Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore
BOSTON (AP) — Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched his longshot bid to challenge President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination next year.
Kennedy, a member of one of the country’s most famous political families, kicked off his campaign in Boston on Wednesday and likened his campaign to the American revolution.
“My mission over the next 18 months of this campaign and throughout my presidency will be to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country,” Kennedy said.
Self-help author Marianne Williamson is also running for the Democratic nomination. Biden has said he’s planning on running again but has not formally announced a campaign. He’s expected to have a glide path to the nomination, with much of the Democratic establishment behind him.
Kennedy, a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of his slain brother Robert F. Kennedy, was once known most as an environmental lawyer who worked on issues such as clean water. But over the past nearly two decades, he’s become one of the leading voices of the anti-vaccine movement. His work has been described by members of his own family and public health experts as misleading and dangerous.
Kennedy has repeatedly invoked Nazis and the Holocaust when talking about measures aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19, such as mask requirements and vaccine mandates. He has apologized for some of those comments, including when he suggested that people in 2022 were worse off than Anne Frank, the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding with her family in a secret annex in an Amsterdam house for two years.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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