In 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., published an article in Rolling Stone, and online, at Salon, called “Deadly Immunity.” It was, he wrote, “the story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal’’—a preservative once widely used in vaccines—and “a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed.”

Kennedy’s article was largely based on a famously discredited and retracted study, published in The Lancet, in 1998, that linked autism to the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. In 2010, the British Medical Council found the principal author, Andrew Wakefield, guilty of dishonesty and of “callous disregard” for the pain of the children in his study.

The Lancet article fuelled a powerful anti-vaccine movement in the United States and in England, led by people convinced that the vaccine causes autism. Many major studies have compared children who have been vaccinated with children who have not. Both groups develop autism at the same rate; nobody has ever discovered a causal relationship between the vaccine and the disorder.

But the damage Wakefield has done cannot be overstated: vaccine denialism became a central issue in American public health as a result of his study. And Kennedy, along with the actress Jenny McCarthy, became one of the cause’s most famous supporters.

I wrote extensively about Kennedy and his misbegotten war on the health of American children in my book, “Denialism,” and others, most notably Seth Mnookin, in “The Panic Virus,” have also written about his role in the anti-vaccination movement. “Deadly Immunity” was riddled with so many errors, misconceptions, and falsehoods that Salon and Rolling Stone published multiple corrections. In 2011, Salon retracted the article. It was not simply a bad piece of journalism; it was so dangerously inaccurate that the problems with the article earned their own Wikipedia entry.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that Kennedy told reporters yesterday that Donald Trump—who has, over the years, issued a stream of inaccurate and conspiratorial tweets on the subject of vaccines and autism—has asked him to “chair a commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity.’’

“President-elect Trump has some doubts about the current vaccine policies, and he has questions about it,’’ Kennedy said on Tuesday, in Trump Tower. “His opinion doesn't matter, but the science does matter. And we ought to be reading the science, and we ought to be debating the science. And everybody ought to be able to be assured that the vaccines that we have—he's very pro-vaccine, as am I—but they're as safe as they possibly can be. He asked me to chair a commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity.”

Later in the day, Trump’s spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, said that no decision on forming an autism commission had been made.

Outrage is a lot like a drug: the more we are exposed to, the more we require to keep us angry. But the Trump vaccine commission is not simply a bad idea—it is a deadly one. Asking Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to chair a commission on scientific integrity is like asking Ted Kaczynski to run the United States Postal Service.

In his Rolling Stone article, Kennedy wrote that vaccines exposed infants to a hundred and eighty-seven times the daily limit of ethyl mercury, as determined by the Environmental Protection Agency. If that were true, they would all have died immediately. Rolling Stone soon printed a correction—and then later corrected that correction. The actual figure was a hundred and eighty-seven micrograms, which is forty per cent higher than the levels recommended by the E.P.A. for methyl mercury (not ethyl mercury), and a tiny fraction of the figure cited in Kennedy’s paper.

Throughout the piece, Kennedy confused and conflated ethyl and methyl mercury. Methyl mercury, which is a product of industrial pollution, and the compound that is so dangerous when contained in fish, is not the mercury found in vaccines. The two forms differ by one atom of carbon. As Paul A. Offit pointed out in his book “Autism’s False Prophets,” this one atom matters tremendously. “An analogy can be made between ethyl alcohol, contained in wine and beer, and methyl alcohol, contained in wood alcohol,” Offit wrote. “Wine and beer can cause headaches and hangovers; wood alcohol causes blindness.”

Kennedy had little time for such niceties. He never quite accused the nation's public-health leaders of attempting to "poison an entire generation of American children." But he did write that "if, as the evidence suggests,'' they had, "their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine."

A conspiracy theory such as the one about the autism vaccine is like an untreated wound. It has festered for years, and yesterday Trump and Kennedy guaranteed that it can only deepen—causing tremendous destruction and needless pain.