OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
4:51 PM – Wednesday, January 22, 2025
Advancing American Freedom, an advocacy group founded by former Vice President Mike Pence, launched an advertising campaign on Wednesday to oppose President Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
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In addition to a mobile billboard that will move around Capitol Hill and the March for Life rally, an annual anti-abortion rally that will take place at America’s most visited national park, the National Mall, on Friday, the six-figure campaign also includes digital advertisements that will run in D.C. over the course of the next few weeks while Kennedy awaits his confirmation hearing.
The advertisements reportedly highlight Kennedy’s previous statements supporting access to abortion, information he disseminated about vaccines during a measles outbreak in American Samoa, and allegations that vaccines cause higher rates of autism in children.
Yet, according to the BBC, “Samoa’s low vaccination rates are in part due to the deaths in 2018 of two children given a wrongly-mixed vaccine.”
“In July 2018, two infants died in Samoa after receiving vaccinations against measles, mumps and rubella, raising local fears over the vaccine itself,” the outlet continued.
According to The Hill, thousands of physicians and public health officials have also signed a letter warning that Kennedy’s “unfounded, fringe beliefs could significantly undermine public health practices across the country and around the world.”
However, Kennedy isn’t the first public figure or institution to question the medical industry as a whole.
A 2023 study by Johns Hopkins Medicine stated that an estimated 795,000 Americans die or become permanently disabled every year due to diagnostic errors, highlighting a substantial portion of medical error-related deaths in the U.S.
So far, no Republican in the Senate has declared openly that they will not support his nomination. Kennedy can still be approved if he loses no more than three GOP votes, even if all Democrats vote against him. Additionally, although he has not yet been scheduled for a confirmation hearing, he has already spoken with hundreds of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Kennedy’s nomination has been opposed by Advancing American Freedom from the start. Last week, the organization wrote to U.S. senators in order to urge them to vote against him due to his prior abortion support when he was still a Democrat.
Nevertheless, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) posted a statement on December 17th, 2024, explaining how his sit down with Kennedy went smoothly. They mostly discussed the pharmaceutical industry and abortion, according to his posts on X.
“He pledged to reverse the Biden Admin’s Section 1557 rule and also said all of his deputies at HHS would be prolife. He told me he believes there are far too many abortions in the US and that we cannot be the moral leader of the free world with abortion rates so high,” Hawley continued.
Trump has stated during his campaign that although he is personally pro-life, he will leave the abortion decision up to the states. Trump has also promised not to ban abortion federally, which Democrats claimed the GOP president would enact if he was reelected.
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