On a chilly afternoon last January, Kennedy took the microphone in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, in front of a crowd of perhaps a few hundred people, some of whom were carrying placards that read, “We will not comply,” “Resist medical tyranny” (accompanied by a swastika) and “Land of the free, you can’t mandate me.” A march earlier that day, which involved several thousand people, included members of the far-right nationalist group the Proud Boys, firefighters in helmets and even a few Buddhist monks from New England. They had gathered for a rally billed as Defeat the Mandates: An American Homecoming. Speakers included many of the country’s best-known vaccine skeptics: vaccine researcher Robert Malone; the activist Del Bigtree; and of course Kennedy.
“What we’re seeing today is what I call turnkey totalitarianism,” he told his audience. “They’re deploying all these technological controls that we’ve never seen before.” He continued: “Even in Hitler’s Germany you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did.” But no longer, he suggested: “Mechanisms are being put in place to ensure that none of us can flee and none of us can hide.”
The response was quick, including from his own wife, the actress Cheryl Hines. On Twitter, she called the Anne Frank reference “reprehensible and insensitive”. But outrage at the allusion to Frank belied the deeper issue, which is exactly how influential Kennedy and other figures in the anti-vaccination movement have become. Kennedy chairs an organization called Children’s Health Defense; it applied for the permit to hold the meeting in Washington. The nonprofit, which says it wants to “end childhood health epidemics by working aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures,” publishes articles online that cast doubt on the safety of vaccines. And it has expanded aggressively during the pandemic. In January 2020, the Children’s Health Defense website received just under 84,000 monthly visits from the United States, according to the tracking company Similarweb. As of March, that number had reached more than 1.4 million monthly visits, a 17-fold increase in traffic. (Revenue, from donations and fundraising events, rose even before the pandemic, according to the group’s tax returns, to $6.8 million in 2020 from just under $1.1 million in 2018.)
On the one hand, CHD’s reach now occasionally exceeds that of bona fide news channels. Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media, whose CoVaxxy project tracks how vaccine-related content is shared on Twitter, has found that the organization’s vaccine-related posts — these could falsely claim that thousands of people have died from getting vaccinated, for example, or that the risks of Covid-19 boosters outweigh benefits — often shared more widely than vaccine-related items from DailyExpertNews, NPR, and the Centers for Disease Control. In a matter of weeks, the vaccine-related content of the Children’s Health Defense was shared more widely than that of DailyExpertNews or The Washington Post.
Kennedy, who did not respond to questions posed through his publisher, embodies an apparent contradiction of the anti-vaccine movement that poses a particularly difficult challenge to laymen. He has done important work as an environmental lawyer, and although other members of his family have publicly criticized his vaccine crusade, he still bears the name of one of the country’s best-known democratic political families. He brings a certain amount of credibility to his case. Many other figures who routinely question the safety and usefulness of vaccines have credentials that can seem impressive. They include Wakefield; Malone, the researcher who claims to have invented the mRNA vaccine (35 years ago, he and several colleagues published an important paper in the field, but other scientists say he didn’t “invent” the technology, which hundreds of scientists have since worked at); and Judy Mikovits, a researcher whose 2009 paper linking chronic fatigue syndrome to a viral infection was withdrawn from the journal Science. Mikovits, who was fired from her job as research director of the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease in Reno, Nev., has published a best-selling book on alleged crimes in science entitled “Plague of Corruption.”
Numerous experts told me that a good way to understand what motivates many players in the anti-vaccination movement is through the lens of profit. There are different levels of profit-seeking. The first concerns social media companies. Historically, the algorithms that power their platforms have, according to some, fed users more and more with what they respond to without checking to see if it’s true. “It’s not cutting edge technology,” said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies disinformation on social media. “It turns out we’re primitive jerks. And the most outrageous stuff, we click on it.”
Facebook and other social media companies, they claim, have taken steps to curb the spread of vaccine misinformation on their sites. Facebook now says it’s helping to “keep people healthy and safe” by providing reliable information about vaccines. But Farid and others doubt that Facebook, in particular, will ever get rid of such material entirely, because standout content is immensely valuable in the attention economy. “The business model, that’s really the main poison here,” says Farid. A partial solution, he thinks, would be changes to regulatory laws that allow individuals to hold social media companies legally liable — through lawsuits — for damages related to content they promote: “You must be held accountable for what you promote.” , mainly because they make money with it.” Aaron Simpson, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s parent company, told me in an email that the company has “every reason” to remove misinformation from its platforms because it makes money from advertising, and advertisers have repeatedly said they don’t want their ads to appear alongside misinformation, and yet in the past prominent anti-vaccine activists were themselves advertisers on Facebook.