Kerry Kennedy remembers how much she looked up to her older brother Robert when they were kids at Hickory Hill, the family estate in McLean, Virginia. She says he took her to streams, crawled into pipes and caught frogs and snakes, ignoring his friends who didn’t want a six-year-old girl on their wild adventures.
“He was an extraordinary big brother,” Kerry said. “He’s brilliant, he’s educated, he cares for others with depth, he’s extremely charismatic. He’s got a youthful animation and lightness. He’s a beautiful person in a million different ways. But he has this side…”
Nearly 60 years after Bobby took his sister for a walk through the woods, the namesake son of Robert F. Kennedy — the New York senator, justice minister and Democratic presidential candidate who was assassinated on June 5, 1968 — has become a incredibly polarizing figure in this close-knit political family.
Once one of the leading environmentalists who led the fight to clean up New York’s Hudson River, the third-eldest son of Robert and Ethel Kennedy has emerged as one of the main voices in the campaign that casts doubt on coronavirus vaccines and other measures promoted by the United States. Joe Biden’s White House in fighting the pandemic that, towards the end of February, was killing about 1,900 people a day.
“The minute they give you your vaccination passport, all the rights you have are turned into a privilege dependent on your obedience to arbitrary government orders,” he told a crowd at a rally against mandatory vaccination in Washington last month. past. “It will make you a slave.”
Kennedy’s rise as the face of the vaccine resistance movement was an unprecedented test of the solidarity of a family that for decades stood steadfast in the face of tragedy and scandal.
This has shaken Hollywood and entertainment circles in which he lives, while also showing how the vaccine debate is tearing down traditional political alliances.
And it left the Kennedys and their friends anguished and baffled by the drastic turn in the often troubled life of a man who carried the coffin at his father’s funeral when he was 14, moved from drug addiction to one of the country’s leading environmentalists. and who is considered one of the most politically talented Kennedys of his generation.
Bobby Kennedy effectively used his talent and one of the most prominent names in American political history as a platform to fuel resistance to vaccines that could save countless lives.
His conduct “undermines 50 years of public health practice in vaccination, and he’s done it in a way I’ve never seen anyone do,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “He’s among the most dangerous, because of his credibility and what his last name has brought to this issue.”
Blake Fleetwood, a writer who calls Kennedy an “inspiration” and has been his friend and ski buddy since 1971, said he can’t understand why Kennedy is “risking his whole life” of activism by “taking on this crusade.”
“Why is he spoiling his life’s work?” he asked.
Kennedy, 68, began criticizing vaccines well before the coronavirus emerged, claiming they cause autism — a claim that has been rejected by medical experts. But the tenor of his attacks has intensified with the arrival of Covid vaccines, bringing new scrutiny not only to Kennedy’s positions on them, but also to other unorthodox causes he has gravitated to over the years.
Kennedy now says Sirhan Sirhan did not kill his father, and has asked California parole commissioners to release him. He echoed a popular conspiracy theory that 5G high-speed transmission towers are being installed across the country “to collect our data and control our behavior.”
In a new bestselling book, he claimed that Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s top medical adviser on the coronavirus pandemic, and Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, were in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to profit from dangerous vaccines.
He has amassed a significant following on social media, where he spreads often false information about the coronavirus and vaccines. Last year, Kennedy was barred from Instagram, where he had 800,000 followers, for spreading misinformation in his vaccine attacks. Its Facebook page, with more than 300 thousand followers, remains online, as well as its Twitter account, with more than 405 thousand followers.
Kennedy declined a request for an interview, saying he was busy with a vaccine harm judgment in Jackson, Tennessee. He also said he believed the New York Times had not given adequate publicity to his vaccine concerns and had ignored his book on Fauci despite high sales. But he did respond to a few questions via email, saying he was drawn to that question when the mother of a child with autism brought several studies purporting to show a link between vaccines and the disease to her Cape Cod home, and stayed there until he read.
“I realized the enormous diversity between the official narratives promoted by the pharmaceutical industry and public health regulators, on the one hand, and the published science I was reading,” Kennedy wrote.
He said he tried to discuss his concerns with top federal health officials and that “these conversations made me angry enough to get involved in this battle.”
Five of his eight surviving siblings — two of whom have died — have publicly reprimanded him over the past two years for his anti-vaccination campaign, a notable fact in an important American family that tries to manage its problems internally. To the visible distress of his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, Kennedy invoked at a rally in Washington the young German-Dutch writer Anne Frank, who died in a Nazi prison camp, comparing government measures against the pandemic to the Holocaust. He later apologized for this.
From his early childhood days in Virginia, to his years at Harvard University, to his work as a co-founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance, created in 1999 to fight water pollution, Kennedy has been known as a person of obsessive energy, passionate to the point of exhaustion. For nearly 40 years, he’s made it his mission to warn about mercury contamination — first from coal-fired power plants and now as a preservative in some vaccines. Even his most prominent critics say they do not doubt his sincerity, even as he has become one of the most prominent disseminators of false information about vaccines.
Fauci said that, on instructions from the Trump White House, he spent an hour listening to Kennedy give a talk on childhood vaccines at the National Institutes of Health. data,'” Fauci narrated in an interview. “He said, ‘I never get a chance to present the facts, so I want to make a presentation, but I don’t want to be interrupted until I’m done.
When it was over, Fauci escorted Kennedy out of the conference room.
“I said, ‘Bobby, I’m sorry we didn’t come to an agreement here,'” he said. “‘While I disagree with everything you’re saying, I understand and respect that deep down you’re really concerned about the safety of the children.’ I said that in a very sincere way.”
Kennedy’s friends asked him to move on to other issues. “Sometimes you want to shake it and say, ‘Jesus Christ, Bobby, pay attention to something else,'” said Mike Papantonio, a lawyer and talk show host who has been involved in court cases with Kennedy. “But at the end of the day he’s committed to it. Jaws are locked.”
Kerry Kennedy said she continues to value the memories of growing up with Bobby and who will always look up to his older brother.
“We have much more in common than our differences over vaccines, but on this issue we are diametrically opposed,” she said. “I can’t tell you how much I love Bobby. It’s so painful. It’s so hard.”
