Eric Clapton helps RFK Jr. raise $2.2 million for his campaign

Musician Eric Clapton helped raise money at a fundraiser for fellow vaccine critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 campaign for the Democratic presidential primary ticket Monday.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame hosted Kennedy and his donors at a private home in the upscale Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, where tickets started at $3,300 and went up to $6,600 for a face-to-face with Kennedy, according to TMZ.

After the event, RFK Jr.’s campaign reported raising a total of $2.2 million for the Democratic Party’s campaign and its independent PAC.

Kennedy, the son of assassinated presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Sr., celebrated Clapton as a figure of unity at the backyard concert.

In a statement on his website, he thanked the Yardbirds rocker “for bringing his musical talent and rebellious spirit to my gathering.”

“Eric sings from the depths of the human condition,” he wrote. “If he sees in me the possibility of bringing unity to our country, it is only possible because artists like him invoke a buried faith in the unlimited power of the human being to overcome any obstacle.”

Although neither Kennedy’s call for bipartisanship nor Clapton’s performance mention vaccines, both men are open critics of coronavirus vaccines.

Clapton complained about suffering “disastrous” but temporary side effects from the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine in 2021, and he denounced vaccine requirements when in-person gatherings began to return later that summer .

In 2020, Clapton collaborated with singer Van Morrison, another outspoken vaccine skeptic, on the anti-lockdown song “Stand and Deliver,” in which they compared COVID safety protocols to slavery.

Kennedy has spent the past two decades peddling widely debunked misinformation about vaccines, which he claims cause autism, allergies, cancer and other illnesses in children.

The activist-turned-politician was banned from Instagram for spreading COVID misinformation in 2021, and last July he called himself “the first person censored by the Biden administration” when Republicans attacked him. invited to testify before the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on the militarization of the federal government.

Even though Kennedy is far behind President Joe Biden in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, his numbers are not insignificant.

According to a HarrisX/Harris poll sponsored by Harvard University’s Center for American Policy Studies released last week, Kennedy trails Biden by 15 to 60 percent.

Earlier this summer, American Values ​​2024, the Kennedy campaign’s political action committee, announced it had raised $16 million in June and July.

Meanwhile, Biden raised $72 million for his reelection bid between his campaign announcement in April and the end of the fiscal second quarter in June.