One of America’s least credible public figures, celebrity environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wades into the mercury in vaccines/autism controversy (Dec. 29, 2003, earlier posts) with a “special investigation” for Salon and Rolling Stone rehearsing the contentions of anti-thimerosal activists (“Deadly Immunity”, Jun. 16). Orac at Respectful Insolence, who’s covered the controversy extensively, hits back hard here, here and here. Reactions from Salon’s readers are here, and the online magazine has already been obliged to post several corrections of Kennedy’s errors, including the following remarkably embarrassing one:
The article also misstated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms — an amount 40 percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA’s limit for daily exposure to methylmercury.
More: Skeptico (Jun. 20) challenges RFK Jr.’s account of a supposedly hush-hush meeting of vaccine scientists held outside Atlanta (via Adler, the Corner).
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