RFK on COVID-19 and the Off-Label Coverups
This series is not a review of Kennedy’s 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci, but this chapter will be relying heavily on statements made by Kennedy in the book regarding chloroquine (CQ), hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), and ivermectin. Kennedy claims the medications would have been effective COVID-19 therapies. For the sake of transparency my citations are usually freely accessible, but here that will not be possible because the book offers the only exploration of Kennedy’s own references regarding potential COVID-19 treatments at a level of detail which he has not expressed in public comments. In order to understand Kennedy’s perspective, Chapter 1: Mismanaging a Pandemic may as well be required reading. That said, it is hard to ignore the monetary incentive Kennedy has for being coy in public while selling the “full story” in a book. It is also concerning that in an effort to appear more credible, the book directs the reader to an Updates and Revisions page hosted on Kennedy’s foundation Children’s Health Defense. 4 years after publication, the list sits empty.
There’s a federal law, the federal emergency use authorization statute, says that you cannot issue an emergency use authorization to a vaccine if there is an existing medication that has been approved for any purpose that is demonstrated effective against the target illness, so they had to destroy [the credibility of] ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and discredit it and they had to tell everybody it’s not effective, because if they had acknowledged that it’s effective in anybody, the whole $200 billion vaccine enterprise would have collapsed.
Kennedy on the Joe Rogan Experience #1999 June 27 2024 (2:01:56)
Kennedy uses the FDA’s guidance of the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) statute to allege a legalistic means for nefarious forces to conspire against the acceptance of HCQ and ivermectin, claiming that “if any FDA-approved drug like hydroxychloroquine (or ivermectin) proved effective against COVID, pharmaceutical companies would no longer be legally allowed to fast-track their billion-dollar vaccines to market under Emergency Use Authorization”. This strong statement makes for a convincing story, but does not line up with how the FDA uses the statute in practice. Evidenced by the issuance of multiple overlapping EUAs for COVID-19 therapies, from concurrent vaccine product EUAs (Moderna and Pfizer), to the prior issuance of an EUA to REGEN-COV for “the treatment of mild to moderate COVID-19 in adults and pediatric patients with positive results of direct SARSCoV-2 viral testing, and who are at high risk for progressing to severe COVID-19 and/or hospitalization” which remained active for years concurrent with the vaccine issuances. If any of Kennedy’s preferred therapies could have been proven effective, an EUA would not have been a barrier to vaccine development. When the vaccine became available, the EUA for it was justified because “There are no COVID-19 vaccines that are approved”, making no reference to any other therapies or EUAs that could have been active for HCQ and ivermectin. Additionally baked into Kennedy’s framing is an assumption that HCQ and ivermectin are as effective at reducing symptomatic COVID-19 and mortality as the vaccines are, which as we will see does not bear out in the evidence.
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I primarily want to discuss HCQ and ivermectin because those are the two main alternative COVID-19 therapies that Kennedy is still talking about these days. In order to engage with Kennedy and other proponents of the discussed treatments, this chapter will include a lot more history and look at a lot more studies than other chapters. If that’s not your thing, feel welcome to skip ahead. I am writing this out was as much for my own personal interest as anything else.
This article is part of a larger series about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
- Index: Does Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Tell the Truth?
- Previous Chapter: Vaccine Recommendations feat. Measles
- Next Chapter: Part 1: Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine
