Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Tuesday that he will head upward a panel on vaccine safety for Donald Trump.

The president-elect's transition team spokeswoman later on walked that back, saying that he is "exploring the possibility" of forming a panel on autism, only "no decisions have been fabricated."

Let's hope Trump drops any thought of a vaccine panel headed by Kennedy. For more than a decade, Kennedy has promoted anti-vaccine propaganda completely unconnected to reality. If Kennedy'due south console leads to even a small decline in vaccine rates across the country, it will result in the waste material of untold amounts of money and, in all likelihood, the preventable deaths of infants likewise young to be vaccinated.

That wasted money will largely bear upon public health departments, whose budgets are already strained. A 2010 written report in Pediatrics calculated the public sector expenses of containing a measles outbreak in which 11 children were infected at $124,517, an average of more than $10,000 per infection. That's not to say that families won't be affected every bit well: During that outbreak, 48 children too young to be vaccinated had to be quarantined at an average cost of $775 per family; medical costs for one infant who was infected were close to $15,000.

But those costs pale into comparison to the loss that will be felt past families who lose children to vaccine-preventable diseases, which typically strike when children are infected while still too immature to be vaccinated.

Take pertussis, more than commonly known as whooping cough. There have been several dramatic spikes in pertussis infections in the past decade, and in 2012 at that place were 48,277 reported cases in the US—the most since 1955. More 87 percent of all of the country's pertussis deaths from 2000 to 2014 were in infants younger than 3 months, which meant they were too young to accept gotten their start pertussis shot.

Kennedy fabricated 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 babyhood 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 funded or conducted past the Centers for Affliction Control and Prevention that take taken place since 2003.

I first wrote most Kennedy and his foray into the anti-vaccine movement in "The Panic Virus," my volume nearly the persistence of the myth that vaccines can crusade autism. Below is a lightly edited version of my chapter on Kennedy, titled "A Conspiracy of Dunces."

While Kennedy has been brazen in publicizing outright lies, he appears to exist less loquacious when faced with skeptical reporters. I attempted to contact Kennedy more twenty times over an eighteen-month period. At various points, I was told that he was because my interview asking, that he was on vacation, that he was dealing with a family unit crisis, that he wasn't feeling well, that he was backside in his emails, and that he was on the verge of calling me dorsum. (He never did.)

In the summer of 2005, Rolling Stone and Salon simultaneously published "Deadly Immunity," a four,700-word story on mercury in vaccines written by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy, the eldest son and namesake of the former attorney general and New York senator, described how he'd come to investigate the issue: "I was drawn into the controversy just reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I oft met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical." [Note: Shortly after "The Panic Virus" was published, Salon decided to pull the piece from its site.]

And then, Kennedy wrote, he began to look at the data these parents had collected. He pored over the transcript from the 2000 CDC-organized meeting outside Atlanta and spoke with members of SafeMinds and Generation Rescue, two groups notable for their virulent opposition to vaccines. He as well studied the work of the "only two scientists" who had managed to gain access to government data on the condom of vaccines: Dr. Marking Geier, a frequent paid witness in lawsuits alleging harm done by vaccines, and his son, David. (The Geiers would go along to develop a "protocol" for treating autism that involved injecting children with the drug that is used to chemically desexualize sexual activity offenders at a cost of up of $seventy,000 per year.)

It wasn't long before Kennedy became convinced that he'd stumbled upon "a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed." If, every bit he believed to be the case, "our public-health authorities knowingly immune the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their deportment arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine," he wrote.

Kennedy went on to quote SafeMinds' Mark Blaxill, whom he identified as the vice president of "a nonprofit organization concerned about the part of mercury in medicine." Blaxill defendant the CDC of "incompetence and gross negligence" and claimed that the damage done by vaccines was "bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you've ever seen."

In the commodity'due south terminal paragraph, Kennedy warned his readers of the scandal's likely furnishings on the time to come: "It's difficult to summate the damage to our country—and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases—if Tertiary Earth nations come up to believe that America's near heralded strange-help initiative is poisoning their children. It's not hard to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by American'due south enemies abroad." In fact, he wrote, he was certain that the failure of a generation of "scientists and researchers … to come clean on thimerosal will come dorsum horribly to haunt our country and the globe's poorest populations."

In order for what Kennedy was claiming to exist true, scientists and officials in governmental agencies, nonprofit organizations, and publicly held companies around the world would need to be function of a coordinated multi-decade scheme to prop up "the vaccine industry'due south lesser line" past masking the dangers of thimerosal.

In Kennedy's telling, the plotting had been going on since the Great Depression, but it had begun in renewed earnest five years earlier "at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center," a location that Kennedy said was chosen because it was "nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure consummate secrecy." (In reality, the location was chosen considering a series of previously scheduled conferences had booked upwardly all of the hotel rooms within 50 miles of Atlanta.)

Kennedy relied on the 286-page transcript of the Simpsonwood meeting to corroborate his allegations—and wherever the transcript diverged from the story he wanted to tell, he simply cut and pasted until things came out right. Again and again, he used participants' warnings about the reckless manipulation of scientific data by people with ulterior motives to practise the very matter they were afraid would happen.

The CDC's Robert Chen was one of the victims of Kennedy'south approach. His actual quote is as follows:

"Before we all go out, someone raised a very proficient procedure question that all of united states of america every bit a group needs to address, and that is this information of all the copies we accept received and are taking back home to your institutions, to what extent should people feel gratuitous to brand copies to distribute to others in their organization? We accept been privileged so far that given the sensitivity of data, nosotros have been able to manage to keep it out of, let'southward say, less responsible hands, yet the nature of kind of proliferation, and Xerox machines beingness what they are, the take chances of that changes. And so I guess equally a group peradventure, and Roger [Bernier, the acquaintance director of science at the National Immunization Program], you may have idea about that?"

In Kennedy's hands, it became this:

"Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that 'given the sensitivity of the data, we take been able to go along it out of the hands of, let'southward say, less responsible hands.'"

Even more than egregious was Kennedy'due south slicing and dicing of a lengthy statement past the World Health Organization'due south John Clements. In this instance, Kennedy transposed sentences and left out words. Here is what actually appeared in the transcript, with italics added to signal the sentences Kennedy used in his story:

"And I really want to risk offending anybody in the room past saying that perchance this written report should non have been done at all,because the outcome of it could have, to some extent, been predicted and nosotros have all reached this point now where we are left hanging . . . There is now the point at which the research results accept to be handled,and even if this committee decides that at that place is no association and that information gets out,the work has been done and through Liberty of Information that will be taken by others and will exist used in other means beyond the command of this group.And I am very concerned about that as I suspect it is already too tardily to practice anything regardless of whatsoever professional body and what they say. . . . My message would be that any other study—and I like the report that has simply been described here very much, I remember information technology makes a lot of sense—but it has to exist thought through. What are the potential outcomes and how volition you handle information technology? How will it be presented to a public and a media that is hungry for selecting the information they want to use for whatsoever means they have in store for them?"

In "Deadly Immunity," that was changed to read:

"Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared flatly that the report 'should non have been done at all' and warned that the results 'volition be taken by others and volition be used in ways beyond the control of this group. The research results accept to be handled.'"

To summit it all off, Kennedy married together two separate comments fabricated by the developmental biologist and pediatrician Robert Brent. In the starting time one, Brent said:

"Finally, the thing that concerns me the most, those who know me, I accept been a pin stick in the litigation community because of the nonsense of our litigious society. This volition exist a resource to our very decorated plaintiff attorneys in this country when this information becomes bachelor. They don't want valid information. At least that is my biased opinion. They desire business and this could potentially exist a lot of business."

Thirty-eight pages afterward, Brent addressed the topic of "junk scientists":

"If an allegation was made that a child's neurobehavioral findings were caused by thimerosal containing vaccines, you could readily find a junk scientist who would support the merits with 'a reasonable degree of certainty.' … So we are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits if they were initiated and I am concerned."

In a distortion that the editor of a high schoolhouse newspaper would take balked at, Kennedy took these two statements, switched their order, and ran them together:

"We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits," said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. DuPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. "This will exist a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country."

In the overall scheme of the piece, that blazon of quote massaging was considered so insignificant that it didn't warrant inclusion in the more than than five hundred words' worth of "notes," "clarifications," and "corrections" that were eventually appended to the piece. (The misuse of Chen'southward quote wasn't best-selling either.) Among the issues thatwere addressed were incorrect attributions, inaccuracies near which vaccines contained thimerosal at unlike points in time, a misrepresentation of the number of shots children had received in the 1980s, and a fake claim about a scientist having a patent on the measles vaccine.

None of this put a dent in Kennedy's conviction that his allegations were valid, and in the weeks and months to come, he kept on repeating many of the errors Rolling Rock and Salon had already publicly acknowledged were wrong.

Just four days later a correction confirmed that his story had misstated the levels of ethylmercury infants had received—information technology was actually "40 percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA's limit for daily exposure to methyl mercury"—Kennedy told MSNBC'due south Joe Scarborough, "Nosotros are injecting our children with 400 times the amount of mercury that FDA or EPA considers rubber." Kennedy as well said on-air that children were being given 24 vaccines and that each one of them had "this thimerosal, this mercury in them."

Those statements were not even remotely truthful: In 2005, the CDC recommended that children under 12 years erstwhile receive a total of 8 vaccines that protected against a dozen different diseases. Only 3 of those vaccines had ever used thimerosal as a preservative, and all had been thimerosal-free since 2001.

That Scarborough didn't ask Kennedy to produce testify supporting his accusations is not surprising: Scarborough had long had a hunch that vaccines were to blame for his teenage son'south "slight grade of autism called Asperger's." Kennedy'south inquiry, it seemed, had confirmed his suspicions once and for all. "There's no doubt in my heed," Scarborough said, "and perchance it's two years from at present, mayhap it'due south v years from at present, maybe it's ten years from now—we are going to find out thimerosal causes, in my stance, autism."

Republished with permission from STAT. This article originally appeared on January 10, 2017