Robert F. Kennedy Jr. intends to end his campaign for president, several outlets reported Wednesday, citing unnamed sources familiar with Kennedy’s plans — spelling a likely end for the anti-vaccine activist and Kennedy family scion’s longshot bid for the White House.
Kennedy’s campaign said in an email Wednesday afternoon that he would “address the nation live on Friday about the present historical moment and his path forward.” The campaign did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on several reports that Kennedy would be dropping out.
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ABC News said of COVID-19: “There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately … COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” (Kennedy said the New York Post, which first reported his remarks, was “mistaken,” and that he never believed the virus was “deliberately engineered” to target certain ethnicities. Still, he said, “it serves as a kind of proof of concept for ethnically targeted bioweapons.”)
Members of Kennedy’s family have denounced his campaign due to his anti-vaccine work. Several of his siblings wrote on social media that they believed his candidacy was “perilous for our country.” (“There’s a lot of members of my family who are working for the Biden administration and they have their own opinions about issues,” Kennedy said of the denunciation.)
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An Anti-Vaccine Candidate
Decades ago, Kennedy began promoting faulty research that claimed, falsely, to show a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. (Before HuffPost shuttered its unpaid contributor platform in 2017, Kennedy wrote several blog entries denigrating vaccines. Those posts, along with others spreading misinformation about vaccines, have since been removed from the site.)
Kennedy’s modern place atop a crowded community of anti-vaccine activists began with the publication of his piece “Deadly Immunity” in Rolling Stone and Salon in 2005. The article falsely suggested a link between a former vaccine preservative and autism, and accused the scientific community of conspiring to bury evidence of that supposed connection. Rolling Stone eventually removed the piece from its website and Salon issued a lengthy retraction, but the article made Kennedy a hero to the anti-vaccine movement. (Kennedy has stood by the piece through the years. Last June, he called it “my award-winning article” in a note to National Review.)
When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, Kennedy switched gears, falsely referring to the COVID-19 jab as the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Meanwhile, Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group he founded, doubled its revenue to nearly $7 million in 2020, according to The Associated Press. Kennedy reported a $516,000 income from the group, part of millions in overall income, in the year before he entered the presidential race.
Kennedy’s impact on American public life will likely long outlast his presidential campaign. Last November, the CDC reported that a record-high 3% of children entering kindergarten had received a vaccine exemption from their state.
