In this exclusive interview with OCN, Robert Kennedy Jr. explains why he believes mandated vaccines are a huge problem.
Senate Bill 163 is a hot topic in Colorado right now, and OCN's CEO Joe Oltmann was privileged to get to sit down with Robert Kennedy Jr., with the Children's Health Defense, to hear his take on the dangers of vaccinations in children.
In this hour-long interview, Kennedy gives a history of vaccinations in the U.S., tells us how he came to become a mouthpiece for this bipartisan anti-vaccination movement, and advises how he thinks Coloradans who are concerned about their medical freedoms can keep advocating for their rights.
(Last week, we interviewed Kevin Jenkins, the Executive Director of the Urban Global Health Alliance, who offered a detailed perspective on how this Senate Bill 163 will affect minorities. Watch it here.)
Read a portion of the Robert Kennedy Jr. interview below, or watch it in its entirety here:
OCN: Hi, everyone, this is Joe Oltmann coming to you from Our Community Now. I'm joined today by Robert Kennedy Jr, who is an activist, author, and works in the vaccine movement. So, Robert, thanks for joining us.
ROBERT KENNEDY: Thanks for having me, Joe.
OCN: So obviously, I just want to kind of jump right in it, and, first, by the way, give you an opportunity to tell everyone a little bit about yourself and what brought you to do the things that you do today.
ROBERT KENNEDY: Well, I've been an environmental lawyer and activist for almost 40 years. I am the founder, a co-founder, and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is the biggest water protection group in the world. In Colorado, we have a Waterkeeper in Boulder and many, many other waterways. We now have 350 Waterkeepers in 46 countries around the world. All of them have patrol boats, and almost all of them litigate against polluters. Oh, I've been representing them in hundreds and hundreds of cases over the past 40 years, and in the early 2000s, we were suing coal-burning power plants all across North America, in the province of Canada and in the United States. We had almost 40 lawsuits against cement kilns and coal-burning power plants, specifically for discharging mercury. In 2003, FDA published a multi-year study in which they found that every freshwater fish in America had dangerous levels of mercury in its flesh. And we were, in my view, living in a science fiction nightmare where my children and the children of most Americans could now no longer engage in a seminal, primal activity of American youth, which is to go fishing in the local fishing hole and then come home and safely eat the fish. And CDC had done a study that showed one out of every six American women had dangerous levels of mercury in their womb and in their cord blood. A lot of people were suing coal plants at that time, but we were suing specifically on the issue of mercury. I was traveling across North America giving lectures. We were pushing legislation to end mercury from coal-burning power plants, and at almost every venue where I spoke to large crowds, there would be collections of women who would occupy the front rows, and afterwards, they would come up. And they were the mothers of, as I later learned, intellectually disabled kids, who believed that their children had been injured by vaccines and, specifically, the mercury in vaccines. And afterwards, they would come up to me in a very respectful—but also mildly scolding—way and say, "If you really are concerned about mercury exposures to children, you need to look at vaccines because they are by far the largest factor."
And one of these ladies came to my summer home on Cape Cod in the summer of 2005, and she was a psychologist from Minnesota. Her name was Sarah Bridges. She had a son, Porter Bridges, who had won $20 million from the vaccine court. He had gotten a (inaudible) vaccine and gotten autism from it. And he had gotten a $20 million settlement from them. They recognized that it was the source of his injury. She brought me a big stack of scientific peer-reviewed studies that was about 18 inches deep, and she put them on my front porch. She said, "I'm not leaving here till you read these." I'm very comfortable reading science. I've brought over 500 successful lawsuits. Almost all of them involve some kind of constant scientific controversy, so I have to be comfortable reading it. I sat down and started reading the studies, and I went through just the abstracts mainly. Before I was even four or five inches down in that pile, I recognized that there was a giant delta between what the public health agencies were telling us about the safety of vaccines and what the actual peer-reviewed science was saying. And I started a journey then that brought me down a lot of rabbit holes, and it has brought me 15 years later today where I run now probably the biggest vaccine safety group in the world, which is the Children's Health Defense. And we are kind of leading the battle to make sure that we have safe vaccines and that people aren't mandated to take medicines against their will.
OCN: So that's a good segue. And just to let you know, I found myself going down the rabbit hole myself about a month and a half ago. I had a little bit of time on my hands because we were in the middle of, obviously, the pandemic, and somebody came to me and said, "I want you to read this stuff about vaccines. And there's a bill that we're very concerned about, and that's SB 163." Now, I want to tell everyone that's listening, what political party you associated with?
ROBERT KENNEDY: I'm a Democrat.
OCN: You're a Democrat. Okay, so, everyone that thinks that this is leaning one side or another—it's not. Because we're now going to have a segue into what's happening in Colorado. But this bill, SB 163—and you came out and actually spoke to the thirty-five hundred people that were there—And you also testified before the committee. Correct?
ROBERT KENNEDY: Yes.
OCN: And what's interesting about this bill is that it limits the rights of parents. It creates limitations on the rights of parents, whether or not their kids can and cannot be vaccinated. And it was predominantly passed by Democrats, right?
ROBERT KENNEDY: Yes.
OCN: So I want you to talk a little bit about that bill and let the listeners know about that bill because that bill has actually passed both the state House and the state Senate. It is on the governor's desk to be signed. And I don't think that people understand that this is not a Democrat or Republican issue. I do know that that bill was actually written by a Big Pharma company. It was not brought by anyone in the community. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that bill from your perspective and why that bill is so dangerous across the country.
ROBERT KENNEDY: Well, this is part of a barrage—I think there are 131 bills in front of legislatures in all 50 states. They're all being pushed by Pharma. Most of them are being pushed through the Democratic Party. Republicans, on the local level—the state legislatures—have been very good on this issue compared to the Democrats. On the federal level, in Congress, the Democrats and Republicans are pretty much equally bad. The Democrats have been terrible on these state bills, and this particular bill is very, very bad. The worst bills were passed in New York and California, and they basically removed any kind of exemptions, including medical exemptions, so that even if you have a child, for example, that has suffered a seizure because of a vaccine and who has a brother who has brain damage from a vaccine or has seizures or autoimmune in his family, or personal history of autoimmune disease, and that child's doctor tells him, "You cannot get a vaccine because it will probably kill you, and it will certainly injure you"—Under California law, you would still need to get that vaccine or you would have to give up your constitutional right to a public education. You also can't go to camps. You can't go to daycare. You basically are a pariah. You can't participate in the life of your community.
OCN: You're treated like you have a scarlet letter.
ROBERT KENNEDY: Yeah, and I'll tell you something, Joe: It makes no sense because, first of all, if you believe in vaccination and you get vaccinated and the vaccines actually work the way that they're supposed to work—the way that they say that work, which is they give you lifetime immunity—then you have nothing to worry about from a kid who decides not to get vaccinated. That child is not carrying it the disease, and you cannot get the disease from him. What the pharmaceutical industry says—and they're, you know, indentured servants in our political process—is that what we're really doing here is protecting immune-compromised kids who are too sick so they cannot get vaccinated, and you could pass the disease to them. There are a lot of problems with that explanation.
Number one, kids who are that immunocompromised (usually they're kids who are recovering from chemo) shouldn't be going to school anyway because the vaccinated illnesses are only a tiny fraction of epidemic or contagious illnesses. There are hundreds of contagious illnesses that they can get; most of them have no vaccination available. The biggest issue is you are more likely to get a disease from a vaccinated child than you are from an unvaccinated child. And the reason for that is all of the live virus vaccines shed virus. So, if you get a flu vaccine—this is what the science says—you are six times more likely to transmit the flu than somebody who is unvaccinated. If you get a pertussis vaccine, the pertussis vaccine does not actually kill the pertussis; it just shields the symptoms. So you become an asymptomatic character carrier of whooping cough, and you can pass it for life to other people without ever knowing you have it. Whereas somebody who actually is unvaccinated, if they get pertussis, they know it, and they stay home. Whereas if you get vaccinated, you may still have it, you may be still passing it. You won't know it, so you're just going to give it to everybody in the class. ...
When they had the measles outbreak, I think in 2018 in California, 39 percent of the people in the Disneyland outbreak were people who had vaccine strain measles, so they got the measles either from the vaccine or from a vaccinated person. According to WHO, 70 percent of the polio cases on Earth today are a vaccine strain. Mainly, they came from the vaccine. CDC acknowledges that every polio case in the United States since 1979 has come from vaccines. If you look at the manufacturer's insert for the chickenpox vaccine (inaudible), it says if you get this vaccine, do not have close contact with pregnant women or immunocompromised people for six weeks because you're passing the chickenpox. This whole idea that we need to keep unvaccinated kids out of school in order to protect immunocompromised kids, it's nonsense. In fact, If you look at any of the historic protocols for how do you take care of an immunocompromised kid—Johns Hopkins, CDC, etc.—all of them say keep them away from vaccinated children. None of them say keep them away from unvaccinated children.
So that justification that Pharma uses to compel Americans to take an unwanted medical intervention of a pharmaceutical product that has never been tested—not a single vaccine ... We sued them three years ago—HHS—and we said, have any of the 72 vaccines that are now required and mandated for children—Have any of them been safety-tested? And HHS was forced to admit they have not safety-tested. There is zero liability. That company has no incentive to make that vaccine safe. And they're mandated. And in fact, those companies are making $60 million selling us mandated vaccines. ...
When I was a kid, I got three vaccines. I was born in '54. At that time, the companies were making $187 million, but they were losing money—they were losing twenty times as much paying damages, because back then you could sue them. So they were paying downstream damages for injuries they caused, for every dollar they were making on a vaccine. CDC mandated a diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine in 1980. That vaccine is now banned in this country because it caused so many horrendous injuries—terrible brain injuries to children. It is banned in all countries where they have white populations. But Bill Gates is giving it to 161 million African children, and it's been shown that the girls who get the vaccine are 10 times more likely to die than children who do not see get the vaccine.
