Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s fringe anti-vaccine position could soon be giving Donald Trump heart palpitations now that the two are working together in the wake of Kennedy's endorsement.
True to his conspiracy theory bent, Kennedy has baselessly claimed that Bill Gates hyped the COVID-19 pandemic to profit from vaccines, and compared vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany's medical experiments on Jews and Gypsies.
In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that conducts research on social media, named Kennedy as one of the "Disinformation Dozen" — the top 12 superspreaders of misinformation about COVID on the internet.
But Kennedy has downplayed those views in public, and has even told Congress that he has "never been anti-vax." That's going to come under harsh media scrutiny now that he's backing Trump.
Trump as president desperately tried to downplay the seriousness of a pandemic that ultimately claimed the lives of more than a million Americans. He was never a cheerleader for getting vaccines, and often attacked mask regulations to stem the spread of COVID.
But since then, to score political points, Trump has often touted what he claims was his role in getting a COVID vaccine developed.
Here is a montage of clips of Trump promoting the Covid vax and bragging that he pushed the FDA to approve it quickly and taking credit for it. RFK Jr says the Covid vax was a deadly Bill Gates bioweapon designed to control and kill people. pic.twitter.com/pGnozukADO
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 24, 2024
Some observers see Kennedy's vaccine views as part of a larger conspiratorial view of the world that powerful forces are out to thwart him, similar to Trump's views of an imagined "deep state" and "weaponized" laws that are specifically targeted at him.
Kennedy's press conference Friday announcing he was suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump included a litany of complaints about a conspiracy-like network of hurdles that made it difficult to gain campaign traction.
"You have a bleeding-over from vaccines to broad conspiratorial ideas on a number of topics," Jonathan Jarry, a scientist and science communicator with McGill University's Office for Science and Society, told the New York Times. Kennedy "promotes a whole world view that is not just about opposing vaccines — it is about distrust of government, media and other bodies, while promoting trust in him."
While sharing a dark world view, there are a number of issues Trump and Kennedy dramatically disagree about.
Kennedy has called the National Rifle Association a "terror group," while Trump bragged earlier this month at his Mar-a-Lago press conference that "as president I totally protected the guns."
Kennedy once called for politicians who deny climate change to be "punished." Trump has said that the only impact from climate change is "basically, you have more beachfront property" (though, in reality, higher water covers more property, not less).
