RFK Jr. is courting Black voters, a group he once targeted with vaccine disinformation

NEW YORK — Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. held a roundtable campaign event with Black leaders Sunday covering a wide range of issues from police reform to the Israel-Hamas war. But one topic that wasn’t broached was his history of spreading vaccine disinformation to the Black community.

In 2021, he produced a film called “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid” which used the real history of medical racism in the United States to peddle conspiracy theories that Covid vaccines were an effort to harm Black communities.

The documentary-style film features Kennedy, as well as Tony Muhammad, a minister of the Nation of Islam who has claimed that vaccines are “genetically modified” to harm Black children. Kevin Jenkins, CEO of the Urban Global Health Alliance, a New Jersey nonprofit group, who claimed that vaccine campaigns were a plot to “wipe out” Black people, is also in the film.

The film was released in the spring of 2021, just as Covid vaccines were becoming commonly available in the U.S. The pandemic took a staggering toll on human life, disproportionately impacting Black communities.

Asked by NBC News on Sunday if he regretted spreading vaccine skepticism to the African American community while the Covid shots were first being rolled out, after the issue did not come up at his campaign event, Kennedy responded “No.”

Once a vocal anti-vaccine activist, Kennedy has been more subdued on the topic during his 2024 campaign. Pressed if he believes that vaccinating children leads to autism, Kennedy responded tersely, “What I believe is irrelevant.”

“A mountain of scientific study links autism to early vaccination with certain vaccines,” he said, without basis.

While there has been an increase in the