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This article is from 2019 after the Informed Choice Iowa Conference.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was the special keynote speaker at the November 16 Empowered to Action 2019 Conference hosted by Informed Choice Iowa. Kennedy started by telling the audience how he got involved in the cause.
An environmental attorney and advocate for over 30 years, Kennedy was knowledgeable regarding neurological injury following exposure to mercury. As he toured the country speaking about the threats to health posed by mercury exposure in 2005, a growing number of parents approached him to advise that he should be looking at the mercury content in childhood vaccines and a potential link to the rising number of autism diagnoses in the U.S. He started investigating the issue, studying the science, and asking questions of people with various federal health agencies.
“These guys at the CDC originally were telling me ‘well, there’s a good mercury and a bad mercury,'” Kennedy said. “I knew at that point, their argument was not with me, it was with the periodic table, because there’s no way that could happen.”
Kennedy said according to well-known vaccine proponent and rotavirus vaccine developer Paul Offit, who he spoke with by phone, ethyl mercury leaves the body so fast that it doesn’t have time to do damage. However, Kennedy said that he had read Thomas Burbacher’s monkey studies which confirmed that although ethyl mercury does clear the blood quickly, it goes directly into the brain, where it rapidly metabolizes into highly toxic inorganic mercury, and then lodges there, creating inflammation and brain damage.
Speaking of the vaccination program in the U.S., Kennedy noted, “They had mandated all these vaccines and nobody had done an analysis on metals. Nobody had been thinking about this. The reason they were thinking about it (then) was because they were seeing the beginning of the autism epidemic. They were all panicked.”
Kennedy then focused on the Hepatitis B vaccine in particular which the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices added to the recommended childhood schedule in 1991, to be given to children in three separate doses, the first vaccine in the series to be given on the day of birth. He referred to a study which compared outcomes of giving the Hepatitis B vaccine to infants in the first 30 days to infants who did not receive the vaccine during the first 30 days. The study found that those who did receive the vaccine had an 11.35 percent relative risk for autism. Causation is assumed if there is a risk great than two.
“This was 11.35,” Kennedy said. “Now, you can prove people with yellow fingers have a 500 percent greater chance of getting lung cancer, but that doesn’t mean yellow fingers cause lung cancer. The relative risk for smoking cigarettes a pack a day for 20 years of getting lung cancer is 10. So they knew at that moment, every one of them knew, that they were causing the autism epidemic. They knew it beyond any doubt.”
Kennedy said he has a gripe with doctors.
“I’m really mad at these doctors. I’m done letting it go,” he said. “They’re watching these children come in and they’re all sick and what is going on in their heads? What do you have to do? It’s like Upton Sinclair said, it’s hard to convince a man of a fact if the existence of that fact will diminish his salary.”
Regarding the much-debated link between vaccines and autism, Kennedy said, “I know kids who have autism and who have severe autism. I see the suffering. These are kids who were leaders. They were exceeding all of their milestones.”
He added that many in the generation of children born after Congress gave pharmaceutical companies blanket immunity from being held liable for vaccine injuries and deaths will never write a poem, go out on a date, have a conversation with peers or use a toilet.
Kennedy said he has seen children living with a fate “worse than death” and that is what has compelled him to give up other causes to focus on this critical issue.
“This is the worst thing that’s ever happened in human history,” Kennedy said. “We are living in a science fiction nightmare.”
He stated that children are being turned into permanent pharmaceutical industry consumers. The four companies who manufacture vaccines in this country are making $50 billion every year selling vaccines but they’re also making $500 billion a year selling Adderall, EpiPen’s, Albuterol, inhalers, diabetes medicine, seizure medications, etc. Kennedy indicated that the demand for these drugs and products were created by the conditions created by vaccines.
It isn’t an idea that Kennedy is comfortable with.
“I don’t want to believe that people are deliberately making a generation of our children sick so that they can sell them drugs for life,” he said. “But the evidence of that is now overwhelming. We have traded a handful of harmless, mild, self-limiting childhood rashes, I’m not even going to call them diseases, they’re rashes that are all treatable and all curable. And we’re trading them for a tsunami of chronic diseases, none of which are curable. None of them. They’re all life sentences.”
When Kennedy was young, he worked with kids who had intellectual disabilities. He had heard about autism, but most Americans knew nothing about it until the 90s.
“We never saw kids like you’re seeing today with the biting, banging and the helmets,” he said. “In Special Olympics, we prided ourselves on being able to handle every child. For every child we could devise a competition, for even a kid who was essentially in a vegetative state. We’d put them on a platform and have them push a sand bag off the platform. We never saw kids like this. We couldn’t have handled them. We said we could handle any child, but we couldn’t have handled these kids. The violence, the screaming, all of these other problems — it didn’t exist. The CDC’s strategy is to tell us, it’s always been with us, we just didn’t notice it.”
Kennedy said that would be like missing a train wreck.
“If that is true, then where are all the people with autism in my generation?” he asked. “Where are the 65-year-old men walking around in the mall with football helmets on and diapers? Where are they? They’re not locked up some place. The answer is, they don’t exist.”
Another area of concern is the amount of trust people put into the pharmaceutical industry and our federal health agencies.
“Those are the same industries, the same companies that invented the opioid epidemic and everybody knows that,” Kennedy said. “Those companies didn’t do it alone, they had the FDA and the CDC’s anointment of those drugs.”
Kennedy said the four companies that make all 72 vaccines that are now mandated for children—Merck, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, and Sanofi—are all “serial felons.”
“Those four companies over the past 10 years have paid $35 billion in damages, penalties and fines for falsifying science, defrauding regulators, and lying to doctors,” he said. “Vioxx, which is Merck’s product—the biggest vaccine-maker in this country—marketed this as a headache drug when they knew it caused heart attacks. They knew it from their clinical data. They hid it.”
Had those individuals who took Vioxx known about the real risks, they likely never would have taken it, Kennedy pointed out.
“If they knew it caused heart attacks, they probably would’ve said ‘I’ll take an aspirin,'” he said. “Merck knew they were going to kill at least 100,000 people. They ended up killing 500,000 people in five years.”
Because of the 1986 Congressional Act removing liability to drug manufacturers for vaccine injuries and deaths, Merck and other vaccine makers have little motivation to ensure vaccines are safe.
Kennedy expressed concerns over censorship of information questioning vaccine safety and efficacy, and also over the reaction from the Democrats when it comes to vaccines.
“I am embarrassed of my Democratic Party,” he said. “I grew up in a party that was skeptical about accumulations of power, particularly big corporations.”
But according to Kennedy, the Democrats steadfastly refuse to consider that the pharmaceutical industry might be lying about vaccine safety.
Kennedy said he asks his Democrat friends, “What about ‘my body, my choice?’What about ‘isn’t it time to listen to women?’ What about the seventh amendment right to jury trials? The Constitution says if you get injured and the injury is valued greater than $25, no American should be deprived of the right of trial by jury That’s the Constitution,” Kennedy said. “How did we get to this place where we don’t have the right to a trial? These companies are running amuck and they own all of the institutions in our society that are supposed to stand between a greedy corporation and vulnerable little children who have been compromised.”
Congress, government agencies, and the media have all been corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry according to Kennedy. Despite this, he told those in attendance there is some good news with current cases.
He is currently representing Jennifer Robi, a 24-year-old who is suing Merck and Kaiser Permanente for injuries she sustained following receipt of Merck’s Gardasil vaccine.
“Jennifer Robi had the Gardasil shot when she was 15,” Kennedy said. “She’s been having seizures about every 40-90 seconds ever since. She’s in a wheelchair. She was at the top of her class, an extraordinary athlete, nothing but a golden pathway for her life.”
Kennedy stressed that everyone has the potential to wake up to the truth about the risks vaccine pose to the health of our nation’s children despite the power and influence of the pharmaceutical industry.
“All they need is something to wake them up and make them alert and to open their hearts to the truth,” he said. “And then they’ll start to see the truth all around them. They’ll start to see the children. None of us is going to stop, no matter what they do to us, no matter how they try to shut us up, we’re not going to shut up. We’re going to keep fighting.”
The Iowa Standard is a free online news source so we can reach as many people as possible. But we need to raise money! We are asking our readers to help support us as a news alternative entering 2020. If you could, please consider showing a sign of support to The Iowa Standard by making a contribution here. Or, you can use Venmo and make a contribution to @Iowa-Standard-2018.
You could also send a check to:
PO Box 112
Sioux Center, IA 51250
