Infamous anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr removed from Instagram in Facebook crackdown

Instagram on Wednesday pulled down the account of Robert F Kennedy Jr for repeatedly making false claims about coronavirus and about the safety of Covid-19 vaccines.

"We removed this account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines," said a spokesperson for Facebook, which owns Instagram.

Mr Kennedy’s Facebook page, which has more than 300,000 followers, however, still remains active. Mr Kennedy, who is the son of later former US attorney general, senator and presidential candidate, Robert F Kennedy, has repeatedly spoken out against vaccines.

More recently, he had falsely linked the death of legendary baseball player, Hank Aaron, to the coronavirus vaccine shot.

A lifelong Democrat, Mr Kennedy also chairs the Children’s Health Defence, a non-profit, that baselessly ties chronic childhood conditions such as asthma, autism and diabetes to a number of factors including vaccines.

In an opinion piece published in the New York Times, his niece, Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, said, "I love my uncle. But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong."

Referring to a post where he questioned the efficacy and safety of the Covid-19 jabs, Ms Meltzer said, "His concern — that a Covid vaccine is potentially unsafe, and hasn’t been properly tested — is widespread, and dangerously wrong."

It was not the only time that Kennedy was chastised for his anti-vaccine activism. In May 2019, Mr Kennedy's sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, his brother Joseph P Kennedy II, and his niece, Maeve Kennedy McKean, wrote a scathing critic of him in Politico magazine for campaigning against immunisation even as the country saw a resurgence of measles, that was declared to have been eliminated in the US in 2000.

"He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines," they said.

Read More

EXPLAINER: What the WHO coronavirus experts learned in Wuhan

Anti-vaccine protesters temporarily shut down major coronavirus vaccine site

World is on course for a coronavirus vaccine ‘apartheid’, experts warn