Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called the federal agency vaccine division fascist as part of his criticism which is a dark view of the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He had in 2019 accused the agency of knowingly hurting children. He also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harm from the child vaccination program to the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
While explaining his choice of words, Kennedy noted that The word ‘fascism’ in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is the bundle is more important than the sticks. He explained an unreported remark made in 2019 to a private audience at AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children. He noted that they wrongly made the institution more important than the children it was meant to protect.
While speaking further he explained that he explained that the situation reflects why there was a paedophile scandal in the Catholic Church. According to him, the people have been able to tell themselves that the institution, the church, was more important than the little children who have been subjected to rape with all individuals not speaking about the issue.
He noted that the press, the prosecutors, the priests, the bishops, the monsignors, the Vatican, and even the parents of the kids who just didn’t want to believe it was happening, or believed so much in the church they were unwilling to criticize it which according to him is the perfect perfect metaphor for what is happing to the people, he emphasized that there was need to have parent that can stand up and speak as such occasion but there seems to be no concern.
Kennedy while speaking made the remarks at the most previously unreported in his years of appearance at the AutismOne. The comments were made in 2013 which included the claims that the CDC has been in the middle of corruption which was filled with profiteers, harming children in a way he also likened to Nazi death camps.
Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, has been known to use and sometimes apologize for extreme language and metaphors when speaking about what he perceives as a threat from vaccines. It’s misinformation about autism and mass injury that doctors and public health officials have disproven over and over again. Numerous studies across countries and continents have found that vaccines are safe, prevent injury save lives, and do not cause autism.
Now that Kenedy has been picked as Trump’s Favourite as the head of the agency he has criticized in the past, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for head of the Department of Health and Human Services, it has been believed that he will bring his false narratives into the agency.
It has been believed that Kennedy may likely offer new strategies in the leadership of the CDC if the Senate confirms, some of the speculated strategies include disbanding panels that study vaccine safety to misrepresenting government data in a way that decreases public trust or causes manufacturers to pull vaccines from the market.
Kennedy and the Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment. The CDC declined to comment.
Kennedy has for decades argued a vast conspiracy surrounding vaccines he had stated that the pharmaceutical industry, governments and the scientific community at large were covering up the threat vaccines posed to children, including developmental diseases and chronic illness.
As health secretary, Kennedy would have what one former secretary described as a shocking amount of power by the stroke of a pen, which he could use to dismantle the agencies he’s implicated as key players in his conspiracy theories. At a 2013 speech for AutismOne, self-described as the largest parent-run autism conference, Kennedy vilified a nebulous group, including vaccine scientists, involved in what he falsely claimed was a conspiracy to hide vaccines as the cause of autism.
Kennedy told the cheering AutismOne crowd before invoking the Bible that the individuals should be sent to jail and the keys were thrown away. While speaking from a biblical perspective, he noted that Jesus Christ has stated that for anybody who harms a hair of these little children, it would be better if a millstone was tied around their neck and they were thrown into the deepest part of the ocean and it would be better yet if they had never been born.
Kennedy had made a move to contest for the presidency in 2023 but since the ambition failed he has less spoken about his theories surrounding vaccines, opting instead for vague claims about how federal public health agencies have been captured by corporations and how he would “free” them if he were in charge.
Kennedy has said publicly that he plans to gut the National Institutes of Health, telling an Arizona audience this month that he would replace 600 employees on his first day at HHS. Last year, at a conference for his own anti-vaccine organization, Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy said he would shift the agency away from studying infectious diseases.
Less attention has focused on the CDC, a public health agency Kennedy has long vilified in speeches and writings. His remarks at AutismOne give a window into the departments Kennedy may target, including those that review vaccine data and safety and make recommendations about vaccine schedules for children.
Del Bigtree, Kennedy’s campaign communications director and leader of the country’s second-best-funded anti-vaccine organization, in a publication last, stated that the who has been strategic remains committed to the anti-vaccine cause. The director noted that Bobby was not dragged through the mud for over a decade just in order to compromise his values when he got into the the government or appointed as a leader.
At the 2013 AutismOne question-and-answer session, when asked about the CDC’s motives for failing to acknowledge autism as an epidemic, Kennedy spoke and made a comparison to the Holocaust.
He further spoke about the people who have been believed to belong more to the prison he noted that he has a fear that such might never happen as the bad guys have been managed somehow to get themselves out of the accusations, He noted that he will do his best to ensure that some of the guys have themselves set behind bars.
Dr. Paul Offit is the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine. He currently serves on a Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory committee. When asked to speak on the issue noted that Kennedy had targeted him and others on government vaccine panels for nearly two decades as main characters in baseless conspiracy theories, attacks that have invited harassment and threats.
Offit stated that he has been a paediatrician who has worked with high strength to ensure the creation of vaccines he noted that he has been good but Kennedy believed there was an international conspiracy to hide the truth, and it involved the CDC and the advisory committees and the FDA. He noted that the massive conspiracy is all orchestrated by the pharmaceutical companies in whose pockets sit the government and the medical establishment.
In a 2017 address, Kennedy listed out his overarching theory to the audience at AutismOne. He noted that there was a matrix of interwoven relationships between the CDC FDA and the vaccine industry. He further noted that the pharmaceutical companies and the military were also involved, and “of course, the doctors and the AAP and the AMA and the media,” referring to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association.
He went further to state that they have begun to tell the people that it was not true by imposing an alternative reality on all the people which shows a matrix of reality that is a lie that is been witnessed by the people.
The American Academy of Pediatrics released a statement in response to Trump’s choice of Kennedy for HHS secretary that defended vaccines as the safest and most cost-effective way to protect children, families and communities from disease, disability and death. In the 2017 speech, Kennedy singled out several departments within the CDC he was concerned about.
First was the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a group of medical and public health experts who review safety data and make vaccine recommendations, which the CDC uses to create immunization schedules. As HHS secretary, Kennedy would be charged with appointing ACIP members. Anti-vaccine groups have for years attended ACIP meetings to share false information during public comment.
In his 2017 speech, Kennedy criticized ACIP as a group of self-interested actors who base decisions on financial gain instead of public health. He noted that the people who are on ACIP are not public health advocates, according to him they have been working for the vaccine industry in the past years only.
The CDC screens ACIP members, who are largely medical professionals and cannot be employed by vaccine manufacturers. Members are required to disclose both real and perceived conflicts of interest.
Kennedy who raised concerns about the safety of the vaccine stated that they have a huge worry about the Immunization Safety Office, which, alongside other agencies, monitors vaccine safety and reports findings and concerns to ACIP.
Kennedy claimed that the mission of the Immunization Safety Office has become subsumed by the broader mission of the CDC, which is to promote vaccines and get as many people to use them as possible.
One of Kennedy’s central pieces of evidence involved William Thompson, a psychologist and former senior scientist at the CDC who came forward in 2014 to allege he and other researchers had hidden data that suggested the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine increased the risk of autism in Black boys. However, the claims have been debunked in several areas.
The Immunization Safety Office maintains the Vaccine Safety Datalink, which houses data from patient health records used to conduct studies about rare adverse events following immunization. This raw data is available to researchers but isn’t public for a variety of reasons including concerns over privacy, misrepresentation of data, and manpower.
In a recent statement Kennedy stated that within two months of leading HHS and CDC, he will be able to figure out what causes autism. Before the recent statement, In 2017 in his speech, he explained that his belief that the CDC vaccine safety database would provide the answer to whether “something” in vaccines was making children vulnerable to other kinds of disease a theory that has no evidence. He noted that answers to the concern will be provided if access to the database has been provided to the people or his leadership.
In November while speaking on CNN Howard Lutnick, co-chair of Trump’s transition team, stated that after a conversation with the not-yet-nominated HHS secretary, he understood Kennedy wanted access to federal health data so he could show vaccines are unsafe and force manufacturers to stop making them.
Lutnick stated that if the data were given to him he would present the data and show that the Vaccine were not safe for the people to use and the products would be pulled off the market by the producers which his course has been fought
This weekend, Trump picked former congressman Dr. Dave Weldon to lead the CDC. Weldon has also spoken at AutismOne conferences. He introduced a bill in 2007 related to vaccine data that died in committee; it would have removed vaccine safety research from the purview of the CDC to a separate HHS agency.
In 2004 remarks at AutismOne, Weldon suggested vaccines caused neurological problems and said parents of autistic children were “the 900-pound gorilla that has not had its voice heard adequately on Capitol Hill.”
