New York Times Dismisses Data Showing Unvaccinated Kids Are Healthier

Introduction

The New York Times on September 12 published yet another hit piece against presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that usefully illustrates how the function of the mainstream media is not to inform but to indoctrinate.

This is obvious from how the Times habitually mischaracterizes the retraction by Salon of Kennedy’s 2005 article “Deadly Immunity”; how it absurdly characterizes Kennedy as a conspiracy theorist for pointing out how the government serves the pharmaceutical industry; and how it mindlessly dismisses scientific research showing that the healthiest children among the US population are those who have remained completely unvaccinated, as detailed in a new book by Kennedy and Dr. Brian Hooker called Vax-Unvax: Let the Science Speak.

What the Media Won’t Tell You about RFK Jr.’s “Deadly Immunity”

The New York Times article’s headline dismisses Kennedy as holding “Fringe Views”, and to support that characterization, the article includes a typical reference to his 2005 article “Deadly Immunity”:

Mr. Kennedy’s public work against vaccines began in 2005, when he published articles in Rolling Stone and Salon claiming a link between vaccines and autism. The news outlets later withdrew the articles.

As usual, the Times references Salon’s 2011 retraction of “Deadly Immunity” as though this were proof that the thesis of Kennedy’s article was false. Notably, while the article has since disappeared from Rolling Stone’s website, that publication never retracted the article and, to the contrary, stood by it after Salon’s retraction.

Most importantly, what the Times doesn’t tell its readers is that none of the corrections made to the article that Salon’s editors cited as the reason for its retraction substantively affected Kennedy’s thesis. I detailed each of those corrections, at least some of which were introduced by the editors themselves, in my freely available e-book The New York Times vs. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: How the Mainstream Media Spread Vaccine Misinformation.

As I summarized in my June 28 article “The Mainstream Media’s Reign of Error: Correcting the Record about RFK Jr.’s ‘Deadly Immunity’”, here are key points that Salon’s editors did not dispute:

• From the late 1980s through the 1990s, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) substantially increased the number of mercury-containing vaccinations on its recommended childhood schedule.
• Throughout this time, nobody in the CDC or US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had ever bothered to consider the potential harms from this increased exposure to a known neurotoxin, and when the FDA finally got around to doing the simple calculations as a result of a Congressional directive in 1997, government officials realized that the CDC’s routine childhood vaccine schedule was exposing infants to cumulative levels of mercury that exceeded the government’s own safety guidelines.
• Once “public health” officials realized this, with the understanding that it was only a matter of time before this damning realization became public, they panicked and scrambled to resolve the impossible dilemma of how to disclose the FDA’s finding without causing irreparable damage to their own credibility.
• In the wake of the FDA’s realization of how the CDC had been recklessly placing children’s health at risk, an analysis of the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) data was carried out by CDC epidemiologist Tom Verstraeten, which study found mercury-containing vaccines to be associated with a statistically significant increased risk of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
• The documentary record indicated that the CDC sought to make the statistical significance of that association go away through subsequent revisions of Verstraeten’s analysis that strayed from the original study protocol.
• Attendees at the CDC’s “Simpsonwood” conference expressed concerns about the potential health impacts of exposing children to harmful levels of mercury and the potential legal liability resulting from the government’s malfeasance.

The New York Times avoids having to address any of those undisputed points by lazily citing the retraction as though that constituted a sufficient rebuttal to the facts that Kennedy reported.