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In an appearance last week on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laid out the case for thorough, scientifically sound safety testing of vaccines and greater transparency on the part of agencies responsible for approving and recommending the vaccines.

The show began trending on Twitter hours after the broadcast and continued driving heavy traffic for days afterward.

Kennedy, founder and chairman on leave from Children’s Health Defense (CHD), devoted most of the three-hour interview with Rogan to explaining why, after decades of successfully litigating cases against environmental polluters, he was compelled to take on Big Pharma, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — initially, over the issue of mercury in vaccines.

It all started when a group of persistent women “scolded” him into reading the science on mercury in vaccines, and its impact on children’s neurological health and development.

He did. And what he discovered was enough to convince him that despite efforts by public health authorities to dismiss the women as “crazy,” they weren’t.

“They didn’t look crazy to me and they were rational,” Kennedy said. “They weren’t excitable and they had done their research. And I was like, I should be listening to these people even if they’re wrong. Somebody needs to listen to them.”

At the outset of the interview, Rogan admitted he previously dismissed Kennedy as a “fringy thinking, almost conspiracy theorist-type person,” because Rogan had bought into the narrative that vaccines were one of the “most important medical advancements in human history, saved countless lives, protected children.”

That was before he did his own homework — including reading Kennedy’s bestseller, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”

After reading the book, which contains more than 2,200 citations, Rogan said, he wondered if it was “possible this guy’s telling the truth? Is this possible that everyone that I know that had these strong opinions of you, that most of them, at least, were like me — they had formed these opinions through a glance at a headline, someone talking about you on a television show?”

Rogan said it wasn’t until the pandemic that he first started questioning the official narrative on vaccines, especially COVID-19 vaccines, and related public policies and narratives.

Rogan acknowledged the mainstream media’s boycott of Kennedy and his views and proceeded to allow Kennedy to speak, uninterrupted, on the topic.

Throughout the interview, Kennedy shared highlights from his decades of research into vaccine injuries and public health authorities’ suppression of any science, no matter how sound, suggesting vaccines cause harm.

The interview prompted Rogan to challenge Dr. Peter Hotez to debate Kennedy. Rogan pledged to donate $100,000 to a charity of Hotez’s choice if he would appear on Rogan’s podcast with Kennedy.

The challenge triggered an avalanche of activity on Twitter, as others offered to up the ante — which at press time, had reached $2.62 million.

In addition to sharing his extensive knowledge of vaccine studies and statistics, Kennedy touched on other issues relevant to CHD’s mission, including his role in lawsuits against Monsanto over glyphosate and Roundup weedkiller, and the failure of public health agencies to endorse ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19.

Toward the end of the interview, Kennedy became emotional when Rogan asked about the personal toll of enduring years and years of personal attacks for his stance on vaccines.

Kennedy said:

“It’s frustrating, but I mean, I listen, I look at these … children who, you know, were perfectly healthy kids who exceeded all their milestones. And then they lost everything when they were 2 years old. And a lot of these kids are so severely affected.

“They’ll never … hold a job. They’ll never pay taxes. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never throw a baseball. They’ll never go out on a date with a girl or a boy. And they’ll never serve in the military … their lives are so constricted and the parents’ lives are also shattered.

“A lot of these parents, for most of them, because the children have … severe anger and violence, and they have these tactile sensitivities and light sensitivities and don’t like strangers … these parents can’t go out, they can’t get a babysitter to take care of that child.

“And the parents just stop going out on dates. A lot of them give up their jobs. They, almost all of them, their careers are … really debilitated.

“And I see them going through that. And, you know, anything that I go through is like nothing, nothing. So I don’t … spend any time thinking of myself. I just don’t get frustrated because all I have to do is think, I’m here for those parents.

“And, you know, I’m lucky that … I don’t have to fight that battle because I don’t know if I could take it.”

Watch the entire interview here:

 

Listen on Spotify here.

Read the transcript here.

The Defender on occasion posts content related to Children’s Health Defense’s nonprofit mission that features Mr. Kennedy’s views on the issues CHD and The Defender regularly cover. In keeping with Federal Election Commission rules, this content does not represent an endorsement of Mr. Kennedy, who is on leave from CHD and is seeking the Democratic nomination for president of the U.S.