US Well being Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will deliver a keynote address at an anti-vaccine conference being held in Washington, DC, later this week and hosted by the anti-vaccine group he as soon as led, Kids’s Well being Protection (CHD). The group introduced Monday that Kennedy had signed on to the occasion.
Kennedy will seem alongside different high-profile figures within the anti-vaccine world, together with Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced former physician who was stripped of his medical license over a fraudulent, now-retracted research that falsely claimed a hyperlink between autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. An investigation by a medical board discovered that Wakefield had mistreated susceptible youngsters and that his actions amounted to severe skilled misconduct.
Regardless of being ostracized from the medical group, Wakefield has turn out to be an everlasting determine within the anti-vaccine group. His harmful falsehood that vaccines trigger autism has additionally endured—with important assist from CHD and Kennedy, who’ve embraced and broadly promoted the misguided hyperlink.