Falsely Accusing RFK Jr, BBC Spreads Vaccine Misinformation

Introduction

On March 1, the BBC ran an article titled “RFK Jr: How anti-vaccine misinformation has shaped his ‘truth-teller’ candidacy”, which in typical mainstream media fashion accuses presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of spreading “misinformation” about vaccines while itself basing that accusation on its own misinformation.

The effect of the BBC’s deceptions is to deflect from rampant government corruption in serving the pharmaceutical industry instead of public health, from how the government brazenly lies about the science, and from how social media companies have acted in service to the government and industry by censoring factually accurate information about vaccines that does not align with the policy goal of achieving high vaccination rates.

Deceiving about CDC Corruption

The article is presented as an investigation by Rachel Schraer, who describes herself in her Twitter profile as a senior reporter covering health and “misinformation”.

The article includes the usual obligatory mention of Kennedy’s 2005 article “Deadly Immunity”. Here is how Schraer presents that episode in history (bold emphasis added):

Mr Kennedy, a member of the famous political dynasty and nephew of former president John F Kennedy, told Prof [Paul] Offit he was looking for information. He wanted to reassure parents who were worried about the effects of a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal, found in some vaccines.

Prof Offit confesses he was excited to be able to talk a Kennedy through the studies, which showed children exposed to thimerosal (not found in most US vaccines anyway since 2001) were no worse off than those who hadn’t had exposure.

But a year or so later, Mr Kennedy wrote an article published in Rolling Stone magazine which repeated baseless claims that thimerosal was causing health problems. It also wrongly claimed the vaccine that Prof Offit was working on at the time contained this preservative, suggesting this had driven him to misrepresent the risks. The article was later retracted due to a large number of inaccuracies.

The problem here is that it is the BBC spreading misinformation.

First, contrary to the BBC’s claim, Rolling Stone never retracted the article. On the contrary, it stood by Kennedy’s article when it was retracted in 2011 by Salon, which had jointly published it in 2005.

Rolling Stone did later quietly remove the article from its website but never issued a formal retraction, and, again, it stood by the article when Salon retracted it, correctly pointing out that none of the corrections made to the article materially affected its thesis that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had tried to cover up an analysis by one of its own top researchers finding statistically significant associations between thimerosal-containing vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders.

I detailed each of the corrections that Salon’s editors made to the article in my freely downloadable e-book The New York Times vs. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I also debunked mainstream media misinformation about this episode in my June 2023 article “The Mainstream Media’s Reign of Error: Correcting the Record about RFK Jr.’s ‘Deadly Immunity’.”

Among those corrections was the one mentioned by the BBC: the original article falsely claimed that the rotavirus vaccine developed by Dr. Paul Offit contained the mercury-based preservative thimerosal.

However, Ms. Schraer deceives by omission by failing to inform BBC readers that it is a matter of public record that this misstatement was not in Mr. Kennedy’s submitted manuscript but was, as Salon admitted, introduced into the article “because of an editing error”.

Kennedy did suggest in the article that Offit was misrepresenting the risks, but not because his rotavirus vaccine contained thimerosal.

Here again Schraer deceives by omission because Kennedy rather correctly pointed out that Offit had a blatant conflict of interest in sharing ownership of the patent for Merck’s rotavirus vaccine while sitting on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and using his vote to help ensure the vaccine would be profitable.

Offit later sold his stake in the vaccine and acknowledged making several million dollars for it.

I detailed that episode in an article for Kennedy’s organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD) that I wrote in 2019 titled “The Rotavirus Vaccine: A Case Study in Government Corruption and Malfeasance”, which I encourage you to read for the full details of just how thoroughly corrupt the CDC is and how the BBC’s source Paul Offit perfectly illustrates the corruption.

(I also reviewed Offit’s conflict of interest in my book The War on Informed Consent, which features a Foreword by Mr. Kennedy.)

The effect if not the intent of the BBC’s deceptions in this regard is to whitewash Offit’s conflict of interest and hence to deflect attention from Kennedy’s legitimate point about CDC corruption.