Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- On June 15, 2023, podcast host Joe Rogan interviewed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is currently running as a Democratic presidential candidate
- In 2005, Kennedy started suing coal-burning power plants and cement kilns for releasing mercury into waterways. He also pushed legislation to protect children against mercury and gave lectures on its dangers
- During those lectures, mothers started approaching him saying they suspected their children had been injured by mercury-containing vaccines. They told him that if he was really interested in protecting children against mercury, he had to investigate vaccines
- The mother of a vaccine-injured child brought him a thick stack of published research, and after looking through it, Kennedy realized that what health officials told us was very different from what the science showed
- Kennedy is now also legally representing people who claim they’ve been injured by cellphone radiation, which science shows can cause cancer, degrade mitochondria and make your blood-brain barrier more permeable, allowing toxins in your system to flood into your brain
June 15, 2023, podcast host Joe Rogan interviewed1 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is currently running as a Democratic presidential candidate. Rogan admits being blown away by Kennedy’s book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” in part because the information in that book was not talked about anywhere else, and radically veered from the official narrative.
Still, if anything in that book was false, Kennedy would have been sued to high heaven by now, Rogan reasoned. Reading that book opened Rogan’s eyes to the fact that what we’re told by public officials and the media isn’t necessarily the truth. He also realized just how easy it is to fall for a false narrative — especially when it’s all you’re ever allowed to really hear.
For the first several minutes of the interview, Kennedy reviewed his background and how he got to where he is today. He started his legal career as an environmental lawyer in the mid-1960s, suing 500 polluters who had turned the Hudson River into a sewer, on behalf of commercial fishermen whose livelihoods were threatened.
As a result of those lawsuits, the Hudson River was cleaned up and restored. These successes led Kennedy to found Riverkeeper,2 which patrols waterways in 46 countries, holds polluters accountable and defends clean drinking water.
How Kennedy Got Involved With Vaccine Safety
I would strongly encourage you to listen to this interview as around the 10-minute mark Rogan asks Kennedy how he got into the vaccine controversy. Although Kennedy had presented some of his comments in the media previously, this is the first time he was ever allowed to give his uninterrupted one-hour fascinating story on major media.
In 2005, Kennedy started suing coal-burning power plants and cement kilns for releasing mercury into waterways. He launched these lawsuits on behalf of local Riverkeeper chapters after learning that mercury was being found in the flesh of most freshwater fish. Pregnant women were also found to have levels that might put their children at risk of developmental problems.
Kennedy also pushed legislation to protect children against mercury and gave lectures on its dangers. During those lectures, mothers started approaching him saying they suspected that mercury (thimerosal) in the childhood vaccines had injured their children. They told him that if he was really interested in protecting children against mercury, he had to investigate vaccines.
He resisted, as his focus was on environmental pollution and he didn’t want to get involved in public health. However, mothers of developmentally challenged children kept coming to his speeches, wanting to talk to him about vaccines.
Their continued pressure eventually changed his mind, and he decided to listen to their concerns. The true turning point came when a psychologist named Sarah Bridges found his home address and delivered an 18-inch thick stack of scientific papers, saying she would not leave until he’d read them.
Bridges was one of the few people who had been awarded $20 million by the vaccine court, which had concluded that her son’s autism had been caused by a vaccine. She just didn’t want other parents to go through the same heartache.
Huge Gap Between Public Narrative and Published Science
Kennedy began reading, and by the time he’d gone through a third of the pile, he came to the realization that there was a huge gap between what the public health agencies were saying about vaccine safety and what the published science showed.
Kennedy then started calling high-level public health officials and regulators, asking them about these studies and, to his surprise, he realized none of them had read them. They were all just repeating what they had been told about the science. Stranger still, they told him to take his questions to people in the vaccine industry.
Kennedy did contact Dr. Paul Offit, as suggested, and caught Offit in a blatant lie. He asked Offit, how come pregnant women are told not to eat tuna fish to avoid mercury, but are then told to get flu shots that contain a huge bolus of mercury? Offit told him “there are two kinds of mercury, a good mercury and a bad mercury.” According to Offit, fish contain the bad kind, whereas the mercury in vaccines is harmless.
The problem was, Kennedy is an expert on mercury, having spent years suing mercury polluters. He has a deep understanding of the two types of mercury (ethyl mercury in vaccines and methyl mercury in fish), and there’s no such thing as a “good” or harmless mercury.
Kennedy, an excellent storyteller, goes on to review the history of vaccine science and why toxic elements like mercury are used at all. This interview is without doubt one of the most educational “lectures” on vaccines available right now, so I encourage you to listen to at least the first hour, if you don’t have time for the whole thing.
Ethyl Mercury Lodges in the Brain
Importantly, he reviews crucial research that firmly debunks the claim that ethyl mercury is excreted from the body within a week. Studies on monkeys, where the animals were sacrificed after vaccination (which you cannot do with children), showed that the reason there was no ethyl mercury in the blood after several days was because it had traveled into the brain, where it stayed, causing inflammation.
When Kennedy challenged Offit on this point, Offit insisted that, while this research did show that ethyl mercury lodged in the brain, “the mosaic of studies” proved it was harmless and left the body.
Kennedy asked him to share those studies, which Offit promised to do but never did. Kennedy never heard from him again. At that point, Kennedy realized that something was terribly wrong, and he couldn’t walk away.
Kennedy also challenged Dr. Anthony Fauci — who is a close friend of the Kennedy family — to show him a single placebo-controlled trial of a vaccine listed on the childhood vaccination schedule. Fauci said he would send him the studies, but, like Offit, never did.
The reality is, none of the mandated vaccines has ever been tested against a true placebo, such as saline. Most are tested against other vaccines, and if you’re testing two products that contain a similar toxin, of course, the outcomes will be similar. That doesn’t mean you’ve proven safety. Not even close.
Kennedy eventually sued the Health and Human Services Department to obtain the evidence Fauci claimed to have, and after a year the HHS finally returned a letter saying there were no such safety studies. “So, nobody knows what the risk profiles of these products are,” Kennedy says.
The sheer lack of data also means that anyone who claims vaccines have saved more lives by preventing disease than they’ve destroyed through side effects is simply guessing and making assumptions. There’s no scientific data to back that up.
Also, Kennedy points out that while many vaccines are now mercury-free, they’re loaded with aluminum adjuvant instead, which is just as bad. So they’ve just exchanged one neurotoxin for another.
Intentional Suppression of the Autism Signal
Kennedy goes on to tell the story of a secret meeting3 organized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1999 after they conducted an internal study of their database, which contains the medical records, including the vaccination records, of 10 million children from the 10 biggest HMOs.
Specifically, they wanted to know whether mercury-containing vaccines might be causing autism. One of the first comparisons of health outcomes was done on the hepatitis B vaccine.
The data showed that infants who had received the hepatitis B vaccine within 30 days of birth had a 1,135% higher risk of autism compared to infants who either did not get the hepatitis B vaccine at all or received it after 30 days of age. “At that point, they knew what caused the autism epidemic,” Kennedy told Rogan, because “that’s a relative risk of 11.35, and a relative risk of 2 is proof of causation.”
As panic spread through the industry, the CDC put together this secret meeting at a retreat center in Georgia. It was intentionally held outside the CDC campus to circumvent FOIA laws. The meeting included representatives from all the major vaccine companies, regulatory agencies that administer vaccines, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Health and Human Services Department and leading academic institutions that conduct clinical trials.
The first day was spent discussing the reality of the problem, and the second day was spent discussing how to hide it. While the meeting was held in secret, someone did record it and, in 2005, Kennedy obtained a copy of it. You can read the transcript on the Children’s Health Defense website.
Early on in that 286-page transcript, we find the following admission by Walter Orenstein, then-director of the National Immunization Program at the CDC:4
“Initial concerns were raised last summer that mercury, as methyl mercury in vaccines, might exceed safe levels … Analysis to date raise some concerns of a possible dose-response effect of increasing levels of methyl mercury in vaccines and certain neurologic diagnoses.”
What happened to this safety signal? As explained by Kennedy, it was intentionally “vanished” by reworking the study four times, using statistical tricks.5 After the fourth iteration, the signal linking thimerosal with autism and a half dozen other neuro developmental disorders were no longer detectable.
The CDC published that final version and announced thimerosal had been investigated and found to be safe. And when investigators asked to see the raw data, the CDC claimed the data had been “lost,” so no one was ever able to verify the results. The fabrication stuck and has been peddled ever since.
We Live in a Toxic Soup
Kennedy stresses that vaccines are not the only factor in the epidemics of chronic disease and autism in children. There are many other factors as well. Children are exposed to an enormous amount of toxins from many different sources, including electromagnetic fields (EMF) and wireless radiation.
Kennedy is currently representing people who blame their brain tumors on cellphone radiation, and “we have the science,” he says. “Tens of thousands of studies show the dangers of Wi-Fi radiation.”
Aside from cancer, cellphone radiation degrades your mitochondria and makes your blood-brain barrier more permeable, Kennedy says, allowing all the other toxins in your system to flood in. So, this too, could play a significant role in the neurological dysfunction we now see in so many children. Kennedy also discusses the history behind and toxic influence of glyphosate, especially on your gut. (Incidentally, gut dysfunction is also a hallmark in autism.)
This is an interesting part of the interview as when Kennedy first mentions EMF, Rogan doubts it is true and doesn’t believe him. After Kennedy’s explanation you see Rogan morph in real time to a believer in EMF dangers and even ask his assistant Jamie to look into getting rid of the Wi-Fi.
Rogan Invites Dr. Hotez to Debate RFK
Yesterday, I published an article reviewing the online debate that erupted after this interview, when Dr. Peter Hotez took to Twitter, slamming Spotify for not clamping down on Rogan’s “vaccine misinformation.”6 Never mind the fact that Hotez, in April 2020, was allowed to argue his own irrational vaccine stance on Rogan’s show.7
Rogan replied to Hotez’s tweet, saying, “Peter, if you claim what RFK Jr. is saying is ‘misinformation,’ I am offering you $100,000.00 to the charity of your choice if you’re willing to debate him on my show with no time limit.” Others further sweetened Rogan’s offer by adding their own donations and, by 9 a.m. EST on June 18, the pot had reached $1.52 million.
Hotez refused, albeit indirectly. Instead of giving Rogan a direct answer, he went on the MSNBC show “Rising Reacts” and said he wasn’t willing to participate in an event that would get turned into “The Jerry Springer Show” by having Kennedy there.
Once you’ve listened to this interview, you can probably understand why no one is willing to engage in a public debate with Kennedy on this issue, particularly if you also heard Rogan’s interview8 with Hotez and compare the two. Kennedy has the data to back his claims and they have none.
On a side note, I find it curious that after Rogan took a beating in the press for discussing how he used ivermectin to treat a bout of COVID-19, he really hasn’t had any hard-hitting health-related truth tellers on his show — until Kennedy.
In my view, Spotify is hardly a free speech platform, so maybe that shouldn’t be that surprising. Spotify killed our account due to a discussion about EMF, and they didn’t just take that episode down. They removed all of my content.
Rogan has an exclusive contract with Spotify that grants him more freedom than most others, but I doubt he has completely free reign. That said, I’m glad he brought Kennedy on, and allowed him to talk uninterrupted.