Daily Beast - Kennedy has a long history of promoting outlandish and unproven ideas related to public health—here’s a look at some of his recent policy proposals and statements that are sending shockwaves through the medical world.
Shortly before Election Day, Kennedy announced that one of his first priorities serving in a potential Trump administration would be to remove fluoride from the nation’s drinking water—a public health policy to prevent tooth decay and cavities that began in some parts of the country as early as the 1940s, according to the CDC. Days later, NPR asked Kennedy about this proposal directly. “Yes. That’s something that the ministration will do,” he replied.
When pressed on this radical shift in policy, Kennedy said “you know, fluoride made sense in the 1940s when they put it in, but now we have fluoride in toothpaste. And countries like Austria and Germany that have removed fluoride from their water supplies have either the same or lower cavity issues than Americans. We don’t need fluoride in our water, and it’s a very bad way to deliver it because it’s delivered through the blood system.”
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, became a vocal critic of the COVID-19 jabs and government’s policies during the pandemic. An Associated Press investigation in 2021 found that Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit he chairs, played a pivotal role in spreading vaccine misinformation to millions of people.
SpeaSpeaking at an anti-COVID vaccine rally in 2022, he compared vaccine mandates to fascism. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy told the crowd. He quickly apologized for the remarks after widespread condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League and the Auschwitz Memorial.
Kennedy continued to promote conspiracy theories after the pandemic. In one example, while he was still running for the Democratic presidential nomination, the New York Post published a video of Kennedy speaking at a closed-door donor event in Manhattan, where he brought up COVID-19 while discussing the development of bioweapons in the United States and China.
“COVID-19—there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately,” Kennedy said, noting this was due to the “genetic differentials” in different races or ethnicities.
Kennedy is a notorious vaccine skeptic, and serves as the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, one of the leading anti-vaccine nonprofit groups in the country.
He notably led the charge to remove the mercury-based preservative thimerosal from vaccines. The CDC and multiple studies have found no link between the compound and the development of autism.
In the same NPR interview where he discussed water fluoridation, Kennedy insisted he wasn’t planning to ban vaccines.
“Of course, we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody,” Kennedy said. “We are going to make sure that Americans have good information right now. The science on vaccine safety particularly has huge deficits, and we’re going to make sure those scientific studies are done and that people can make informed choices about their vaccinations and their children’s vaccinations.”
There is no known link between vaccines and autism, according to the scientific consensus. The original paper published in The Lancet in 1998 that attempted to establish the link between autism and the MMR vaccine was retracted by the medical journal in 2010. MORE
No comments:
Post a Comment