Trump’s pick for health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr once called US vaccine rollout agency a ‘fascist’ enterprise
Donald Trump’s pick for health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr once labelled the agency responsible for vaccine rollouts in the US a “fascist” enterprise and accused it of knowingly hurting children.
Mr Kennedy, a vaccine sceptic, also compared what he saw as a widespread conspiracy to hide harms from the US’ child vaccination programme to the cover-up of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
The comments were made from 2013 onwards to private audiences of AutismOne, a conference for parents of autistic children. Recordings of the remarks have recently been shared with NBC News, the US sister network of Sky News.
In other comments, he also claimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was a “cesspool of corruption”, filled with profiteers, and was harming children in a way he likened to “Nazi death camps”.
Mr Kennedy, the son of the late Robert Kennedy and nephew of the late former president John F Kennedy, is poised to run the US Health Department when president-elect Mr Trump enters the White House in January.
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In previously unreported comments from 2019, Mr Kennedy compared the CDC and its vaccine programme to “fascism”.
“The word ‘fascism’ in Italian means a bundle of sticks, and what it means is the bundle is more important than the sticks,” he said.
“The institution, CDC and the vaccine programme is more important than the children that it’s supposed to protect.
“It’s the same reason we had a paedophile 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 everybody kept their mouth shut.
“The press, the prosecutors, the priests, the bishops, 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 criticise it.
“And you know, that is the perfect metaphor for what’s happening to us.”
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In comments made in 2013 at AutismOne, he criticised a group of experts, including vaccine scientists, involved in what he falsely claimed was a conspiracy to hide vaccines as the cause of autism.
Links between autism and vaccines, which originate from a discredited and fraudulent research paper, have long been debunked and been described as “perhaps, the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years”.
Mr Kennedy also said vaccine scientists “should be in jail and the key should be thrown away”.
At the 2013 AutismOne conference question-and-answer session, when asked about the CDC’s motives for failing to acknowledge autism as an epidemic, Mr Kennedy made a comparison to the Holocaust.
“To me, this is like Nazi death camps, what happened to these kids,” he said.
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Mr Kennedy said of the rising number of children diagnosed with autism and what he described as a link to vaccines: “I can’t tell you why somebody would do something like that. I can’t tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust.”
Over the weekend, Mr Trump picked former congressman Dr Dave Weldon to lead the CDC.
Dr Weldon has also spoken at AutismOne conferences and in remarks made in 2004 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”.
Mr Kennedy and the Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment when asked by NBC. The CDC also declined to comment.
Police officers found a handgun, a silencer and a red notebook described as a “manifesto” when they arrested Luigi Mangione.
The 27-year-old was arrested in December 2024 and charged with killing UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson in New York City.
Mangione‘s lawyers want to block prosecutors from showing or telling jurors at his eventual trial in Manhattan about statements he allegedly made and items they said police seized from his backpack during his arrest at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.
The objects include a 9mm handgun prosecutors say matches the one used in the killing, a silencer, a magazine with bullets wrapped in underwear and a notebook in which they say Mangione described his intent to “wack” a healthcare executive.
Mangione with his attorney. Pic: Reuters
The defence contends the items should be excluded because police did not get a warrant before searching Mangione’s backpack.
Prosecutors deny claims Mangione was illegally searched and questioned.
They also want to suppress some statements he made to police, such as allegedly giving a false name, because officers asked him questions before telling him he had a right to remain silent.
Last week, Mangione watched surveillance videos of the killing of Mr Thompson, 50, as he walked to a New York City hotel for his company’s annual investor conference.
Mangione has pleaded not guilty to state and federal murder charges.
The state charges carry the possibility of life in prison, while federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
This week’s hearing concerns only the state case, but Mangione’s lawyers want to bar evidence from both cases.
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In September, a judge dismissed two terrorism counts against Mangione, finding prosecutors had not presented enough evidence Mangione intended to intimidate health insurance workers or influence government policy.
Trial dates are yet to be set in either the state or federal cases.
Paramount has launched a £108.4bn hostile bid for Warner Bros, challenging Netflix, which had reached a $72bn takeover deal with the company.
Paramount said on Monday that it was going straight to Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) shareholders with a $30 per share in cash offer for the entirety of the company, including its Global Networks segment, asking them to reject the deal with Netflix.
On Friday Netflix struck a deal to buy WBD, the Hollywood giant behind “Harry Potter” and HBO Max
The agreement means Warner Bros Discovery’s library of film and TV successes including Harry Potter and Game Of Thrones will come under the same roof as Stranger Things and Squid Game.
The cash and stock deal is valued at $27.75 per Warner share, giving it a total enterprise value of $82.7 billion, including debt.
But Paramount says its deal will pay $30 cash per share, representing $18 billion more in cash than its rivals are offering.
In a statement, Paramount said it was making a “strategically and financially compelling offer to WBD shareholders” and a “superior alternative to the Netflix transaction”.
File pic: iStock
David Ellison, chairman and CEO of Paramount, said: “WBD shareholders deserve an opportunity to consider our superior all-cash offer for their shares in the entire company.
“Our public offer, which is on the same terms we provided to the Warner Bros. Discovery Board of Directors in private, provides superior value, and a more certain and quicker path to completion.
“We believe the WBD Board of Directors is pursuing an inferior proposal which exposes shareholders to a mix of cash and stock, an uncertain future trading value of the Global Networks linear cable business and a challenging regulatory approval process.
“We are taking our offer directly to shareholders to give them the opportunity to act in their own best interests and maximize the value of their shares.”
Paramount said it had submitted six proposals to WBD in the course of 12 weeks, but that they were never “meaningfully” engaged with.
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