Call to arms, misleading language launch Kansas chapter of RFK Jr.’s anti-vax organization

Jim Meehan, an Oklahoma physician, talks with an audience member Saturday after the launch event of the Kansas Chapter of Children’s Health Defense. (Sam Bailey/Kansas Reflector)

WICHITA — As a national anti-vaccine group launched in Kansas, keynote speakers hooked the audience with a call to arms and criticisms of transgender people and coddled children.

About 200 people attended a fundraiser Saturday in Wichita for the fledgling Kansas chapter of the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit established by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that spreads discredited information about vaccines. Professors of global health and public policy, interviewed for this story, cautioned that claims made at Saturday’s event pose a threat to children’s health, as vaccines are safe and effective.

Featured speakers Jim Meehan, an Oklahoma physician, and Lawrence Palevsky, a New York pediatrician, spoke broadly about their belief that vaccines are poison to humans and mothers know better than the doctors.

“We are dealing with a very serious threat and it is not a time of complacency,” Meehan said. “It’s a time to start growing your own food, invest in precious metals — brass and lead is what I mean by precious metals — because you may have to defend this freedom. You may have to defend this freedom.”

Sen. Mark Steffen, R-Hutchinson; Rep. Carrie Barth, R-Baldwin City; Rep. Michael Murphy, R-Sylvia; and Jacklynn Walters, a Shawnee City Council member, all attended the event.

Steffen, a retired physician and anesthesiologist, participated in a Q&A panel with Meehan, Palevsky and Gayln Perry, who formerly worked in sleep medicine at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri.

Sen. Mark Steffen, R-Hutchinson, speaks with attendees of the Kansas Children’s Health Defense launch event before he participates in a Q&A panel. (Sam Bailey/Kansas Reflector)

Events like this one, with a single perspective given from individuals with medical licenses, can have a confirmation bias effect and a “veneer of legitimacy,” said Richard Carpiano, professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside.

“You can think for people who are on the fence about this stuff, even if they’re going to go in and attend these things, this gives the opportunity to validate those sorts of misunderstandings that people might have,” Carpiano said.

Carpiano said organizations like this also use terms that misidentify the true agenda of their message. For example, “health freedom” is used instead of “anti-vaccine” and even the name “Children’s Health Defense” contradicts the group’s promotion of putting children at risk of disease.

Both Meehan and Palevsky repeatedly used terminology like “poison” and “toxins” when referring to vaccinations. Meehan also referred to individuals wearing masks as a symbol of “medical theater.”

Kelly Smith, a homeschooling mother from Newton, said she attended the event largely to hear Palevsky speak in person.

“One thing that I’ve heard Dr. Palevsky say is we talk about having a health care system, and he says, ‘There’s no health, there’s no care, there’s no system,’ ” Smith said. “And I just think there’s a lot of commonsense wisdom of, you know, how we can care for ourselves as human beings and for one another as human beings that can get lost in the shuffle, and in the money and stuff too.”

Kelly Smith, a homeschooling mother from Newton, talks to Phil Stubbs about vaccinations during the meet-and-greet portion of the fundraising event. (Sam Bailey/Kansas Reflector)

Vaccines routinely used in children have been tested and used in millions of children with few side effects, said Abram Wagner, University of Michigan research assistant professor of epidemiology and global public health. When cases of measles were killing children, people reached for the vaccine because it saved lives.

“So because vaccines have been so successful, we just don’t see the cases of these very serious diseases,” Wagner said. “As a result, people just aren’t aware of the need of vaccines.”

During his speech, Palevsky said he has practiced pediatric medicine for the past 20 years without pharmaceuticals or vaccines. Instead, he explained that fever, coughing and seizures are simply ways the body expels waste.

He said he still monitors the child to make sure they don’t “turn a corner.”

When asked by Kansas Reflector what happens if the child reaches that point, Palevsky said he has the “ability as a clinician to detect whether or not a child seems to be doing well, which indicates the possibility of an infection which requires intervention.” He said it’s never gotten to that point, though, and did not explain what may happen if he is unable to treat the child in the clinic.

During his second speech, Palevsky spoke about poor parenting and blamed people becoming vaccinated on children having lives with comfort. He said that because parents don’t want their children to suffer, they are allowing them to grow up without struggle by just following orders, not thinking for themselves.

“So that’s how I started to realize how we got there is that we basically crippled our kids for several generations by making their life better,” he said. “Which actually made their lives worse.”

A child wears a shirt promoting the anti-vaccination group Children’s Health Defense during its Kansas Launch event. (Sam Bailey/Kansas Reflector)

Meehan said neurodevelopmental damage from vaccines causes gender dysphoria and transgender identities. Palevsky also attacked the nonbinary community by saying it’s all a “big, big tantrum.”

The United States has a history of violence toward the LGBTQ population and anti-LGBTQ legislation, from raids of gay bars to the more than 500 anti-trans bills filed in state legislatures in 2023.

“Jim brought up the whole transgender agenda,” Palevsky said. “And regardless of what you think about what’s going on, the real underbelly of what’s going on is, ‘I believe this, and you have to or else.’ That’s the core underpinning of what’s going on is, ‘This is the way I feel, this is what I believe in, and you have to believe in it the way I want you to, or you’re a bigot, a racist, or I’m gonna kill you.’ ”

Spreading false threats of violence has caused members of the LGBTQ+ community to be accused of crimes in the past that had the potential to ruin their lives.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.