New Anti-vaccine Documentary on Racism in Healthcare Is Full of Harmful Falsehoods
Mar 18, 2021

Medical Racism: The New Apartheid is a new documentary being promoted by anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Rather than shed light on the very real racism in healthcare, it uses falsehoods and misrepresentations to villainize vaccines.

Systemic racism in medicine and public health is a serious and urgent issue — and one we’ve talked about before. But this latest documentary is part of a larger trend to target marginalized communities with misinformation about vaccines. At its heart, the film exploits and misleads, falsely tying modern vaccines to historical atrocities like the Tuskegee study, in order to discourage Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) from getting vaccinated.

Father holding his baby

What it fails to acknowledge is how a drop in vaccination rates will deepen health disparities in communities of color — communities hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We desperately need to fix racism in healthcare. Scaring people away from vaccines isn’t how we get there.

Vaxopedia, a website by pediatrician Dr. Vincent Ianelli with information about vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases, recently broke down the falsehoods in RFK Jr.’s latest project:

“If you have been following what Robert F. Kennedy, Jr has been up to lately, you can probably predict that most of his new film, Medical Racism: The New Apartheid, isn’t actually about medical racism…it is just more misinformation and propaganda from Kennedy, mostly about vaccines.” For more information about the claims in this film, read Vaxopedia’s full review here


Related Posts

The Public Health Emergency (PHE) declaration is ending on May 11, but COVID remains a threat. The PHE was first declared in 2020 in response to the spread of COVID-19 to allow for special...

This post was originally published with MediaPlanet in the FutureOfPersonalHealth.com Winter Wellness Issue, and was written by Vaccinate Your Family.  Are you more likely to get sick during the winter? Yep – more viruses...


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.