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.

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.