RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine stance blasted as cynical ploy: Sources

In the summer of 2003, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was casting around for a new cause — and a new revenue stream — when a young mother showed up on his porch in Hyannis Port, Mass.

Carrying a banker’s box of documents, Sarah Bridges wanted the environmental lawyer, who had been outspoken about mercury levels in water in the Hudson River, to lend his famous name to her crusade against the vaccines she believed had caused her son’s brain damage.

Kennedy, however, couldn’t be bothered. He had sailing plans with friends, as Bridges recalled to The Post. Finally, he said, “If I read your stuff, will you just leave?” 

It took a week to get back to her, but he found a lucrative new fixation: parroting dangerous misinformation and fringe claims which go against decades of established scientific research and testing.

“There’s no vaccine that’s safe and effective,” he claimed as recently as 2023.

Vaccine skepticism also helped Kennedy get richer and gain political power at the expense of Americans’ health, sources tell The Post.  

“Bobby saw skepticism of vaccines as a way to generate attention and controversy for himself, get book deals, lucrative speaking engagements and his hope was to turn his anti-vaccine stance into a political position,” said Jerry Oppenheimer, author of “RFK Jr.: The Dark Side of Camelot.”

At 71, Kennedy, an attorney with no medical training, is up for the role of secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

His fringe views will be put to the test Wednesday when he is scheduled to appear for his Senate confirmation hearings — which are being heavily contested by actual physicians, 77 Nobel Prize winners and even members of his own family.

Calling him a “predator,” his first cousin Caroline Kennedy wrote a scathing letter to senators released Tuesday, saying: “He is willing to enrich himself by denying access to a vaccine that can prevent almost all forms of cervical cancer and which has been safely administered to millions of boys and girls.”

“I don’t think he really ever believed in anything,” said a source who was close to his ex-wife, Mary Richardson. “His aim was always self-promotion and money.” 

Kennedy rakes in vast sums – $11.6 million in the last two years, according to financial disclosures seen by The Post – largely from his association with legal cases which undermine drug companies and erode confidence in public health.

He does this through his own legal firm, Kennedy and Madonna LLP, and by client referrals to firms Morgan & Morgan and Wisner Baum – the latter of whom are leading a case against Gardasil, a vaccine which protects against the human papillomavirus (HPV), a major risk factor for cervical cancer.

“He’s a savvy guy who turned his war on vaccines into a shrewd marketing ploy, and a way to turn the public away from the predominant dark side of his life,” said Oppenheimer. 

That dark side includes a self-admitted 14 years as a heroin addict, a history of alleged cheating in relationships, multiple odd stories about his treatment of animals and a claim that a worm ate part of his brain.

But Kennedy’s words have influence and consequences. Special education teacher Kristen O’Meara, who lives outside Chicago said she had wholly believed RFK Jr.’s claims after going “down the dark Internet rabbit hole” with her husband, like thousands of others.

Her 13-year-old twins and 15-year-old were not vaccinated, but things suddenly got very real when the kids got rotavirus giving them diarrhea and painful cramps.

“A lot of the anti-vax stuff made sense to a non-scientific individual and I was really scared about autism. I didn’t know what to do,” she told The Post.

“When they got sick, it was like a light switch turned on. My mind was completely changed,” and now they’re fully vaccinated.

She added she was worried about Kennedy spouting “misinformation as reality” if he is confirmed.

Kennedy’s embrace of myriad radical causes — including the defense of his father’s assassin, which put him at odds with his own siblings and mother — has been a lifelong struggle to live up to his father’s heroic legacy, said friends and former colleagues. 

Robert F. Kennedy campaigned for civil rights, raised awareness about apartheid in South Africa and was a champion of the poor and downtrodden. He served as attorney general in his brother’s administration and, like his brother John F. Kennedy, was assassinated  dying during his own presidential campaign in 1968, when his son was 14 years old.

“After daddy died I struggled to be a grown-up,” Kennedy wrote in a 2001 diary entry viewed by The Post. “I felt he was watching me from heaven. I felt a failure. I hated myself. I began to lie — to make up a character who was the hero and leader that I wished I was.”

Following his father’s death, Kennedy returned to his posh boarding school in upstate New York, and styled himself a rebel. He was unwashed and unkempt, according to those who knew him, and spent much of his time training his pet falcon to kill rats, disgusting his classmates. 

“He had a toxic relationship with his mother,” said Alex Boyle, who knew Kennedy from Riverkeeper, an environmental non-profit where he worked. “When you know Bobby, you realize that he and his siblings grew up like ‘Lord of the Flies,’ with no male supervision, and today they all behave like unruly adolescents.”

In her letter, Caroline wrote Kennedy had “encouraged” siblings and cousins “down the path of substance abuse.” He himself was busted with heroin in 1983, when he was 29 years old and married to his University of Virginia law school classmate Emily Black. 

It was while married to his second wife, Mary Richardson, that Kennedy kept a sex diary, listing women’s names and rankings from 1 to 10, as The Post first reported in 2013. Richardson – who took her own life in 2012 – had told a friend the numbers corresponded to how far he had gotten with each woman.

In a sign his behavior has not changed, Kennedy, who has been married to actress Cheryl Hines since 2014, was accused of having a year-long virtual affair with journalist Olivia Nuzzi late in 2024.

Her ex-boyfriend alleged in a court filing Kennedy wanted to “control,” “possess” and “impregnate” Nuzzi, whom he had “manipulated” throughout. RFK Jr’s camp has denied the claims and called them “categorically false.”

Kennedy — who has admitted all of his six children are vaccinated — had begun his career as an activist, working as an attorney for the environmental group Riverkeeper in 1985 after passing the bar, He did this “as a way to get out of his pariah status,” from his heroin conviction, according to Boyle, the son of Kennedy’s late mentor Robert Boyle.

Boyle noted Kennedy had little patience for those who didn’t agree with him and was “reckless” with scientific reports that didn’t match his own theories.

For years Kennedy was tolerated at the non-profit because his last name had the power to attract millions in donations, Boyle said. However, over time he turned his mind to profit.

“He broke with Riverkeeper because they were embarrassed about his vaccine stands, and his projects to commercialize water. He wanted them to bottle water like Poland Spring and sell it,” Boyle said. 

Kennedy joined the fringe non-profit Children’s Health Defense in 2013, at a time when the anti-vaccination movement was gaining strength on social media.

It was an ideal environment to incubate skepticism and distrust, particularly of government, and networks quickly popped up pushing misinformation, which spread like wildfire.

Children’s Health Defense promoted the film “Trace Amounts,” which posits mercury and aluminum content in vaccines leads to autism in children — two claims which have been thoroughly researched and found to be untrue.

At a 2015 screening of the film, Kennedy claimed the government and drug companies could not be trusted over the ingredients they use, despite vaccine development, testing and approval being a years-long, multi-agency process.  

“They can put anything they want in that vaccine and they have no accountability for it … [kids] get the shot, that night they have a fever of 103 [degrees], they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our country,” he said, according to The Sacramento Bee. Days later, he apologized for his choice of words.

Kennedy also blamed certain anti-depressants for causing school shootings and suggested that “sexual identification” and “gender confusion” among children may be caused by exposure to chemicals in pesticides and plastic called endocrine disruptors. There is no scientific research to support these claims.

Last week, Kennedy said he resigned from Children’s Health Defense ahead of his confirmation hearing.

RFK Jr.’s vaccine skepticism, as well as other beliefs, has largely alienated him from his siblings and cousins in the Kennedy clan, who have banded together and denounced him numerous times.

At least a dozen members of his immediate family gathered to denounce his run for President after he broke from the Democratic party the family has represented for decades.

His sister, Kerry Kennedy, has repeatedly called him an “outrage,” while brother Max has said his recent political moves were a “hollow grab for power, a strategic attempt at relevance,” in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times.

“Bobby has gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life,” Caroline wrote in her letter.