Days after the death of baseball legend Hank Aaron in January 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on social media to seemingly suggest — without evidence — that his passing could be connected to the COVID-19 vaccine.
Kennedy, the nephew of the former president, has been a major figure in the anti-vaccine movement for more than a decade.
And like many vaccine skeptics, he latched on to Aaron’s death at a time when public health officials were working overtime to get as many Americans — especially older Americans — to take the coronavirus shot.
“Hank Aaron’s tragic death is part of a wave of suspicious deaths among elderly closely following administration of COVID vaccines,” Kennedy tweeted.
Aaron died in his sleep a little over two weeks after he and other prominent civil rights figures publicly received the COVID vaccine to encourage other Black Americans to do the same. Medical examiners said there was nothing to suggest he had an allergic or anaphylactic reaction related to the vaccine.
Facing public criticism, Kennedy would later write that he “never said that the Moderna shot caused Aaron’s death.”
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