Speaker 1: Bobby Kennedy Jr recently appeared on Bill Maher's podcast, The Clubhouse.
We now have the opportunity to hear directly from him.
What is his view about vaccines?
Bill Maher confronted him.
Not really.
Bill Maher told him, I basically agree with you about vaccines, but you're not handling
this correctly.
You're going to have to defend your position.
So we now have video of Bobby Kennedy explaining his views on vaccines.
He always says, I'm not anti-vax.
I just want safe vaccines.
But you will very quickly see in this video that his views are simply not based in fact.
Let's get right into it.
Speaker 5: On the side that shows that autism is caused by vaccines.
There's over 100 studies.
I, in fact, had a book in which I listed all of those studies, and I just did.
In other words, summarize them all and you can go and source them.
Speaker 1: I think this is a classic anti-vaxx line.
There's 100 studies that find a link between vaccines and autism.
There's 100 studies and people accept it uncritically.
The folks that have fallen for this who, by the way, are mostly right wing folks, it's
a whole interesting thing.
Trump is now praising Bobby Kennedy Jr.
His constituency is heavily made up of MAGA people.
He should probably be running as a Republican, quite frankly.
But let's not deal with someone like Bobby goes.
Studies link vaccines to autism and then someone hears it and repeats it.
You can actually investigate that.
Okay.
There is not any scientific evidence that links vaccines to autism.
And in fact, on the contrary, many studies have found no link whatsoever.
The foremost such, quote study by now disbarred doctor, it's revoked medical license.
Andrew Wakefield was retracted.
It's a bogus study.
Most of the data that many people cite comes from that.
But let's talk about this one studies thing.
The claim that more than 100 studies link vaccines to autism is based on a list of papers
that was compiled by an anti-vax website.
They have a horse in the game, in the race, so to speak, and the list has been widely
debunked by experts.
Now, don't take my word for it.
Do what Bobby says.
Go and look at the list.
But don't just look at the summaries that he makes.
Look at the actual citations.
Okay.
Many of the papers on the list are actually about vaccines and autism at all.
They might be about one or the other.
Some have been retracted.
Some have methodological flaws, and some simply theorize about what could cause autism.
If you look at those papers, you will find papers that, for example, say when we think
about why there may be rising rates of autism, one reason could be that we are better at
diagnosing it.
So we're actually just identifying more cases of autism.
Another reason could be vaccines.
Another reason could be, you know, whatever we fight, right?
Just because you put vaccines on a list of things that hypothetically could be related
doesn't mean that it's a study that shows it.
This is the sort of stuff he's citing.
Tons of examples.
There's one paper called a Positive Association found between autism prevalence and childhood
vaccination, and it claims to show that there's a correlation.
Between vaccination rates and autism in different states.
The idea being states with more vaccination also have more autism.
The problem is it doesn't establish any causal link.
It's not science.
It doesn't account for the fact that autism diagnosis is likely better in the very same
states that have more vaccination.
I'll give you one example, and I don't want to beat a dead horse here.
I apologize for the violent term beating a dead horse.
But it's it's really important to understand this.
Think about the states that have higher rates of vaccination.
Okay.
Think about the states that have better health infrastructure.
Okay.
If you think about those states, California, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, states
that have better health infrastructure are going to find and diagnose more autism because
they actually have protocols for when teachers observe certain behaviors.
You would actually say, hey, this is someone who maybe should be screened for autism, etc..
Those are the same states that have higher vaccination rates due to better health infrastructure
and better education.
So this is just one example.
And you can go through and you can find it.
It's a bogus list.
On the also important to note, the very pediatrician that Bobby Kennedy cites for much of his anti-vaccine
views has disavowed Bobby Kennedy and says he interviewed me once and then completely
misstated all the stuff I said.
That's another classic.
On the other hand, we have the work of the CDC, National Academy of Medicine, all these
groups that say we've looked at it, we find absolutely no link between vaccines and autism.
Okay.
It gets crazier from there.
Let's continue.
Remember, this is Bobby Kennedy in his own words, giving us his view about vaccines,
says 100 studies find a link.
That's a debunked list.
Many of the studies don't even actually deal with that issue.
Speaker 5: Let's continue over 456 450 studies summarize.
I have 1400 citations.
The question for your campaign is I'm not talking about this stuff in my campaign.
I'm just talking between you and me.
That's a ridiculous assumption.
Of course, you're going to have to talk about somebody ask me.
I'm going to they're all going to ask you, are you serious?
No.
This is an area they're going to ask you about.
You think you're there for your friends who want to help you?
You know, there's no they don't want to they want to go to the most vulnerable point, which
is your not.
That's because you don't believe in vaccines.
That's not me talking.
No, I don't believe that.
But that's what you believe.
I don't believe in vaccines.
I. I believe you are more I just believe in science.
I enjoy, you know, any job in science.
Yeah, but let's not talk about again, the science.
That's the thing.
That's the mistake they made.
I believe in science.
You're right.
What you trying to.
Let me just say this.
We have different.
Every medicine is required to do placebo controlled trials.
That's what science is.
You give.
You give a group of people, a cohort of people, the medicine, and then you give them a similarly
situated record of people, the placebo.
And then you look at health outcomes over a four or five year period, as many of the
impact of the outcomes are going to have long as they arise.
It's a long incubation period, so you want to see them immediately.
You need to do it as if you had eight years for vaccine, you need to watch them for a
while.
Those studies are not the only medicine that never gets tested are vaccines.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's talk about that.
This they believe that this is their sort of trump card, right?
With the this is irrefutable.
He says we need these placebo controlled vaccine trials.
This is a common ruse with these folks.
Okay.
It is true that the specific autism vaccine link has not been extensively explored with
regard to child vaccinations through that particular type of type of trial.
But why not?
The why not is extraordinarily important to understand.
The reason is similar to why we don't do randomized controlled trials about smoking while pregnant,
Right?
You could say, listen, I don't know that smoking while pregnant is actually bad.
In order to say smoking while pregnant is bad, we should take a thousand women.
We should have one.
Not smoke at all.
We should have 100 smoke a pack a day and 100 smoked two packs a day.
Okay.
And then we spend 20 years seeing what is the impact on those kids.
Okay.
That would be horribly unethical because of what we do know, it is generally considered
unethical to withhold potentially life saving vaccines from individuals if they are available
and proven to be effective.
The vaccines that he has been against for a long time.
Four kids are so effective at preventing serious illness that how would you do such a test?
Do you say, Hey, let's volunteer a bunch of kids to go through adolescence with no vaccines
and see what happens to them?
It would be insanely unethical because of the risk that you would expose them to.
You have to balance risks and benefits.
And with the serious actual validated studies that have looked into this issue, not by doing
it the way he wants because it would be hugely unethical, but by looking at it in the ways
that the CDC and others do.
There has been no link established between vaccination and autism, and this is his view.
So now we've got it.
It's not people misstating it.
It's Bobby Kennedy Jr in his own words and it's horrifying.