Washington CNN —

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Democratic candidate for the presidency, went on the Jordan B. Peterson podcast on June 5 and told a wild and false story about me from 2005 that I want to tell you about.

RFK Jr. has made so many false and wild claims about any number of vital topics – most dangerously about childhood vaccines, per his own siblings – that my interaction with him 18 years ago is small potatoes. He told the story as “evidence” of TV news networks trying to censor the truth when it came to vaccines. In it, he mangles the facts and wildly misrepresents what actually happened.

The truth about it is instructive because of how untethered he is to facts.

Flash back to 2005. Kennedy was co-publishing a piece on Salon.com and Rolling Stone with his spurious since-disproven claims about autism and vaccines. (After amending the story with five significant corrections, Salon.com ultimately took it down. Rolling Stone, too, removed the piece but with less transparency.)

As Seth Mnookin wrote for Scientific American in 2017, “Kennedy made his name in the anti-vaccine movement in 2005, when he published a story alleging a massive conspiracy regarding thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that had been removed from all childhood vaccines except for some variations of the flu vaccine in 2001. In his piece, Kennedy completely ignored an Institute of Medicine immunization safety review on thimerosal published the previous year; he’s also ignored the nine studies...

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