Trump’s pick for health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr once called the US vaccine agency a ‘fascist’ enterprise | News from the USA

On November 28, 2024By Online Niel

Donald Trump’s pick for health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, once labeled the agency responsible for rolling out vaccines in the US a “fascist” enterprise and accused it of knowingly harming children.

Mr. Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harm in America’s childhood vaccination program to the Catholic Church’s cover-up of child sexual abuse.

The comments were made beginning in 2013 to the private audience of AutismOne, a conference for parents of children with autism. Observation records have was recently shared with NBC Newsthe sister network of Sky News in the US.

In other comments, he also claimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was a “corruption shack,” full of profiteers and harming children in a way he likened to “Nazi camps of the dead”.

Mr Kennedy, son of the late Robert Kennedy and grandson of the late former president John F Kennedy, is set to lead the US Department of Health when President-elect Trump enters the White House in January.

In previously unreported comments in 2019, Mr. Kennedy compared the CDC and its vaccination program to “fascism.”

“The word ‘fascism’ in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is that the bundle is more important than the sticks,” he said.

“The institution, the CDC and the vaccination program are more important than the children they are supposed to protect.

“It’s the same reason we had a pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church,” he added.

“Because people were able to convince themselves that the institution, the church, was more important than these little boys and girls who were being raped. And everyone shut up.

“The media, the prosecutors, the priests, the bishops, the Vatican and even the parents of the children who just didn’t want to believe it was happening, or believed so much in the church that they weren’t willing to criticize it.

“And you know, that’s the perfect metaphor for what’s happening to us.”

In comments made in 2013 to AutismOne, he criticized a group of experts, including vaccine scientists, involved in what he falsely claimed was a conspiracy to cover up vaccines as the cause of autism.

The links between autism and vaccines, which came from a discredited and fraudulent research paper, have long been debunked and have been described as “perhaps the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years”.

Kennedy also said vaccine scientists “should be in jail and the key should be thrown away.”

At the question-and-answer session of the 2013 AutismOne conference, when asked about the CDC’s reasons for not recognizing autism as an epidemic, Mr. Kennedy drew a comparison to the Holocaust.

“To me, it’s like the Nazi extermination camps, what happened to these children,” he said.

Mr Kennedy said of the growing number of children being diagnosed with autism and what he described as a link to vaccines: “I can’t tell you why anyone would do that. I cannot tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust. .”

Over the weekend, Trump picked former congressman Dr. Dave Weldon at the CDC.

Dr. Weldon also spoke at AutismOne conferences and, in remarks made in 2004, suggested that vaccines caused neurological problems and said that parents of autistic children were “900-pound gorillas who didn’t hear their voices properly appropriate on Capitol Hill.”

Mr. Kennedy and the Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment when asked by NBC. The CDC also declined to comment.