At a contentious congressional hearing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his long-standing position on vaccine safety, insisting that his calls for transparency have been mischaracterized as opposition to vaccines themselves.
During the conference, Kennedy recounted a past exchange with officials at the Department of HHS. “I said to them at that time, you’ve said publicly that I’ve been dishonest about that. Can you show us a single pre-licensing, placebo-controlled safety trial for any of the 72 vaccines required for American children?” he told lawmakers.
According to Kennedy, the official he questioned appeared to search through documents before responding, “Well, they’re back in Bethesda.” Kennedy said he followed up: “Will you send them to me?” He claims he never received the materials.
Kennedy then described legal action taken under the Freedom of Information Act. “After a year of litigation, they sent a letter… acknowledging that they are now not able to locate a single pre-licensing safety trial, placebo-controlled, for any of the vaccines that are now mandated for children,” he said, noting that the letter is publicly available.
Framing the issue as one of accountability rather than ideology, Kennedy emphasized, “These are zero-liability vaccines. I’m not anti-vaccine, but I think we need to be honest and we need to have good science.”
To illustrate what he views as a double standard, Kennedy drew a comparison to his environmental work. “I spent 30 years trying to get mercury out of the fish in this country and nobody ever called me anti-fish,” he said.
In a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Kennedy has also argued that America’s health agencies have drifted toward a “sick care” model, which are focused more on managing chronic illness than preventing it.
He stated: “You know, it was doing health care. It was doing sick care and just managing all of these perverse incentives. It have us spending 5 trillion dollars a year, two to three times per capita what any other nation spends. And we have the sickest population in the world. We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world.”
