Inside RFK Jr's $16 Million Anti-Vax Trojan Horse
Kennedy is using his charity to boost his presidential bid. Let's look at his finances.
Perusing the Internal Revenue Service’s charity database recently, I noticed something weird.
The listing for Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine pseudo-charity run by Robert F. Kenendy Jr, hadn’t submitted a full 990 form for the past two years.
A 990 is the disclosure report required for all charities reporting a substantial amount of donations. It details the compensation for the charity’s directors, and offers some top-line information about the charity’s expenses and revenues.
Instead, CHD submitted a postcard: A shorter disclosure that reports the charity’s address and attests that they have raised no more than $50,000 in the previous year.
That can’t be right, I thought. CHD is the global anti-vaccine organization. It had, over the course of the pandemic, set up a raft of state chapters, made beachheads in Canada, Europe and Africa, published several books, launched a full line-up of streaming showers, filed a litany of frivolous lawsuits against all levels of government, and now its chairman was running for president. What’s more, it is a tax-exempt organization, meaning donations are deductible.
In 2019, it raised nearly $3 million. What gives?
So I emailed CHD, asking why they hadn’t filed a full 990. After a few days of silence, I was CC’d on an email from lawyers for the organization’s Florida chapter: It turns out there had been an “inadvertent error.” The Florida chapter had accidentally submitted its return in place of the national organization. Fair enough.
I wrote back, asking for a copy of CHD’s 2021 return: The one they were supposed to have filed. After some back-and-forth, they finally sent it along.
The documents reveal an organization flush with cash, in the throes of financing a sustained disinformation blitz against the vaccines, science, and governments everywhere.
Kennedy is gearing up to take on Joe Biden in the Democratic Primary. Some polls put him as high as 20%. While his campaign is certain to be a batshit exercise in conspiracy theorizing, financed by deep-pocket bug-eyed types, Children’s Health Defense may be an unnervingly effective stalking horse for the Kennedy scion.
So let’s break down this tax return and see if we can learn anything about the coming craziness.
Founded in 2007 as the World Mercury Project, a marginal group peddling the thoroughly-debunked idea that mercury in common childhood vaccines caused autism, the organization found new zeal when Kennedy — son of Robert F. Kennedy — joined. With a famous face and a new name, the organization steadily grew. When the pandemic hit, its popularity and revenue exploded.
In 2020, Children’s Health Defense raised almost $7 million. In 2021, it drew in more than $16 million.
The organization finished each year comfortably in the black — it spent less than $5 million in 2020 and $9 million in 2021. Which means it has plenty of money in the bank as its chairman runs for president.
Through it all, Kennedy has sworn up-and-down: “I am not anti vaccine. I want safe vaccines with robust safety testing.”
But, as we’ll see, both Kennedy and his organization are religious anti-vaccine. And they are going to use the broader anti-vaccine movement — which is engaged, energized, and angry — to build the momentum for his presidential bid.
He won’t win, but he may do a lot of damage along the way.
$2.5 million: Daddy has to get paid
I don’t begrudge charities paying their staff a living wage.
But CHD’s employee compensation scale is quite wild. Kennedy, unsurprisingly, sits at the top of the heap: Collecting $500,000 per year in salary and benefits. (He is likely also receiving residuals from his books, and money from speaking engagements.) Their financials list five other directors and key full-time staff — who earn about $650,000 between them.
Brian Hooker, listed as the “chief science officer,” works just five hours a week, according to the tax form, and earns $80,000 a year from the charity. Hooker has been working the anti-vaccine beat for more than a decade. He authored a paper in Translational Neurodegeneration (one of my favorite journals) re-analyzing a 2004 study and claiming the measles vaccine caused autism in young Black men. The paper was retracted a month later, with a note from the journal that there “were undeclared competing interests on the part of the author which compromised the peer review process” in addition to “concerns about the validity of the methods and statistical analysis.” In stuffy scientific terms: The paper was bullshit and should have never been published.
Hooker, whose expertise is in chemical engineering and not medicine, has been a useful voice for CHD for years. He, sadly, believe his son’s autism was caused by a vaccine. (A federal claims court reviewed Hooker’s claim for compensation due the vaccines’ alleged damages and found the claims to be “quite wrong.”)
Unfortunately, it seems that childhood illness in the family is a common thread amongst many involved in CHD. Laura Bono, the organization’s executive director, similarly believes her son’s Landau-Kleffner Syndrom was caused by the vaccines. (Their claim of vaccine injury was similarly rejected for lack of credible evidence.)
Beyond that, there are a number of part-time directors and trustees who get paid very little, or who appear to be volunteers.
$4.2 million: Litigate, litigate, litigate
CHD’s biggest single expense is its aggressive legal strategy.
“Childrens Health Defense files civil and criminal legal actions in federal and state court to force transparency, scientific integrity, and policy change within industry and government regulatory agencies,” they write on their tax forums.
There is CHD’s sprawling action against Facebook, alleging the social media platform, in collusion with government and health bodies, of being “censors, and opponents of real science and open debate.”
The suit alleged CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook were guilty of infringing the constitution, false advertising, racketeering, and wire fraud. (CHD alleges that Facebook is pushing vaccines and 5G technology, and hiding their apparent dangers, to enrich themselves.)
There’s a sprawling action against the FDA, a lawsuit targeting Rutgers University, anti-trust cases against a consortium of media outlets, an unhinged lawsuit against the FCC over the safety of 5G, Freedom of Information cases against the National Institutes of Health, a suit against Elizabeth Warren for asking Amazon to stop recommending Kennedy’s books, and so on.
Almost all shot down at trial, in some cases on appeal, and in one case in application to the Supreme Court.
A few cases are ongoing, including one filed last month against Joe Biden, the surgeon general, Anthony Fauci, the Census Bureau, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the White House climate advisor, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the State Department, and a lot of other people.
In short: These legal eagles are absolute losers.
But, hey, at least some lawyers got paid. While Kennedy himself is a lawyer, and CHD has a general counsel, a staff attorney, and a legal affairs committee: They also paid out over $1 million last year in legal fees.
$3.6 million: The miseducation of RFK Jr.
While their quixotic legal ambitions may be the single biggest line item, CHD’s real impact is on their communications and lobbying.
And it’s here where CHD is really going to help Kennedy’s longshot presidential bid.
During the pandemic, there was a huge demand for content to feed the growing anti-vaccine movement. Existing anti-vaccine media outlets certainly had a big headstart.
CHD has a full roster of TV stations. It’s hard to overstate just how completely bonkers their rhetoric is.
On the CHD morning show today, there was a roundtable discussion about “digital enslavement” was a warning that the World Health Organization was going to use climate change and the 15 minute city to “they will formalize, instill, take over all national government, state government, local governments, to impose a 2030 agenda: The great reset.”
In May, CHD welcomed on Kate Shemirani, a British QAnon follower who has been investigated after suggesting that doctors and nurses should be hanged. In May, she told CHD that any doctors and nurses still performing vaccinations are “criminals” and any medical associations recommending vaccines are “terrorist organizations.”
On Kennedy’s podcast, he interviewed Sasha Latypova — who CHD describes as a “pharma whistleblower,” despite having no apparent medical training and only a tangential experience in the pharmaceutical industry — and nodded along as she said “ultimately they need to tell us it’s an explicit U.S. government policy to commit mass murder and genocide, or these were rogue actors.”
Through their media outlet, The Defender, and their streaming platform, CHD.TV, they are producing a mountain of content.
CHD does pretty well across the social media platforms where they haven’t been banned: 187,000 followers on Twitter, 60,000 on Telegram, 25,000 on Rumble, 16,000 on Gettr, and a smattering across other platforms.
CHD is one of the biggest creators on Sovren, a new blockchain-based streaming platform. Sovren was launched by Ben Swann, a prolific conspiracy theorist who had been tapped to host a Russian propaganda effort. (Indeed, Sovren features a number of Russia Today contributors.) Swann had partnered with CHD in their ludicrous lawsuit against a bunch of international media outlets, and is a frequent booster of Kennedy.
CHD is also tilting hard into book publishing. Through Skyhorse Publishing (which has a distribution deal with Simon & Schuster) CHD has published Kenendy’s The Real Anthony Fauci, which hit numerous best seller lists and which boasts 1 million copies sold. They also put out books from Robert Malone and Peter McCullough (Dispatch #56) which got play on Tucker Carlson and the Joe Rogan Experience; a book about the “epidemic of sudden deaths”; and Kennedy’s A Letter To Liberals, which will likely serve as a useful plank for his presidential bid. (My favorite one-star review: “This whole book needs to be in air quotes. This is not a book for serious people. It reads like baby's first conspiracy theory.”)
We can also look forward to reading The Real RFK Jr., an “epic biography” of the CHD chairman. While there is no disclosure that the book is being paid for by CHD, it is being published by Skyhorse and is getting plenty of airtime on CHD channels.
A lot of this outreach, though, is to the usual suspects.
One truly disgusting aspect of the CHD’s media strategy is to target the parents of children with autism.
There’s Age of Autism, a tax-exempt non-profit which notionally advocates for the (complicated) idea that environmental factors are the leading cause for autism but, in reality, just blames vaccines. Their website is covered in recommendations for CHD’s books, and is enthusiastically pumping Kennedy’s presidential bid.
And there’s also the The Autism File, The Autism Trust, and the Autism Media Channel. While the three, linked, organizations seem to be defunct now, they peddled the falsifiable idea that vaccines cause autism, and did it in such a way that pointed parents back to CHD.
Skyhorse also helps CHD publish books aimed at the parents of children with autism, with bold promises like How to End the Autism Epidemic. (Surprise: The solution is: Stop vaccinating.)
While it’s not easy to figure out exactly where that money went, CHD also reports $1.2 million in lobbying expenses. We know the organization works to run protests aimed at state legislatures and, where invited, to send witnesses for committee work. Luckily, it hasn’t been very effective thus far.
$175,000: Foreign aid
CHD paid out about $160,000 to its European chapters, and another $13,000 in “set-up expenses” in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Thus far, CHD’s overseas operations have been relatively limited. But it’s worth talking for a moment about who is driving CHD’s foreign operations.
Renate Holzeisen is one of the directors for CHD’s European entity. Holzeisen is an Italian activist who topped a regional list for Vita, an Italian political party that echoes many of CHD’s deranged grievances. The party is anti-5G, anti-Ukraine, She won 6% of the vote in her constituency, narrowly missing out on a seat. (The party earned about 200,000 votes nation-wide, but failed to win a seat in the lower chamber.)
One former director of the European corporation, Uwe Alschner, has spent the past two years working with a Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav to allege that the vaccine proponents are the literal continuation of the Nazi Party. At a rally last summer, she compared the vaccines to Zyklon B. Those comments were slammed by the Jewish Forum for Democracy and Against Antisemitism.
Senta Depuydt, a Swiss “independent journalist,” uses her Substack to translate some of the most unglued conspiracy theories out there — like Klaus Schwab’s family helped build the Nazi’s atomic bomb.
CHD has managed to attract a few bigger names. Andrew Bridgen, a member of the UK Parliament, joined CHD.TV not long after being expelled from the Conservative Party to suggest that the vaccine could be worst than the Holocaust: “Six million jews were murdered…various reports I’m reading now are thinking it could be 16 million who have already died because of the vaccine rollout,” Bridgen said.
If CHD manages to link up these disparate agitators and groups across the continent, it may yet become a considerable force in Europe.
It’s about to get even weirder
I think some folks who are unfamiliar with Kennedy’s work over the past few years were quick to assume that his primary campaign would be a ramshackle clown show.
But I think the last two years of CHD’s surprising success shows that Kennedy’s run is going to be a well-financed, slickly-produced clown show.
He has had no trouble getting primetime news slots. Tucker Carlson, Jack Dorsey, David Sacks, Jordan B. Peterson and Elon Musk have been big boosters. CHD is going to marshal its resources to point at Kennedy’s campaign, but in such a way that is unlikely to run afoul of America’s broken campaign finance laws.
We don’t yet have any campaign finance disclosures from Team Kennedy, but we have good reason to think that he’ll be able to mount a full campaign against the sitting president — especially if Republicans believe he could inflict some damage on Biden before a general election.
The real threat of Kennedy, however, is his ability to actually put a movement together. CHD has become the dominant anti-vaccine organization worldwide because it has managed to pair Kennedy’s clout and good name with the most militant and energized anti-vaccine influencers.
Kennedy’s inherited charisma means he can claim to not be anti-vaccine, even as his organization claims there is a worldwide vaccine genocide taking place. His professional-ish legal actions — often in the name of freedom of speech — means he stands as a shining example for the crew who equate a Facebook ban with state repression. For the shameless many in the alternative media who are happy playing along with Kennedy’s moderate persona, a man in search of truth who has been silenced by big pharma, he is a perfect interview subject.
Behind the scenes, Children’s Health Defense will be using its ample resources to try and create a grassroots groundswell behind Kenendy.
It might even work.
That’s it for this week.
If you’re keen to do some more reading and listening:
On Sunday I joined the CBC’s Sunday Edition to talk about the rise in hate and vitriol targeting the Queer community.
On Monday, for WIRED, I delved into 4chan’s shady moderation practises to show how the platform uses moderation as a tool to advance its far-right agenda.
On Thursday, in Foreign Policy, I broke down some of the misinformation and conspiracy theorizing cropping up around Canada’s wildfires.
Until next week!
One of my favourite parts about the Bug Eyed crowd is that they believe that organization X is able to accomplish their nefarious goal involving multiple organizations in multiple countries, but the Bug Eyed them selves can’t even complete basic administration tasks with out fairly major errors.
A person has only so much bandwidth to absorb all the things we need to worry about these days. Take your pick. This well-funded conspiracy theory organization makes me worry a lot. "Insurrection" makes me worry a lot. WTF does Kennedy want?