RFK Jr.’s Success Is Forcing the Media to Acknowledge COVID Vaccine Skeptics on the Left

Among President Biden’s challengers for the presidential nomination in the Democratic primary, one in particular has the President’s team sweating: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has emerged with 20 percent support since announcing his campaign for president. But RFK Jr.’s auspicious rise is not due to anything he personally believes or any unique charisma; he’s most well known for being an anti-vaxxer long before the COVID vaccine even existed. Instead, his success is a direct reflection of the authoritarian approach the President and his party took to managing COVID—and how poorly that has gone over within the President’s own party.

RFK Jr.’s success is forcing the media to learn a lesson it has done its best to stave off: that it wasn’t just wacko conservatives who opposed the silencing of skepticism around everything that had to do with the pandemic, but many on the Left, too. Kennedy’s reputation as someone open to questioning orthodoxy around vaccines and his more general adversarial approach to Big Pharma is being seen by many Democrats as not only not a turn-off, but something we can use a lot more of these days.