Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.
American environmental attorney and anti-vaccine activist
(Redirected from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr.. (born 17 January 1954), often referred to as RFK Jr. or Bobby Jr., is the third of eleven children born to Ethel Skakel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. He is an environmental lawyer known for promoting anti-vaccine propaganda and conspiracy theories and co-host of Ring of Fire on the Air America Radio network.
QuotesEdit
- Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt to the energy industry with global instability, depleted national coffers and increased vulnerability to price shocks in the oil market. They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of life at home. Pollution from power plants and traffic smog will continue to skyrocket. Carbon-dioxide emissions will aggravate global warming. Acid rain from Midwestern coal plants has already sterilized half the lakes in the Adirondacks and destroyed the forest cover in the high peaks of the Appalachian range up into Canada. The administration's attacks on science and the law have put something even greater at risk. Americans need to recognize that we are facing not just a threat to our environment but to our values, and to our democracy.
- In "Crimes against nature" in Rolling Stone magazine (11 December 2003).
- Today, more than ever, it is critical for American citizens to understand the difference between the free-market capitalism that made our country great and the corporate cronyism that is now corrupting our political process, strangling democracy and devouring our national treasures.
- In "Crimes against nature" in Rolling Stone magazine (11 December 2003).
- I had my own mercury levels tested recently, Bill, and my levels are about three times what are considered safe, just from eating fish. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels of mercury would have children with cognitive impairment, with permanent brain damage, probably an IQ loss of 5 to 7 points... Under Clinton rules, they would have had to remove 90% of that mercury within three-and-a-half years. But this president, eight weeks ago, announced he was scrapping those rules and substituting rules that were written by industry lobbyists that will require that they never have to clean up. This is an issue that affects hundreds of thousands of people and directly impacts the health of millions and millions of Americans. But you don't see it in the newspaper. It should be the headlines every single day. But we don't know about it.
- To Bill Maher on Real Time with Bill Maher (22 October 2004).
- The news departments have become corporate profit centers. And their only obligation now is to their shareholders. Which is to create large audiences and viewership so they can sell more ad space. So they're airing stories that appeal to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain: for sex and celebrity gossip. And now, for terror. So they give us Kobe Bryant and they give us Michael Jackson. And they give us Laci Peterson and they give us lots and lots of terror alerts. But they're not telling us the really critical stories that impact our way of life.
- Real Time with Bill Maher (22 October 2004).
- Thimerosal is a controversial mercury based (sic) vaccine preservative that research scientists and vaccine safety advocates have connected to the epidemic of brain disorders in children.
- "Why Does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Get Brain Science So Wrong?" by Emily Willingham, forbes.com (July 21, 2015).
- This account by Judy Mikovits and Kent Heckenlively is vitally important both to the health of our children and the vitality of our democracy. My father believed moral courage to be the rarest species of bravery. Rarer even than the physical courage of soldiers in battle or great intelligence. He thought it the one vital quality required to salvage the world. If we are to continue to enjoy democracy and protect our children from the forces that seek to commoditize humanity, then we need courageous scientists like Judy Mikovits who are willing to speak truth to power, even at terrible personal cost.
- Dr. Mikovits joined NIH in 1980 as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Molecular Virology at the National Cancer Institute and began a 20-year collaboration with Frank Ruscetti, a pioneer in the field of human retro virology. She helped Dr Russetti isolate the HIV virus and link it to #AIDS in 1983. Her NIH boss Anthony Fauci delayed publication of that critical paper for 6 months to let his protégé Robert Gallo replicate, publish and claim credit. The delay in mass HIV testing let AIDS further spread around the globe and helped Fauci win promotion to director NIAID... Appropriating her (Judy Mikovits') work wasn’t the worst of it. This delayed the development of testing and spread the HIV epidemic through the world, killing millions. Driven by greed and cronyism, Anthony Fauci—”America’s Doctor”—is directly responsible for the further spread of HIV throughout the world. Rather than being punished for his actions, six months later he was appointed Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases–a position he still holds today.
- The Truth About Fauci—Featuring Dr. Judy Mikovits,Children's Health Defense (20 April 2020)
- Note: In 2007, Mikovits met a co-discoverer of xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV), Robert Silverman, at a conference. Silverman had found XMRV sequences, which are highly similar to mouse genomic sequences, in prostate cancer specimens several years earlier. Using tools obtained from Silverman, Mikovits began to look for XMRV in her CFS samples. In late 2008, a graduate student, who subsequently was hired as her technician, obtained two positive results from a group of twenty samples. He and Mikovits successively altered the experimental conditions until all samples gave a positive signal. In 2009, Mikovits and co-workers reported in the journal Science that they had detected XMRV DNA in CFS patients and control subjects. Negative results were published soon after, disputing Mikovits's findings. Two of the original authors of this paper subsequently reanalyzed the samples used in the research and found that the samples were contaminated with XMRV plasmid DNA, leading them to publish a partial retraction of their original results. In December 2011, after a request by first author Robert Silverman, the editors of Science retracted the paper in its entirety. On September 29, 2011, Mikovits was terminated by the WPI due to disputes over the control of lab samples and the integrity of her work; she subsequently came under investigation for alleged manipulation of data in her publications related to XMRV. (See Judy Mikovits#XMRV and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue)
- In 2006, Dr Mikovits became director of Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease and collaborated with Dr Ruscetti searching for the cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which suddenly became epidemic in the 1980s.... Dr. Mikovits discovered that 67% of affected women carried a virus—called Xenotropic Murine Leukemia related Virus—that appeared in healthy women only 4% of the time. XMRV is also associated with prostate, breast, ovarian cancers, leukemia, and multiple myeloma. Many women with XMRV bore children with autism. In 2009, Drs. Mikovits and Ruscetti published their explosive findings in the journal Science. But the question remained: how was XMRV getting into people? Other researchers linked the first CFS outbreak to a polio vaccine given to doctors and nurses that resulted in the “1934 Los Angeles County Hospital Epidemic.” That vaccine was cultivated on pulverized mouse brains. Retroviruses from dead animals can survive in cell lines and permanently contaminate vaccines.
Dr Mikovits’ studies suggested that the XMRV Virus was present in the MMR, Polio and Encephalitis vaccines given to American children and soldiers. XMRV is so hazardous that the mere presence of mouse tissue in a laboratory can contaminate other tissues in the same room. Dr Fauci ordered Mikovits to keep her mouth shut. When she refused, he illegally confiscated her work books and hard drives, drove her from government work and blackballed her from receiving NIH grants ending her science career. XMRV remains in American vaccines.
Quotes about KennedyEdit
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ...is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases. He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation... and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines. ...We stand behind him in his ongoing fight to protect our environment. However, on vaccines he is wrong. ...[H]is and others’ work against vaccines is having heartbreaking consequences. ...[M]any people are more afraid of the vaccines than the diseases, because they've been lucky enough to have never seen the diseases and their devastating impact. But that’s not luck; it’s the result of concerted vaccination efforts over many years. ...Those who delay or refuse vaccinations, or encourage others to do so, put themselves and others, especially children, at risk. It is in all our interests to make sure that immunizations reach every child on the globe through safe, effective and affordable vaccines. Everyone must communicate the benefits and safety of vaccines, and advocate for the respect and confidence of the institutions which make them possible. To do otherwise risks even further erosion of one of public health’s greatest achievements.
- Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Joseph P. Kennedy II, Maeve Kennedy McKean "RFK Jr. Is Our Brother and Uncle. He’s Tragically Wrong About Vaccines." (May 8, 2019) Politico Magazine
- RFK, Jr.’s banishment from Instagram is not just because he raises informed questions about vaccines, Bill Gates and Big Pharma, but because he suggests something more dangerous is afoot: the demise of democracy and the rise of a totalitarian order.... Just the other day The New York Times had this headline: “Robert Kennedy Jr. Barred From Instagram Over False Virus Claims.” Notice the lack of the word alleged before “false virus claims.” This is guilt by headline. It is a perfect piece of propaganda posing as reporting, since it accuses Kennedy, a brilliant and honorable man, of falsity and stupidity, thus justifying Instagram’s ban, and it is an inducement to further censorship of Mr. Kennedy by Facebook, Instagram’s parent company. That ban should follow soon, as the Times’ reporter Jennifer Jett hopes, since she accusingly writes that RFK, Jr. “makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers” on Facebook. Jett made sure her report also went to MSN.com and The Boston Globe. This is one example of the censorship underway with much, much more to follow. What was once done under the cover of omission is now done openly and brazenly, cheered on by those who, in an act of bad faith, claim to be upholders of the First Amendment and the importance of free debate in a democracy. We are quickly slipping into an unreal totalitarian social order.
