RFK Jr. attacked the CDC's ‘fascism’, likened vaccinating children to abuse by the Catholic Church
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump's pick for Health and Human Services secretary, shared anti-vaccine conspiracy theories at conferences on autism.
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.”
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.
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