What a bizarre headline. This article from last summer asks, "Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The New Je…
What a bizarre headline. This article from last summer asks, "Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The New Jenny McCarthy?," because he may be publishing a new book about a link between autism and vaccines.
But RFK Jr. has been pushing the idea of this link for a decade now. He -- due to his public prominence -- is, in my view, more culpable for the misinformation about the dangers of vaccines than McCarthy is. He got a lot of people to listen to and believe in these false ideas. Only later did McCarthy come along, building off of the foundation RFK Jr. had laid.
This article mention the fact that RFK Jr. wrote that 2005 article, published in Salon and Rolling Stone, which Salon only retracted many years later, in 2011. And Salon and Rolling Stone are more culpable than McCarthy, too. (Rolling Stone also published the RFK Jr. article that claimed -- based almost entirely on easily proven lies -- that Bush and the Republicans stole Ohio from John Kerry in 2004.)
McCarthy, having no public respect on intellectual or policy matters and not strongly associated with the left, is an easier target. But she's not the most correct one. 
RFK Jr., the lawyer and environmental activist, has joined the anti-vaccination movement with a "dangerous" crusade linking vaccines and autism.
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt."
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