Robert De Niro and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are looking for proof that vaccines are safe, despite overwhelming evidence that vaccines are safe.
The unlikely duo teamed up to offer $100,000 to anyone who can provide proof.
“On one hand, the government is telling pregnant women which mercury-laced fish to avoid so that they don’t harm their fetuses, and on the other, the CDC supports injecting mercury-containing vaccines into pregnant women, infants and children,” Kennedy said at a joint press conference Wednesday.
“This defies all logic and common sense.”
De Niro, whose son has autism, and Kennedy specifically called out the use of thimerosal, which contains mercury.
An FDA study in 1999 found that thimerosal used as a vaccine preservative posed no harm except for hypersensitivity.
Despite that, the FDA phased the preservative out of vaccines for children and hasn’t been used since 2001, according to the Center for Disease Control.
The CDC also provided research that shows no link between thimerosal and autism.
De Niro and Kennedy apparently don’t find that satisfactory and are offering a large cash reward, through Kennedy’s World Mercury Project, for anyone “who can find a peer-reviewed scientific study demonstrating that thimerosal is safe in the amounts contained in vaccines currently being administered to American children and pregnant women.”
Kennedy, the son of the late Robert Kennedy and the nephew of the late John F. Kennedy, has long warned of the dangers of vaccines.
In 2005, he published an article titled “Deadly Immunity” alleging that thimerosal causes mercury poisoning and autism.
Salon retracted the article, which also ran in Rolling Stone magazine, in 2011 because “continued revelations of the flaws and even fraud tainting the science behind the connection make taking down the story the right thing to do,” editor Joan Walsh said.
In 2016, De Niro pulled an anti-vaccine documentary from the Tribeca Film Festival, which he co-founded, after controversy, despite initially defending it and implying that he’d requested the movie be screened.
Kennedy also said recently that President Trump still wants him to chair a commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity, which was proposed in early January when he met with the then-President Elect at Trump Tower.
He’s met with White House officials “many times” and has been “trading documents about what the commission would look like,” he told Politico.
