The nephew of late President John F Kennedy had his account
permanently taken down "for repeatedly sharing debunked claims",
Facebook, which owns Instagram, said in a statement.
His Facebook account remains active despite similar claims
posted there.
These have included linking the death of legendary baseball
player Hank Aaron to the Covid-19 vaccine.
Facebook has vowed to remove false claims about Covid-19
vaccines to prevent "imminent physical harm".
Mr Kennedy, a lawyer and environmentalist, is the son of
late former US attorney general, senator and presidential candidate Robert F
Kennedy.
He chairs Children's Health Defense, a group that expresses
scepticism about the health benefits of vaccines. He also campaigned against
the immunisation of measles during a resurgence of the infection.
Speaking last year at a conference for the National Vaccine
Information Centre, a controversial group accused of spreading misinformation
on vaccines, Mr Kennedy said people were hearing his message and "those
seeds are landing on very fertile ground".
He has addressed anti-lockdown protests and his videos are
regularly translated by activists based in other countries.
In December, his niece, Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, a physician,
wrote a piece in the New York Times entitled: Vaccines Are Safe, No Matter What
Robert Kennedy Jr Says.
Mr Kennedy's Instagram account had been a key source of bad
information about Covid-19 and vaccines.
But his personal account on Facebook - with over 300,000
followers - is still active on the platform.
The accounts of Children's Health Defense are also still up
on both Instagram and Facebook. Combined they have well over 300,000 followers
in total. And although Instagram has started to take action against other
accounts spreading misleading health information, many still remain.
For critics of the social media companies, it will be
further evidence that the tech giants are too slow to combat misinformation.
Mr Kennedy, like many other influential figures in the
anti-vaccination community, promoted bad science about the coronavirus and
vaccines to hundreds of thousands of social media users throughout the
pandemic.
Claims echoing his and others' anti-vaccine narratives now
routinely appear in private Facebook groups discussing Covid-19 vaccines - and
they spill over into other forums - everything from Twitter to family chats on
WhatsApp.
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