Fake CDC vaccine site linked to anti-vax nonprofit once headed by RFK

Anti-science
Childhood Vaccines
Measles
Man looking at website on desktop computer

EyeEm Mobile GmbH / iStock

An imposter US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine safety site hosted by a nonprofit once led by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been taken down after a watchdog noticed it being staged.

E. Rosalie Li, MA, founder of InfoEpi Lab on Substack, reported the clone on Friday after learning of the faked site, which 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, a domain that Li said is hosted by the antivaccine organization Children's Health Defense (CHD), which Kennedy led until he launched his presidential bid in 2023. Realcdc.org was activated on January 24 and is managed through the same Cloudflare (content-delivery network) host as the one hosted by CHD.

The shadow 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 (with titles such as "Mother of 3: I will never vaccinate again").

Imposter site taken down

The site was taken down on Saturday evening at Kennedy's direction after the New York Times asked about it and social media posts about it proliferated, the Times reported.

Secretary Kennedy has instructed the Office of the General Counsel to send a formal demand to Children’s Health Defense requesting the removal of their website.

HHS

"Secretary Kennedy has instructed the Office of the General Counsel to send a formal demand to Children’s Health Defense requesting the removal of their website," HHS said in a statement to the Times. "At H.H.S. we are dedicated to restoring our agencies to their tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science."

At Kennedy's behest, the CDC is planning a large study 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 discovery of the deceptive site comes as the nation grapples with a large outbreak of measles fueled by unvaccinated people and affecting mainly children. As of late last week, 378 cases in 17 states and New York City had been reported. A total of 285 measles cases were reported from 33 US jurisdictions in all of 2024.

Late last week, CBS2Iowa.com quoted the Lubbock Public Health Director Katherine Wells, DrPH, MPH, in Texas as saying the outbreak could be protracted if it is not contained soon. "I’m really thinking this is going to be a year long... to get through this entire outbreak," she said.

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