A DEMOCRAT CHALLENGER: President Joe Biden has an early challenger in his bid to continue to win a second term. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has entered the race, and he recently appeared in Hanover, N.H., to discuss vaccine mandates on college campuses.

HANOVER, N.H. — Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke to a packed banquet room of about 300 at Dartmouth College’s Hanover Inn on Wednesday, delivering a speech focused mostly on the topic of vaccine mandates on college campuses.

Currently, colleges are not urged by state or federal government to require COVID-19 vaccines to attend. However, some schools continue to mandate vaccines for students.

Kennedy has made a name for himself by critiquing the vaccine industry and its safety record. On Wednesday, the presidential candidate shared the story of how he got involved in vaccine safety issues.

He said it started about two decades ago when he decided to alert Americans in the Midwest about mercury pollution from nearby coal power plants, which he said could contaminate the fish that people eat. He said members of the public would approach him on the issue, asking him to look at mercury in some vaccines.

“Why did I listen to them? I listened to them because of a couple of things in my experience. … I knew that experts were often wrong. … There are always experts on both sides [of an issue],” he said citing his experiences as a lawyer.

Some allege mercury is still found in some shots today, listed as “thimerosal” on the package inserts. When Kennedy investigated the issue, he discovered that studies done on monkeys showed that thimerosal never actually leaves the body — however, he said it does leave the bloodstream because it deposits inside the brain and can cause inflammation.

“It passes the blood-brain barrier much easier than Methylmercury [the kind that can be found in fish],” he said. Kennedy added that its absence from the bloodstream led to claims by the vaccine industry that the ingredient was safely excreted from human bodies.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed into law a bill granting liability protections for vaccine manufacturers. Kennedy suggested that the president was reluctant to sign the bill, and even asked companies at the time, “Why don’t you just make the vaccines safe?”

Kennedy noted a wave of new vaccines hit the market in 1989, and that the date correlates with increased health problems now common today. He said allergies, ADHD, and autism were rare in his generation, but are highly common now — and he dismissed claims that the increased rates of these conditions could be attributed to more frequent testing.

A panel of legal and medical experts

Prior to Kennedy’s speech, a panel of legal and medical professionals discussed the topic of vaccine mandates on college campuses.

Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist from the United Kingdom, spoke via Zoom and talked about what it means when populations allow fear to cloud their judgments.

“What happens, when you have fear, is it inhibits your ability to engage in critical thinking and there’s still some of that,” he said. “… But also what it means from a population perspective, it means that government is able to have great control over the population.”

Other experts on the panel included Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Dr. Joel Wallskog, a co-founder of React19, which advocates for vaccine-injured people. Also speaking at the event were Todd Zywicki, a professor at Antonin Scalia Law School; Brook Jackson, a clinical trial expert and whistleblower; and Dr. Sandy Reider, a founding member of Physicians for Informed Consent.

Michael Bielawski is a reporter for True North. Send him news tips at bielawski82@yahoo.com and follow him on Twitter @TrueNorthMikeB.