-related death following vaccination. But experts who specialize in the unique method used in the analysis say it was not properly done — and even if it had been, the findings would not mean that individuals should not get vaccinated.