How ‘experts’ led to the rise of RFK Jr.

The nomination of husky-voiced, musclebound Robert F. Kennedy Jr — who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park — to be secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration has horrified “experts,” according to the BBC. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator Hugo Chávez, hates big business, rails against the ultra-processed food that Donald Trump likes to eat and wants climate skeptics jailed, RFK Jr. sounds like a BBC hero and hardly a natural member of the MAGA tribe. But his criticism of Covid vaccines catapulted him into the arms of Trump.

The experts who now bash him should reflect on their own role in making him popular. Anti-vax sentiment was a fringe concern until public health officials began misinforming the public about the efficacy and safety of Covid-19 vaccines, the origin of the disease and other aspects of the pandemic. They sowed the wind and are now reaping the whirlwin.

RFK Jr. claims he just wants more transparent information about vaccines, but some of his criticisms are wacky, if not irresponsible. He made a film with the discredited medic Andrew Wakefield claiming that tetanus vaccines in Kenya were deliberately contaminated with hormone blockers to suppress fertility. He blames vaccines for the rise in allergies, autism, ADHD and other chronic problems. For this there is no good evidence. As Liz Wolfe wrote in the libertarian magazine Reason last year: “Kennedy frequently mistakes correlation for causation, gets his numbers wrong, and portrays complex trends as simpler than they really are.”

So why play into his hands? When, miraculously, the biotech industry came up with vaccines against Covid-19 in record time, the right way to sell them to the public would have been to say: we think they will save lives, especially among the elderly, but we don’t yet know if they will prevent transmission, especially if the virus mutates, so let’s not force them on people; also, they may have side effects so probably should not be given to children, who are at lower risk.

Instead, they overclaimed. “When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus,” said Anthony Fauci, then the president’s chief medical advisor. Yet “breakthrough infections” were soon rampant as it became clear that vaccines did little or nothing to slow the spread of the virus. All three of my own Covid bouts came after all three of my vaccinations, a common pattern.

Unlike measles and polio vaccines, these Pfizer and Moderna shots could save your life but not stop the spread of disease. Yet many experts argued for vaccine passports and the sacking of unvaccinated people. They forbade us to board planes without vaccination certificates. This made no sense if vaccines did not stop you infecting others, but such policies fired up resistance. During the vaccine rollout, RFK Jr’s Children’s Health Defense group rocketed in popularity, with monthly visits to its website going from 150,000 to nearly five million. His 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci shot to number one on Amazon.

Anti-vax sentiment was a fringe concern until officials began misinforming us about the pandemic

From November 2021, America recommended vaccinating children as young as five. “It is criminal medical malpractice to give a child one of these vaccines,” said RFK Jr. Hyperbole aside, many thought he had a point. The vaccines have side-effects, albeit rare ones, and the risk of death from Covid is very low indeed in children.

This was not the only topic on which misinforming but authoritarian experts acted as enablers of RFK Jr’s rise. They told us that the virus was NOT airborne (the World Health Organization used upper case letters), so we should stay indoors and wash our hands thoroughly. This turned out to be wrong. They told us that masks were ineffective, then changed their minds even though no good evidence emerged for masks making a difference. They demanded compulsory, draconian lockdowns despite the growing evidence from Sweden that these were doing more harm than good. They told us lockdowns would last for just a few weeks when they went on for months. Here, the models of what would happen without lockdown in December 2021 proved wildly wide of the mark when Boris Johnson at last called the modelers’ bluff.

They told us that “natural immunity” acquired after infection with Covid did not obviate the need for vaccination, or even that it was a myth. They told us it was nonsense that the Omicron variant was milder. As the Kansas-based biotech professor Andrew Torrance put it to me, such misinformation “spread faster than any virus, leaving in its wake herd immunity to the truth.” Last week the entrepreneur Peter Thiel said: “In the Covid pandemic we cut off skepticism so prematurely so many times where not only was the skepticism healthy but the skeptics were right. The science establishment is way too far on the dogmatic side.”

The biggest gift to RFK Jr. was to rule out even the possibility that the entire pandemic began through risky experiments on bat viruses being conducted uniquely in the very city where the outbreak began, Wuhan. We now know that scientists led by Fauci and Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust conspired (yup) to dismiss this hypothesis early on, despite their own private misgivings. Obediently the mainstream media called the lab leak “debunked.” Facebook banned all discussion of it and experts routinely referred to it as a “conspiracy theory.”

When that strategy collapsed and every organization from the WHO to the FBI conceded that the lab leak was possible if not probable, the effect on ordinary people’s views of official pronouncements is easy to imagine. Once you concede that one conspiracy theory might be right, your dismissal of others stops working. If a lab leak is plausible after all — and RFK Jr. thinks it is — then why not the rest of his agenda?