Kennedy Said He Was Done With Children’s Health Defense; His Wife Headlined Its Annual Conference
Actress Cheryl Hines spoke at the anti-vax star-studded affair this weekend.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy says he cut ties with Children’s Health Defense, but his wife was a guest of honor at his former anti-vaccine advocacy group’s annual conference this weekend.
An October 17 email from the group boasted that actress Cheryl Hines was co-headlining the group’s “Champion Dinner” with actor Russell Brand, an anti-vax comedian and actor who, after being accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, found Jesus and a home within Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. The dinner, which took place on Saturday, was billed as a closed-door networking session, available only to those who either purchased the $397 (plus $12.17 in fees) general admission ticket with an add-on for the event—or those who hold a “Champion All-Access Pass.”
“The combination of these two firebrands promises an unforgettable evening of laughter and thought-provoking insights about their journey in the health freedom movement,” the email reads.
During his Senate confirmation hearings, when confronted by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders over anti-vax baby onesies sold by Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy insisted that he had cut ties with the lucrative anti-vax group.
“Senator, I have no power over that organization, I’m not part of it, I resigned from the board,” he said.
Throughout his tenure as HHS secretary, however, Children’s Health Defense has continued to promote Kennedy and his agenda, and defended him. As Important Context previously reported, the group ran interference for Kennedy after several children died in a measles outbreak in Texas this year. Children’s Health Defense also hosted a vaccine safety page containing misinformation that was made to look like the one from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was taken down after Kennedy called on the group to remove it.
The fact that the Children’s Health Defense conference featured Hines, who has previously used her relationship with Kennedy to hawk “MAHA” products, raises more questions about Kennedy’s relationship with the group.
The “Moment of Truth” conference, which ran Nov 7-9 in Austin, Texas, hosted a number of fringe-sounding panels with speaker lineups featuring of a who’s who of anti-vaxxers and other health conspiracists. For example, two panels—the reunion for the pseudodocumentary “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe” and another called “Breaking the Mainstream Media Measles Narrative”—featured disgraced researcher and fraudster Andrew Wakefield, progenitor of the debunked vaccine-autism connection.
The lineup also featured a panel focused on “The Enduring Nightmare of COVID mRNA Technology” and hosted anti-vaxxers like former cardiologist Peter McCullough, his frequent collaborator and computational biologist Jessica Rose, ivermectin-promoting physician Pierre Kory, osteopathic physician Sheri Tenpenny, and evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, who Important Context reported recently received an award last weekend from the Brownstone Institute along with National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya.
The agenda also featured talks from notable individuals in the MAHA movement, including one from the president of the MAHA Institute, a think tank created earlier this year to push for policies aligned with Kennedy’s anti-vax mission.
The talk “Bobby Kennedy, the CDC, and the Vaccine Industrial Complex” featured Dave Weldon, an anti-vax physician and former congressman who was unsuccessfully nominated to lead the CDC in Kennedy’s HHS. Kennedy ousted Weldon’s replacement, Susan Monarez, not long after her confirmation for failure to comply with his agenda.
Tech entrepreneur-turned anti-vaxxer Steve Kirsch, founder of the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation, was slotted for a talk called “Safe & Effective? What the Czech Data Tells Us.” Kirsch previously used stolen patient data from New Zealand to falsely claim the vaccines had killed 10 million people worldwide.
Joseph Varon, head of the ivermectin-pushing, pro-MAHA Independent Medical Alliance (formerly the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance), was slated to talk about “The Great Medical Awakening: From Captured Science to Independent Medicine.”
Anti-vax Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who just announced he would be doing away with vaccine mandates in his state, despite rising vaccine-preventable pediatric disease cases nationally, was scheduled for a talk titled, “Sustaining the Promise of Freedom Through Action.”
Two Republican senators featured on the anti-vax group’s conference lineup: Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Both have been key allies of the anti-vaccine movement and promoted misinformation about COVID-19.
Notably, early announcements of the conference advertised the involvement of MAGA strategist Steve Bannon. Bannon’s podcast was a leading source of COVID misinformation at the height of the pandemic and he encouraged Kennedy’s aborted presidential campaign as a means of causing “chaos” and spread anti-vax sentiment. Bannon recently raised eyebrows for declaring that Republicans losing the midterms would result in his imprisonment along with others in the MAGA movement.
At one point, photos of Hines and Bannon were both featured on the Children’s Health Defense conference poster. Today, however, his picture and name are absent.
The big sponsor of the festivities was MAHA Action, the 501(c)(4) dark money group founded to promote Kennedy’s anti-vax agenda at HHS. Kirsch’s Vaccine Safety Research Foundation and the Independent Medical Alliance were Gold Sponsors while the Brownstone Institute was Silver.