Impostor CDC Site Hosted by Nonprofit Once Led by RFK Jr. Taken Down

An impostor CDC vaccine safety site that was “hosted by a nonprofit once led by [HHS] Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been taken down.” CIDRAP has the news.

The faked site was nearly identical to the official CDC vaccine safety site “but cited misinformation about vaccines and autism.” The URL realcdc.org was “redirecting to the staging site chdstaging.org,” which was hosted by the antivaccine organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD). Kennedy led the organization until he launched his presidential bid in 2023. The site used “CDC logos, links to active CDC social media accounts, the same fonts, formats, and similar language, as well as purported parent testimonials about their child's negative experience with vaccines.”

The site was taken down on Saturday night at Kennedy’s direction after the New York Times asked about it. The CDC is planning a large study at Kennedy’s behest to “re-evaluate any link between vaccines and autism, a connection that Kennedy has publicly supported for years, despite a plethora of evidence to the contrary.” The study and the shadow site are all happening against a backdrop of an increasingly large measles outbreak “fueled by unvaccinated people and affecting mainly children.”