Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been a vaccine skeptic — he told a podcaster in 2021 that he thinks a flu vaccine might have triggered his own voice disorder.
Over the years he's convinced numerous journalists to give time and energy to his growing list of unfounded concerns about vaccines.
In 2011, Kennedy founded Children's Health Defense, a nonprofit organization that claims to expound the dangers of vaccines and 5G wireless technology. It became an even bigger anti-vax juggernaut during the pandemic as Kennedy railed against the COVID-19 vaccines, suggesting vaccine mandates were harder to escape than Nazi persecution during World War II. (He later issued a semi-apology for this statement.)
He also nearly doubled his salary from the organization and wrote a bestselling book called "The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health."
Now he's running for president as a Democratic primary challenger.
Since announcing his candidacy for the White House in April, he's downplayed his multi-decade anti-vaccine crusade. Kennedy's campaign website says only that "pharma controls the CDC, NIH, and FDA" and that as president he'd "clean up" the government.
"I'm not running on vaccines," Kennedy said when he went on Joe Rogan's show in June, and spent three hours chatting about the dangers of vaccines. "The only time I will talk about vaccines is if somebody asks me about it."
Kennedy's backers include the former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya, and the PayPal founder David Sacks, among other top Silicon Valley and Wall Street executives. Steve Bannon, who was an advisor to President Donald Trump, has also suggested Kennedy would be an "excellent choice" for Trump's running mate in 2024.
While Kennedy isn't expected to win the Democratic nomination, he's performed relatively well in polls among Democrats and Republicans.
Here are the presidential candidate's most common anti-vaccine myths and the truth behind them.