Did Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Really Tell Me I Gave My Son Cancer?
April 10, 2025 at 09:32PMWeeks before Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Ryan D’Agostino revisited an exchange he’d had with Kennedy years earlier. D’Agostino had been reporting on “the views of perhaps America’s foremost vaccine skeptic as the development of a Covid-19 vaccine was progressing quickly.” He mentioned to Kennedy that his son, at six years old, had been diagnosed with leukemia; Kennedy replied that, since the advent of the vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella, “there’s been an explosion in leukemia in children.” After the call, D’Agostino does the work that, he notes, most parents aren’t able to do, interviewing experts in infectious diseases and public health before calling Kennedy back to confront him. Their exchange, and what D’Agostino takes from it, has stayed with me since, surfacing with each new headline about the health secretary.
“The story on XMRV is that scientists inadvertently joined two sequences from a mouse cell line that looked like a virus, and they called it XMRV—murine retrovirus [MRV], and then the X just means that it’s in a different place than you’d expect to find it. X-murine retrovirus,” Dr. Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia’s School of Public Health, told me. Lipkin has done groundbreaking work in virology dating back to the 1980s AIDS epidemic, and in 1999 he identified West Nile virus as the cause of encephalitis in North Africa, something Bobby Kennedy Jr. didn’t do. “But this was all debunked,” he told me. “Eventually a famous retrovirologist who works at the National Cancer Institute identified the origins of this laboratory accident…It had nothing to do with anything. They were just completely bogus.”
Working with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Lipkin then investigated a supposed second claim by scientists who said they’d found the virus, and Lipkin confirmed that “it was all junk.” He learned that the first group of scientists had attempted to replicate their findings and failed to do so, “which means it was never there in the first place.”
In other words, XMRV had never been linked to human illness of any kind (let alone leukemia). Kennedy had mangled a malign belief and told it to me as if it were irrefutably proven. It was not only dangerously wrong—it was perhaps the cruelest thing anyone had ever said to me.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/10/did-robert-f-kennedy-jr-really-tell-me-i-gave-my-son-cancer/
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