As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. throws his hat in the latest American presidential race, it would be easy to confine his bad ideas to the label âanti-vaccine.â He is, after all, the founder and chairman of the board (now on leave) of the Childrenâs Health Defense (CHD), one of the leading anti-vaccine organizations. This line of work has been very lucrative to him. The New York Times as USD 516,000, while he gained an additional USD 1.6 million as co-counsel on legal cases involving an HPV vaccine and the Roundup weed killer. His grand total income for the year preceding his run for political office? USD 7.8 million.
The branding of âanti-vaccineâ can act as a false quarantine because the ideology that animates him spills over into a comprehensive, paranoid philosophy. Few people seem to know that CHD has a media branch called âCHD TV.â While not an actual television channel, it boasts (mostly conducted over videotelephony software) streaming on their website, for a total of roughly fourteen hours.
I watched every one of these shows for the week of June 25 to July 1. What I saw was not just the expected ramblings against vaccines, but an alternative worldview firmly anchored in conspirituality.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Watching CHD TV is like receiving a shot of fear right in the deltoid. The Wednesday morning show, called showed Daniel, sitting outside in the baking Middle Eastern sun, jumping from one real concern to the next, reducing them to corkboard pins around which to tie a long piece of red yarn. In a forty-five-minute monologue that exemplifies the trope of âjust asking questionsââby hiding wild accusations as simple questions rather than statementsâ, Daniel touched upon artificial intelligence; the CIAâs operation to infiltrate American media in the 1950s; pharmaceutical ads on television; ties between Google and military organizations; brain chips; and Appleâs upcoming VisionPro headset. The anxieties are real, but their treatment is superficial. Their only purpose is to act as bricks in the construction of a grand conspiracy theory.
The fear of our babies receiving âtoo many needlesâ was also a recurring theme on CHD TV, with many guests comparing the current childhood vaccine schedule to what they had experienced as infants. It doesnât matter to them that babies today get exposed through their vaccines to âthe molecules from viruses and bacteria that are recognized as foreign and trigger an immune response. Vaccines used to be quite crude and contain many more antigens; today, there may be more vaccines, but . And those newer vaccines that didnât exist half a century ago protect us from diseases that used to be debilitating and sometimes deadly. None of this matters, though, to the anti-vaxxers counting the needles.
I saw by a nurse who âshared her opinionâ that you do not have to volunteer any information to healthcare workers beyond the reason for your visit, which includes refusing to fill out family history questionnaires. She seems to think genetic risk factors are not your doctorâs business when they try to diagnose you. On CHD TV, most doctors simply cannot be trusted. The nurse also recommended a book detailing a holistic approach to viruses. âAnd even if you donât think there are viruses,â she commented, âitâs a holistic approach to being well.â The denial of the germ theory of disease gained a foothold in anti-vaccine circles during COVID. Maybe, they thought, viruses arenât even real.
HIV denialism is also making a comeback, with an entire hour of CHD TVâs dedicated to platforming a former columnist for SPIN magazine who started interviewing contrarians at the height of the AIDS epidemic and interpreted the pushback she received as evidence that she was uncovering a hidden truth. On the show, she claimed, , that the antiretroviral AZT killed over 300,000 gay men in the early years of AIDS. As with COVID, the belief is that the disease is mild or its causes are misunderstood, but the pharmaceutical solution is the real killer.
CHD TV is a fear delivery system. Everything, from public health experts preparing for the next pandemic to QR codes, becomes evidence of nefariousness. Top scientists know what is really happening, we are told by outcast interviewees who somehow claim to be connected to the grapevine, but they are either corrupt or are not allowed to speak. It must be exhausting to be constantly afraid that everyone is out to get you.
This ceaseless anxiety is justified by bad logic and worse science, with the spectre of always in the background. Andrew Wakefield, the father of the modern anti-vaccine movement, was a guest on , where he claimed the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine has actually made the measles virus worse and has stripped us of our immunity to it. His solution? Natural measles exposure, as he is âa great believer in the power of nature.â But if the vaccine doesnât work and measles is bad, how is the answer for all of us to contract measles now? Meanwhile, Steve Kirsch, the wealthy entrepreneur and COVID contrarian who is asking everyone to debate him for a cash prize, is still trawling the VAERS database to prove the COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, and he told the host of that Bruce Willisâ diagnosis of dementia needs to be investigated, as it could be due to the COVID vaccine. As for ivermectin, an osteopathic physician in Chicago said on CHD TVâs that âunder my own hands, I saw miraculousâquasi-miraculous things happen.â He cited as evidence the work of Dr. Carvallo in South America, which .
Two individuals can look at the same data and come to radically different interpretations. Talking heads on CHD TV mention that Americans have lost two years of life expectancy since the pandemic started and that rare conditions are suddenly becoming more common. Their interpretation? It has to be the COVID-19 vaccines. It could not possibly be the emergence of a new pandemic virus which targets multiple organ systems in the body. No: the mÏăœ¶ÊÓÆ” vaccines must be blamed at all costs.
And itâs not just the COVID-19 vaccines. Denying their overall safety leads you down the rabbit hole to full-on anti-vaccine territory, as described by : âItâs kind of like you got a fishing line, and youâre bringing up the fishing line, and it starts bringing up all this COVID stuff, and then you see something funny that comes on the line and itâs like, âHey, maybe thereâs another vaccineâare all these vaccines safe? I read something about this guy Andrew Wakefield. [âŠ] It sounds like he's being labelled as a misinformation spreader and .ââ¶Ä
The most reproduced finding in the literature on conspiracy beliefs is that the more you believe in one conspiracy theory, the . The pandemic was definitely a radicalizing event for many of the guests on CHD TV. If you decide the mainstream narrative on COVID-19 vaccines cannot be trusted, why would you trust the narrative on the childhood immunization schedule? In this way, trust in governments, the pharmaceutical industry, academia, the healthcare system, and âthe mainstream mediaâ decays. This makes you primed to enter CHDâs alternative media ecosystem, which is imbued with strong religious and spiritual language.
âI donât know anything except what I feelâ
Contrarians and science deniers grow their audiences by going on each otherâs platforms and having the host plug their latest work. On CHD TV, viewers were recommended Del Bigtreeâs The High Wire (âtrue investigative journalism!â), Andrew Wakefieldâs production company website (7th Chakra Films), Dr. Pierre Koryâs The War on Ivermectin, and so many guestsâ Substack blog. The pamphleteering of car windshields to warn about the coming of the new world order seems to have been replaced by Substacking about it.
I learned that Andrew Wakefield is finishing the edit of his latest film, Protocol 7, which will not be a âdocumentaryâ but a scripted movie âbased on true facts,â whatever that means. Meanwhile, Americaâs favourite Disney mom Leigh-Allyn Baker, who âblew up her careerâ by becoming an anti-vaxxer, is involved in the production of , a three-part scripted series that will teach kids not to trust the government. The idea for the series was apparently put in the head of a 17-year-old girl by none other than God.
Promoting others is great, but self-promotion is also important, and you would be hard-pressed to watch any show on CHD TV and not spot a copy of the book The Real Anthony Fauci by RFK Jr. somewhere in the background. Their morning show also frequently features a rundown of CHDâs latest articles from their blog The Defender, each one being portrayed as shocking and ground-breaking in its revelation of alleged censorship or mad-scientist-type experiments. This coverage is often repeated ad nauseam across multiple shows, demonstrating that for all of its posturing against the mainstream media, CHD TV falls victim to the same repetitious tricks of the 24/7 news cycle.
After scaring their viewers and eroding their trust in official bodies, RFK Jr.âs CHD TV comes to their rescue with irrational solutions. The rallying cry of âdo your own researchâ can often be heard. It is not an invitation to learn the complexities of scientific thinking, but rather a Marco Polo-style call-and-answer for anti-vaccine leaders to guide their followers to where they are in the rabbit hole. âDo your own researchâ means âI hope you follow the breadcrumbs to the same truth I now choose to believe.â It is also a convenient legal shield. They are not giving out medical advice or telling you what to do. It is part of CHD TVâs careful treading around the law, which includes regular disclaimers and the refrain of âin my opinionâ following any bold statement. The website itself warns that the opinions expressed by the hosts and guests are not necessarily the views of CHD (or, by extension, RFK Jr. himself), but when your entire âtelevision channelâ spews out anti-vaccine, anti-government, and anti-science views, it is hard to imagine that its founder believes the exact opposite. (In fact, we know he doesnât.)
But doing your own research is not enough. Analytical thinking must be put aside to make way for intuition. Trust your gut, we are told over and over again, as if our brainâs quick-and-dirty threat assessment function can help us understand what the contents of a syringe does to our body. Mondayâs programme went even further. The guest, who teaches the art of emotional connection, declared, âI donât know anything except what I feel,â before one of the hosts said that âour minds and thoughts create our reality,â which was echoed by Ilana Daniel in The Jerusalem Report claiming that âwhat you think and what you believe is what will come true for you.â This is straight out of the book The Secret, a New Age wish-fulfilment fantasy that makes it easy to blame people for failing in life. They simply did not wish hard enough.
This itching for the reassurance of intuitive thinking leads us straight into the arms of religion and spirituality, and for a channel allegedly dedicated to denouncing vaccines, CHD TV is surprisingly church-like. I counted half of all shows that week making clear, often repeated mentions of the importance of God and spirituality. There was talk of healing crystals and high-soul tribes, but most allusions were of a Christian nature. The AIDS denialist who worked at SPIN magazine counts on Godâs plan and protection during this âspiritual warfare,â while a former television producer and sound engineer who wrote an anti-vaccine booklet for his grandchildren ended by declaring that âyou donât want to inject things into [your childrenâs perfect bodies] to disrupt what God put into them.â
Anti-vaccination is now a quicksand. It will pull you down into a conspirituality trap. Conspirituality was by the authors of the book of the same name as the phenomenon in which âpolitical anxieties merge with spiritual hopes,â whereby âevery cruel plot point begets the necessity for spiritual warfare and renewal.â
RFK Jr. is one of the heads of not just an anti-vaccine movement, but of a far-reaching ideology that cultivates conspiracy theories and offers as solutions the silencing of critical thinking and the soothing balm of fantasy. That a man with such a paranoid detachment from reality is grasping for the highest political seat in one of the most influential countries in the world should make us all worry about the future.
I will close with a lengthy quote from Bernadette Pajer, whose CHD TV show on June 30th managed to encapsulate this mad, mongrel philosophy fueling the worldâs strangest fever dream. She was interviewing a Welsh engineer with experience in how vaccines are produced who is now convinced that the extreme fragility of the cold chain for delivering mÏăœ¶ÊÓÆ” vaccines means that they have morphed into a toxic brew.
âYou said something that the UK wants to be the dominant voice, the leader of life sciences. Well, I got something to tell them. There is already somebody, the head of life sciences, who will never be toppled, and his name is God⊠or Mother Nature, or whatever your belief systemâthereâs a brilliant, higher power that already has thought what health and life need to thrive. Itâs not brewed in a vat somewhere, doesnât need to be kept at -70°C as it gets shipped across the world, doesnât have to be given a liability shield so nobody sues them.
âWe know how to be healthy. We know how to avoid illness. Itâs about individual susceptibility and it's about utilizing what nature/God has given us in the land, how to farm properly. We know what to do⊠but that doesnât make them łŸŽÇČÔ±đČâ.â
This kind of anti-science rhetoric is a recipe for a new Dark Age.
Take-home message:
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the founder and chairman of the board of the anti-vaccine organization Childrenâs Health Defense, which produces multiple âtelevisionâ shows that stream weekly on its website
- The shows on CHD TV fuel fear and mistrust of science, governments, academia, healthcare, and the media, while providing alternatives to these institutions
- The solutions put forth by CHD TV include âdoing your own research,â relying entirely on your intuition and feelings to understand reality, and praying for change
