A Badly-Needed Mercury Chemistry Lesson for RFK Jr.

Mercury, the element, is no longer used in thermometers, but it remains at the center of a decades-long debate over vaccine safety, despite the science being crystal clear. At the heart of this confusion is thimerosal, a mercury-containing preservative wrongly accused of causing autism. What follows isn’t a rehash of that conspiracy theory, but rather a crash course in chemistry, something that RFK Jr. and his CDC picks need to know.