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 Timesreported.
