Quote:Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made the nutso claim on Monday’s Tucker Carlson Today that Covid-19 vaccines have killed thousands and declared them deadlier than all other vaccines combined.

The anti-vax Kennedy, who claims he is not anti-vax, cited the CDC’s frequently misunderstood Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, (VAERS) to back up his claim. Tucker Carlson himself has touted numbers from VAERS when discussing “the apparent death rate from the coronavirus vaccines” on his show.

In May, Dr. Pradheep J. Shanker spoke with Mediate editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin, who asked the doctor whether a conclusion based on VAERS provides an accurate picture of adverse reactions to vaccines.

“It is not accurate,” he said. “VAERS was intended to cast a wide net to capture any possible or potential complication that even has the remotest possibility of being related to the vaccine. Any adverse event is considered reportable.”

“With hundreds of millions of doses, the likelihood of some percentage of those people dying (especially among the elderly) after vaccination is a certainty. Carlson did nothing to filter out which deaths were expected with or without the vaccine, and which deaths can be tied to the vaccine,” he said.

This is a criticism the current anti-vax crowd made against reporting of covid deaths when they were opposed to taking the pandemic seriously in the first place.

Throughout the pandemic, the people who opposed public measures have repeatedly remarked on complicating factors and comorbidities. Yet on Tucker’s show, he and Kennedy drew broad, inflammatory, alarmist conclusions without accounting for those same factors, or even seemingly indulging any skepticism or journalistic research whatsoever.

And despite that alarm at potential vaccine risks, with regard to covid risk RFK was rather more sanguine, in both the modern and archaic senses of the word.