Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a dark view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2019, he called the federal agency’s vaccine division a fascist enterprise and accused it of knowingly hurting children. He also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harms from the child vaccination program to the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
“The word ‘fascism’ in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is the bundle is more important than the sticks,” Kennedy said in previously unreported remarks in 2019 to a private audience at AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children. “The institution, CDC and the vaccine program, is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect.
“It’s the same reason we had a pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church,” he continued. “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 everybody kept their mouth shut. 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. And you know, that is the perfect metaphor for what’s happening to us. There have to be parents who stand up and say, ‘We don’t give a s---.’”
Kennedy made these remarks and others — most previously unreported — over years of appearances at AutismOne. The comments, dating back to 2013, include claims that the CDC is a “cesspool of corruption,” filled with profiteers, harming children in a way he also likened to “Nazi death camps.”
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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 and save lives, and do not cause autism.
Now Kennedy could bring his false views into the agency he has so strongly criticized, as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for head of the Department of Health and Human Services.
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The speeches offer new insight into what Kennedy might do with the CDC if the Senate confirms him, from 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: 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.
“Is it hyperbole when I say these people should be in jail? They should be in jail and the key should be thrown away,” Kennedy told the cheering AutismOne crowd before invoking the Bible. “What Jesus Christ says is that anybody who harms a hair of these little children that it would be better if a millstone was tied around their neck and they were thrown in the deepest part of the ocean and it would be better yet if they had never been born.”
Since launching his failed presidential run in 2023, Kennedy has been less vocal 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, posted last week that Kennedy, while “strategic,” remains committed to the anti-vaccine cause. “Bobby didn’t get dragged through the mud for over a decade just so he could compromise his values once he finally got inside the castle,” Bigtree said.
At the 2013 AutismOne question-and-answer session, when asked about the CDC’s motives for failing to acknowledge autism as an epidemic, Kennedy made a comparison to the Holocaust.
“To me this is like Nazi death camps, what happened to these kids,” Kennedy said of the rising number of children diagnosed with autism and what he described as a link to vaccines — which had been debunked over a decade earlier. “I can’t tell you why somebody would do something like that. I can’t tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust.”
He also gave more detail on the people he believed belonged in prison.
“I don’t think this is going to happen because they always manage, the bad guys somehow manage to weasel their way out of it,” he said. “But I would do a lot to see Paul Offit, all these ‘good people,’ 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. Asked for comment, Offit said 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.
“I am a pediatrician who worked very hard trying to create a vaccine,” Offit said. “I’m a good guy. But RFK believes there is a massive international conspiracy to hide the truth, and it involves the CDC and the advisory committees and the FDA, this massive conspiracy that is all orchestrated by the pharmaceutical companies in whose pocket sits the government and the medical establishment. Which is to say he is a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, and that is what wild-eyed conspiracy theorists say: ‘Put everybody in jail.’”
In a 2017 address, Kennedy laid out his overarching theory to the audience at AutismOne.
“It’s a matrix of an interwoven relationships between CDC and FDA and the vaccine industry,” he said. Kennedy said 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.
“They’re all telling us what we know is true is not true,” he went on. “They’re imposing an alternative reality on all of us, a ‘Matrix’ reality, and we’re sitting here and we know it’s all a lie.”
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.
“The people who are on ACIP are not public health advocates,” he said. “They work for the vaccine industry.”
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.
Another branch of the CDC “that we worry about,” Kennedy said in 2017, was the Immunization Safety Office, which, alongside other agencies, monitors vaccine safety and reports findings and concerns to ACIP.
Kennedy claimed the mission of the Immunization Safety Office “has become subsumed by the broader mission of CDC, which is: 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. (Those claims have been debunked.)
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.
Kennedy suggested in the 2017 speech that the walled access is nefarious. “Oh, they’ve hidden it, and they won’t let anybody in it, except their own guys who cherry-pick and design these fabricated studies and change the protocols constantly to try to use it to defend vaccines,” Kennedy said. “It’s being used instead to craft these fabricated, fraudulent studies by in-house bought-and-paid-for ‘biostitutes’ to fool the public about vaccine safety.” (Biostitutes is a term Kennedy has used often: Seemingly it is a portmanteau of “biologist” and “prostitute” he has explained means “industry-paid junk scientists.”)
Kennedy recently said that within two months of leading HHS and CDC, he will be able to figure out what causes autism. In his 2017 speech, he explained his belief that the CDC’s vaccine safety database would provide the answer to whether “something” in vaccines was making children vulnerable to other kinds of disease — a theory without evidence. “We would know the answer to that question if we were given access to the vaccine safety database, but they’ve hidden it,” Kennedy said.
Last month on CNN, Howard Lutnick, co-chair of Trump’s transition team, said 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.
“He says, if you give me the data, all I want is the data and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off of the market. So that’s his point,” Lutnick said.
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."
This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:
