Senator Angela Alsobrook, a Maryland Democrat, has questioned RFK Jr.’s suggestion that blacks should be on a vaccination calendar different from that of whites.
Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images
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Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images
It was one of the most tense exchanges in an already stormy confirmation audience, because the senators put the file of Robert F Kennedy Jr. on vaccines – and its changing positions on their safety and their efficiency – under a microscope.
Senator Angela Alsobrooks, a Maryland Democrat, underlined the previous comments made by Kennedy in which he said: “We should not give blacks the same vaccine calendar that is given to whites because their immune system is better than ours.”
“So what other vaccination schedule would you say that I should have received?” Alsobrooks asked, which is black. “With all the respect I owe you, it’s so dangerous.”
In response, Kennedy cited a well -known vaccine researcher and said there was a “series of studies” showing that “special antigens have a much stronger reaction”.
The basis of Kennedy’s comment seems to be the work carried out by a team from the Mayo clinic who examined the differences in immune response to vaccination by breed. The data has shown that African-Americans have gone up a higher antibody response after the mmr vaccination (measles, mumps and rubella) compared to whites.
However, the own author of the study indicates to NPR that the data do not support a change in the calendar of vaccines according to the breed.
Dr. Richard Kennedy – A vaccine researcher at Mayo Clinic who is not linked to Robert F Kennedy Jr. – says it is true that the immune response to vaccination can vary according to the breed, sex and “potentially dozens of other factors “.
But suggesting that African-Americans should have different hours “twist the data far beyond what they really demonstrate,” he said.
Dr. Carlos del Rio, professor of medicine at Emory University, says, saying that such a conclusion is to “take him to a very dangerous place”, in part because the vaccination rates are already lower in Black children.
Despite his story to undermine confidence in vaccines, Kennedy has passed the confirmation audiences to argue that he supports them. But he ceased to give up previous declarations, including demystified assertions that vaccines cause autism.
An examination of the full comments of Kennedy during this appearance in 2021 which Alsobrooks cited, shows Kennedy making false additional complaints on the safety of vaccines.
He begins by citing a statistic of a study which reported having found a much higher autism rate in black children who received the ROR vaccine on time. However, this document has been retracted due to unorganized competing interests on the part of the author and concerns about the validity of methods and statistical analysis. The author is the scientific director of the defense of children’s health, the anti-vaccine defense group Kennedy, founded and led for many years.
Kennedy then seems to refer to the study of the Mayo Clinic, saying that it shows that the measles vaccine “will push their immune response to the cliff” and “the body of these black boys will begin to attack their own body in thinking that it is a foreign invader. “
He adds: “The vaccines that we give them overload them and cause self-immunity.”
None of this is supported by the real study, which has not examined adverse events or side effects.
“The data does not show that a racial group is undergoing an increase in damage or autoimmunity compared to any other racial group,” said the author of the study Richard Kennedy.
RFK Jr. was involved in other efforts to question the safety of vaccines according to the breed.
A film that was produced by Kennedy several years ago explicitly raised the idea that vaccines could harm people in color – and distort another study by Mayo Clinic, this on the vaccine against the rubella, to strengthen his argument.
The author of this study, Dr. Gregory Poland, told NPR that they found “no evidence of increased side effects of the vaccine” and that any claim of “increased vulnerability” among African-Americans who receive the vaccine Against rubella is “simply not supported by this study or is science.”
This story was published by Jane Greenhalgh
