TueWhen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his presidential campaign on April 19 in Boston, he highlighted his family’s political pedigree and his history of advocating for “numerous environmental issues”, saying he was running to “end the corrupt merging of state and corporate power.” Notable is the lack of any direct recognition of the multi-year crusade that made the 69-year-old the most well-known face of the anti-vaccine movement in the country.
This contrasted sharply with the speeches he had given the previous year. In January 2022, Kennedy gathered thousands from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to a massive anti-vaccination mandate demonstration in which he shared discredited COVID-19 conspiracies and compared the actions of U.S. public health officials to those of Nazi Germany.
As the pandemic fades from public view, the anti-vaccination movement is in a state of flux. Kennedy’s decision not to even use the word “vaccine” in his speech likely reflects his desire to gain support in the Democratic primary among voters seeking an alternative to President Joe Biden. It’s a different story on the other side of the aisle, where some candidates appear to be actively courting a right-wing contingent of anti-vaccine and vaccine skeptics, opponents of public health mandates and conspiracy theorists who have grown up during the pandemic. The extent to which presidential candidates share these sentiments may indicate that the movement and its associated larger anti-science conspiracies and anti-government views maintain their grip on the American electorate.
Prior to 2020, the idea that anti-vaccine players had any influence in national politics was considered unthinkable. However, now a significant number of vaccine skeptics have “made it part of their identity, and interacting with them will actually increase their resistance,” says the doctor. Tom Frieden, who headed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2009 to 2017.
After years of involvement in anti-vaccine activism, Kennedy further increased his following during the pandemic, capitalizing on many Americans undermining public health officials, their fears of the virus and widespread misinformation. He became one of the “Disinformation Dozen,” a group of twelve people that the Centers for Digital Hate Control says are responsible for 65% of anti-vaccine content on Facebook and Twitter. Last year, Facebook and Instagram removed pages from his non-profit organization Children’s Health Defense for spreading medical misinformation. But to a growing audience of hundreds of thousands of supporters and online fans, he was a hero who spoke out against dangerous schemes by government officials and drug companies. Despite being a Democrat, he remains popular on right-wing anti-vaccine channels, where his candidacy was greeted with “Trump/RFC 2024!” stickers.
Although Kennedy did not explicitly mention vaccines in his statement, it was clear that there was no need for his most enthusiastic supporters. “This is a candidate for vaccine truth that promises to destroy the underlying state of the vaccine!” On April 16, one of the popular right-wing anti-vaccine Telegram channels made the announcement to its 81,000 subscribers, urging them to visit its announcement in Boston. “RFK may not be perfect, but we know it will hit the pharmaceutical industry and vaccines,” wrote one poster on a popular Trump supporter forum. “Even Trump can’t do that.”
Five days into his campaign, Kennedy claimed on Twitter that Fox News had fired Tucker Carlson because a right-wing anchor claimed “TV networks promoted a deadly and ineffective vaccine to please their Pharma advertisers…Fox had just demonstrated the terrifying power of big pharma” .
But Kennedy is not the only presidential candidate to use anti-vaccine rhetoric. The pandemic and the vaccine resistance that followed gave momentum to the movement and provoked a partisan split that turned vaccine support into a political litmus test. While vaccine skepticism has been limited to forward-thinking ones like Kennedy on the left—President Joe Biden is widely expected to run for the Democratic nomination—more prominent challengers on the right appear to be pushing it.
“I think Robert Kennedy Jr. is learning on his own because a huge part of what he’s working on is anti-vaccination,” says Joshua Scharfstein, professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University. “I don’t think he’s credible in his own family, let alone you know, as a national speaker on the subject … More concerned about Florida’s governor.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who recently fell in the polls but is still expected to challenge former President Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, has raised questions about vaccine safety in Florida. In December, DeSantis asked the Florida Supreme Court to form a grand jury to investigate “offences” related to COVID-19 vaccines. “I think people want the truth, and I think people want accountability,” DeSantis said at the time. “You need to conduct a thorough investigation into what happened to the shots.”
Read more: How the anti-vaccine movement is taking over the law
The acceptance by many on the right of vaccine skepticism, and often anti-vaccination conspiracies, has turned the public health campaign into a partisan issue. A Washington Post-ABC Poll conducted in June 2021 found that 47% of Republicans said they were unlikely to get vaccinated against COVID-19, compared with 6% of Democrats. According to a November 2021 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, unvaccinated adults are three times more likely to lean Republican than Democrat.
“According to the data, there is a pretty strong correlation between vaccine biases and mortality rates,” says Frieden. “Politicians react to what their potential voters think, and some of those who will vote in the primaries have very strong beliefs about vaccines. … So that’s about it.”
The politicization of COVID-19 vaccines has often led to strange spectacles as Republican lawmakers have become reluctant to reveal their own vaccination status. In 2021, nearly half of Republicans in the House of Representatives declined to answer CNN’s question about whether they had been vaccinated. In New York City, a GOP city council member refused to reveal her vaccination status, although it prevented her from entering the cell.
DeSantis has staffed his administration with notorious vaccine skeptics. In 2021, at the height of a nationwide public health effort to vaccinate Americans against COVID-19, he appointed vocal vaccine critic Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s Surgeon General. Since then, Ladapo has become the hero of online anti-vaccination communities that follow his lead rather than that of the US health authorities.
Last year, guidance issued by Ladapo warned against vaccinating men aged 18 to 39, claiming an 84% increase in deaths from cardiovascular disease associated with the COVID vaccine. He also recommended that healthy children not be vaccinated, contrary to US public health advice. This led to CDC and FDA executives sending a letter to Ladapo last month. “The job of public health officials across the country is to protect the lives of the population they serve, especially the vulnerable,” the statement said. federal letters said. “Fueling vaccine hesitancy is undermining these efforts.”
Trump, on the other hand, has a more complicated history with vaccine misinformation. In 2017, Kennedy said Trump asked him chair the vaccine safety committee in his administration. But since the pandemic, Trump has vacillated between taking credit for his COVID-19 vaccine rollout and seemingly acknowledging that anti-vaccine sentiment has taken root among MAGA supporters. After initially denouncing politicians who refused to disclose their vaccination status as “weak-willed,” the former president appeared to remain silent on the matter. But many in his orbit were still happy to participate: His son Eric spoke at a conference of anti-vaccination activists in Nashville last fall, and some of his most prominent supporters, including former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson and strategist Steve Bannon, raised questions. on the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
If DeSantis or Trump walks out of the Republican primary stoking anti-vax fervor, they may regret it when the time comes for the general election, when they have to appeal to a wider constituency.
“The vast majority of Americans understand the value of vaccines and the importance of getting enough vaccinations to keep infectious diseases from threatening us all,” Scharfstein says.
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Write Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@time.com and Mini Racker at mini.racker@time.com.
