Chilly afternoon January of this year, Kennedy I took the microphone In front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, perhaps in front of a crowd of hundreds, “we don’t obey”, “resist against medical tyranny” (with a swastika), “land of freedom you give me Thousands of people participated in the march earlier in the day, including members of the far-right tyrannical group Proud Boys, helmeted firefighters, and even a few monks in New England. Was included. They were gathering for a rally billed as “Defeating Mandates: Returning to America.” The speakers included many of the country’s most famous vaccine skeptics. Vaccine researcher Robert Malone. Activist Dell Big Tree. And of course, Kennedy.
“What we see today is what I call turnkey totalitarianism,” he told the audience. “They are introducing all these technical mechanisms for control that we have never seen before,” he continued. “Even Hitler’s Germany was able to cross the Alps into Switzerland. Like Anne Frank, she could hide in the attic.” But no longer he suggested: “A mechanism has been introduced to prevent any of us from running and hiding.”
The reaction was quick, including his wife, actress Cheryl Hines. On Twitter She called Anne Frank’s reference is “blamed and insensitive.” But the anger at the reference to Frank believed in a deeper problem. How influential Kennedy is And other anti-vaccine movement numbers are. Kennedy is the president of an organization named Children’s Health Defense. He applied for permission to host the Washington Rally. Nonprofits say they aim to “end the epidemic of childhood health by actively working to eliminate harmful exposures,” an online article that casts doubt on the safety of vaccines. It is sending out in large quantities. And it expanded aggressively during the pandemic. According to tracking company Similarweb, in January 2020, the Children’s Health Defense website received slightly less than 84,000 monthly visits from the United States. As of March of this year, the number reached more than 1.4 million monthly visits and traffic increased 17-fold. (According to the Group’s tax filings, revenue from donations and funding events has already surged before the pandemic, rising from just under $ 1.1 million in 2018 to $ 6.8 million in 2020.)
On one measure, the reach of CHD sometimes exceeds the reach of well-meaning news outlets.Indiana University Social Media Observatory, Its CoVaxxy project We tracked how vaccine-related content was shared on Twitter and found vaccine-related posts in the organization. For example, thousands of people may have died from vaccination, or falsely claim that the risk of a Covid-19 booster outweighs the benefits. — Often more widely shared than vaccine-related items on CNN, NPR, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Within a few weeks, Children’s Health Defense vaccine-related content was more widely shared than content from The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Kennedy, who did not answer the questions posed through the publisher, embodies the apparent contradiction of the anti-vaccine movement, which presents a particularly difficult task for the general public. He has an important job as an environmental lawyer, and while other members of his family have publicly criticized his anti-vaccine crusades, he is still one of the country’s most famous democratic politicians. I have one person’s name. He brings some trust to his cause. Many other people who routinely question the safety and usefulness of vaccines have qualifications that seem impressive. They include wakefields. Malone, a researcher who claims to have invented the mRNA vaccine (35 years ago, he and several colleagues published important papers in this area, but other scientists did not “invent” the technique. Worked on); Judy Mikovits, a researcher whose 2009 paper linking chronic fatigue syndrome and viral infections was withdrawn from the journal Science. Dismissed from work as a research director at the Whitmore Peterson Institute for Neuroimmunology in Reno, Nevada, Mikowitz publishes a best-selling book on possible misconduct in science entitled “The Epidemic of Corruption.” did.
Many experts have told me that a good way to understand what motivates many players in the anti-vaccine movement is through the lens of profit. There are several levels to make money. The first is a social media company. Historically, some argue that the algorithms that drive the platform have provided more and more of what users respond to, whether it is true or not. “It’s not a sophisticated technique,” says Professor Hany Farid of the University of California, Berkeley, who is studying false information on social media. “We found it to be a primitive jerk, and the most ridiculous, we click on it.”
They claim that Facebook and other social media companies are taking steps to counter the surge in vaccine-related misinformation on their sites. Facebook now To tell Helping to “maintain the health and safety of people” by providing reliable information about vaccines. However, Farid and others suspect that Facebook, in particular, will not completely remove such material. Because the content that attracts attention is of great value in the economy of interest. “The business model, it really is the core poison here,” says Farid. He believes that the partial solution is a change in regulatory law that will allow individuals to hold social media companies legally liable for harm related to the content they advertise through proceedings. .. “Then I’m making money.” Facebook parent company Meta spokesman Aaron Simpson is making money from advertising, so the company has “every incentive” to wipe out false information from the platform. I said in an email that I was there. Their ads will appear next to incorrect information.Still, in the past, prominent anti-vaccine activists have themselves Was an advertiser On facebook.
