Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, has repeatedly insisted she does not oppose vaccines—though she continues to sow doubt about at least some of them.
In a post to X on Tuesday, the Silicon Valley lawyer opined about the “devastating reality” of Moderna’s mRNA jab. “It is not a safe vaccine, and must be recalled immediately. Many people are suffering who took it,” she wrote.
She added a picture of herself and her boyfriend, “reformed Wall Street guy” Jacob Strumwasser, and the caption, “One of us took 3 doses of the Moderna mRNA vaccine, and the other did not. Guess who?”
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Strumwasser was wearing a T-shirt that read, “At least my tin foil hat won’t give me myocarditis”—a reference to inflammation of the heart that is a very rare side effect of the mRNA vaccine.
“Jacob, I love you and your ridiculous shirts,” she wrote.
Despite being widely shared in certain online circles, Shanahan’s vaccine skepticism is not based in science, Amesh Adalja, a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told The Daily Beast.
“There's no basis to recall the Moderna COVID vaccine,” he said. If anything, it should be “in the hall of fame of vaccines as part of a vaccine effort that would have been thought of as miraculous in years past.”
As for myocarditis, Adalja said that cases are concentrated in teenage boys and young adult males, and are more likely to occur following the second vaccine dose. The likelihood of occurrence can be reduced by spacing out vaccines, he said, and even if myocarditis does occur, cases “have been relatively mild, not life threatening.”
Most important, he continued, the COVID-19 virus itself “is more likely to cause myocarditis than the vaccines are,” making the cost-benefit analysis in favor of vaccination even more obvious.
Overall, he concluded, side effects are “very, very minor and pale in comparison to the benefit that the vaccine provides.”
Kennedy has spread similar conspiracies in the past and once drew heat for comparing COVID lockdowns and government oversight to life in Nazi Germany. Shanahan, who was previously married to Google billionaire Sergey Brin, helped bankroll Kennedy’s 2024 Super Bowl ad and is expected to boost his campaign’s financial prospects.
A spokesperson for the campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
