RFK Jr. Assures Vaccine Skeptics They Have a ‘Friend at the White House’

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday told members of the anti-vaccine group he founded that they had “a strong and steadfast friend at the White House” and that he would “die with my boots on” pursuing answers about the risks of vaccines.

His remarks, to a convention of Children’s Health Defense, signaled a notable shift from earlier this year when White House officials and political advisers had pushed Mr. Kennedy to sidestep the vaccine issue, given widespread support among voters for protecting children against deadly diseases. They came just one day after President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Nicole Saphier, gave a full-throated defense of the safety and efficacy of vaccines during her Senate confirmation hearing.

But Mr. Kennedy, after spending the first part of his speech on the far more politically popular topics of food safety and nutrition, plunged headlong into vaccines, in a conference riddled with misinformation and references to discredited studies.

The speaker before Mr. Kennedy was Mark Gorton, the president of the MAHA Institute, who called the success of the polio vaccine a “fraud,” priming the audience for the remarks of their former leader, who railed against vaccines for two decades. The speaker after him was Andrew Wakefield, a discredited British doctor whose retracted paper linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine with autism. Decades of research have proved that finding to be wrong.

With the midterm elections less than two months away and Republicans struggling in the polls, Mr. Kennedy has been trying to rally followers of his Make America Healthy Again movement, some of whom have expressed impatience with the pace of his policy changes.

He promised the crowd that he would “be in this fight” to the end, and said the work he was doing was methodical. He added that his team was launching studies after which, he said, “we will take appropriate action.”