Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received a blistering fact-check from a medical expert on Wednesday, relating to a claim he made during an interview last year with Bill Maher that slipped under the radar.
A clip of the claim, made during Kennedy's independent bid for the presidency, was recirculated by the X account Joe Rogan Podcast News.
"If you look at the studies that were done of the Pfizer vaccine ... the people who got the vaccine had a 23 percent higher death rate from all causes at the end of that study," said Kennedy.
That isn't true, said Texas Medical Center professor Peter Hotez, who has frequently gone after Kennedy's false vaccine claims and has been subject to threats and harassment over his defense of medical science.
"This is nonsense, the Covid death rates globally = a mirror image of where people weren’t getting vaccinated," wrote Hotez, who proceeded to provide graphs showing the actual data.
"Here’s a bubble map of the unvaccinated world in 2021, where North America, Europe, many Latin American countries received the Pfizer vaccine, whereas the African and South Asian countries didn’t have access (eventually our group helped fill in for India and Indonesia but not until early 2022)" wrote Hotez. "And here are the death rates according to the GBD 2021 of the @IHME_UW it’s not even close: no vaccine access, awful death rates."
"Covid vaccines including Pfizer and others, such as our low-cost patent free version for India and Indonesia saved at least 20 million lives during the pandemic, [and] 3.2 million American lives were saved by Covid immunizations," Hotez said. "Remember as I always say: the antivaccine activists don’t care about you, they don’t care about your family. They have another agenda."
