Salon deletes autism article by RFK, Jr.

Yesterday also brought word that the widely-read online journal Salon was deleting a 2005 story by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the purported — but actually non-existent — relationship between autism and childhood vaccination.

The son of the former U.S. Attorney General, Kennedy is a lawyer with an undergraduate degree in literature and history. In spite of his lack of training as a scientist, he has made a career of offering opinions on questions involving public health and the environment. This habit was bolstered in 1984, after he chose to serve his 1500-hour community service sentence for heroin possession by working for the radical environmental group, Riverkeeper.

Salon’s decision to omit the article follows the recent revelation that the original claim that there was a connection between autism and childhood vaccination resulted from a fraudulent criminal scheme perpetrated by British scientist Dr. Andrew Wakefield. Before making up his “research,” Dr. Wakefield, it is now known, was paid 400,000 pounds by lawyers suing the vaccine manufacturers.

ACSH’s Jody Manley says, “Because these articles tying autism to vaccines prevented children from getting shots they needed, they were literally lethal.”

Salon’s decision to delete the story was highly unusual, and we congratulate the publication. We wonder, however, why it took them so long. ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan says that ACSH is proud that ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross and ACSH intern Aubrey Noelle Stimola officially responded at the time of Kennedy’s article to the deadly nonsense he had written.