Instagram on xo Wednesday deleted the account of controversial anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.We deleted this account because it shared repeated cleared claims about the coronavirus or vaccine," a Facebook spokesman who owns Instagram said in a statement.Kennedy, son of former US Attorney General, US Senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, has repeatedly spoken about the vaccine. He has lobbied Congress to keep parents exempt from state requirements requiring them to vaccinate their children.

The lifelong Democrats overlooked his anti-vaccine views, saying he liked the vaccines that Be safe and observe that all of his children have been vaccinated.Kennedy's Facebook page, which has more than 300,000 followers, remains active at the time of publication, a company spokesperson said there are no plans to delete the page "at this time".In a statement Thursday conducted by Children's Health Defense, a nonprofit group he chaired, Kennedy pushed back, insisting his post was false and accusing Facebook of "censoring" it.

Facebook has struggled for years to crack down on misinformation about vaccines and announced yet another effort to do so earlier this week. In addition to operations on Kennedy's Instagram account, eight Facebook and Instagram accounts and pages have been removed for sharing misleading information about vaccines.On Monday, the company announced ways to better combat misinformation about vaccines, including making it harder to find accounts through Facebook's Instagram search that discourages people from getting vaccinated.

The announcement comes a day after CNN Business reported that Instagram still featured a prominently anti-vaxxer account in search results, while the anti-vaccine Facebook group was still easy to find. The findings raise concerns among public health experts as the United States is in the process of launching the largest-ever vaccine to tackle the coronavirus outbreak.