The most dangerous claims Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes about vaccines — and why he's dead wrong

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long been a vaccine skeptic and has claimed he was injured by a vaccine.

• He's running for president with endorsements from Jack Dorsey and other tech titans.

• Here are the most dangerous claims he's made about vaccines — and why they're false.

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.

Myth: COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than they've saved.

Kennedy is one of several prominent anti-vaccine figureheads perpetuating the falsehood that COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than the virus itself.

In the US, COVID-19 vaccines have been linked to the deaths of nine people, all of whom developed rare, fatal blood clots after receiving the Janssen COVID-19 vaccination. More people die each year from being struck by lightning.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 infections have killed more than 1.1 million people nationwide. It's been estimated that more than 20% of those deaths could've been prevented by vaccination.

Researchers have estimated that during some of the deadliest days of the pandemic, from December 2020 to December 2021, the vaccines saved the lives of as many as 19.8 million people worldwide.

On Rogan's show in June, Kennedy claimed that people died from taking Pfizer's vaccine during clinical trials, but this is false. Research has not associated the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines with a higher risk of death.

Kennedy isn't the first person to argue that COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous and deadly, and he probably won't be the last. But the reality is that vaccines are rigorously tested in placebo-controlled trials. And because vaccines are generally given to healthy people, they're subject to stricter safety standards and monitoring than prescription drugs.

Myth: Vaccines contain microchips.

This just isn't physically possible.

As the researcher James Heathers pointed out in The Atlantic, "the most recent 5G chips are about the size of a penny," far too large to fit in a 0.025-inch-wide needle.

But even if we could, somehow, inject the most teeny-weeny microchips that exist today, how would the chips get powered up once inside the body? And how would the data from the chips get read?

Our muscles are like "a big bag of conductive fluid, notoriously fatal to radio signals," Heathers said. Even if it could get into the body, any embedded microchip would quickly "run right up against the limits of what's possible."

Myth: Vaccines have mercury, aluminum, and other toxins.

For years Kennedy has been sounding the alarm about what he says is a "toxic" type of mercury in vaccines called thimerosal. But independent scientists have thoroughly checked this out, and there's no evidence that thimerosal in vaccines is bad for us — and it's in very few vaccines in the first place.

Thimerosal used to be put in multidose vials of vaccines to prevent contamination. But all children's vaccines in the US have been available without thimerosal since 2001.

The specific type of mercury that thimerosal breaks down to in the body is called ethylmercury, which is chemically different and far less potent than the methylmercury in the Earth's crust and in tuna fish.

Small amounts of thimerosal preservatives are still used in some vaccines (but not the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines). For example, a few multishot flu vaccines still use thimerosal, but many of today's vaccines come in a single-dose package, which doesn't require thimerosal.

Even when it's present, there's no evidence that the tiny amounts of thimerosal in vaccines can harm people. The antiseptic is still used in products such as tattoo ink and eye drops because it's a safe way to prevent contamination.

Small, safe amounts of aluminum salts are used in some vaccines. They help boost the body's immune response to a vaccine, improving the disease protection vaccines can provide. There is no aluminum in the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.

Myth: There's tissue from aborted fetuses in vaccines.

Human stem cells are sometimes used to create vaccines, in addition to many other modern medical treatments.

Most vaccines — and most drugs — on the market have been tested or developed using human fetal tissue at some point. This doesn't mean our vaccines have human fetal tissue or DNA in them (they don't), but human-fetal-tissue research is often an important part of advancing scientific discoveries in the lab. Much of the fetal tissue being used today is from one immortalized cell line created in 1973.

Myth: Vaccines increase the risk of conditions they claim to protect against, like cancer and COVID-19.

"The more vaccines you get," Kennedy said on Rogan's podcast, "the more likely it is that you're going to get sick."

But vaccines don't make people more susceptible to disease. Vaccines make it less likely you'll get a disease and, in turn, less likely you'll suffer long-term complications of that disease, including lifelong neurological defects or cancer.

Scientists have seriously looked into whether COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of deaths or strokes among older people, and the answer so far is no.

While in rare cases young men can develop a kind of treatable heart inflammation after vaccination, the risk of developing heart issues after a COVID-19 infection is far higher. Spacing out a teenager's first and second vaccine doses for at least eight weeks can help reduce that (already low) risk of heart inflammation.

Kennedy also likes to say that better nutrition, not vaccines, is the real reason fewer children die of vaccine-preventable illnesses these days, but vaccines are responsible for saving the lives of tens of thousands of American children each year from diseases including tetanus, whooping cough, and measles.

Myth: Vaccines are deadly for infants.

Kennedy has described infant-mortality rates in the US as fishy. He's suggested that vaccines kill babies, based on population-wide infant-mortality data and unverified vaccine-injury reports that anyone can file online.

There are myriad factors in the US's abysmal infant-mortality rate, but they don't have to do with too many vaccines. Even today, about 10 to 20 babies too young to be vaccinated die of whooping cough in the US each year.

"We have a system that is well-regulated, well-monitored, and open for scrutiny to be able to judge whether a vaccine is safe and effective," Dr. C. Buddy Creech, a professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and the president of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, previously told Insider.

The last time there was a safety issue with an approved childhood vaccine was in 1999, when RotaShield was taken off the market after 15 babies developed rare but treatable bowel issues. They all survived.

Myth: Vaccines can cause autism.

Kennedy has consistently pointed to rising rates of autism as evidence that modern childhood vaccination schedules have led to more cases of autism.

Autism is a very complicated and still poorly understood condition. But experts think that much of what determines who gets the disorder happens during pregnancy, before a child is born, because of a mix of genetic predispositions and environmental triggers.

The bogus autism-vaccines link has been debunked in study after study after study, but it persists. It's hard to stamp out in large part because the time when babies and toddlers get lots of their routine vaccines is right around the time when parents may start to notice signs of autism or screen their children for autism.

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