This article first appeared on Mother Jones. It has been republished with the publication’s permission.
At an event late last week in Arizona, anti-vaccine activist and Donald Trump transition team member Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he’d fire and replace 600 people from the National Institutes of Health on day one of a second Trump term. The NIH is one of the public health agencies Kennedy loathes the most—and despite still lacking any defined role in a new administration, he’s clearly relishing the opportunity to promise retribution against them.
In comments that were first reported by ABC News, Kennedy declared, “We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on January 20, so that on January 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave.”
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is known for being an anti-vaxxer, but his stance on LGBTQ+ issues have flown under the radar.
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Kennedy, a long-standing opponent of vaccines, has consistently been critical of the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control, and other federal agencies that are part of the basic infrastructure of public health. His The Real Anthony Fauci attacked Fauci, a former NIH director, at book length, albeit with what one physician reviewer called “many errors and gross misrepresentations.”
The remarks offering some concrete details about Kennedy’s Trump-aligned and so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda came during an onstage interview at an entrepreneurship event in Scottsdale, which included discussions of Kennedy’s workout routine and his relationship with the once and future president.
Calley Means, a self-described health care reform activist who played a role in Kennedy’s independent presidential run sat alongside him for part of the interview. He framed the MAHA movement as “kicking the special interests and the Deep State” out of government, calling the NIH “an orgy of corruption.”
Kennedy made other eyebrow-raising claims during the interview, for instance claiming that “pilot studies” showed that anorexia could be cured with “keto diets and other kind of diets.”
“NIH won’t do those studies because they don’t want to know the source or the cure or the treatment of chronic disease,” he declared. He also returned to his hobby horse, claiming links between vaccines and a spread in autism.
“I never saw anybody who was autistic when I was a kid,” Kennedy claimed. “Never.” He added that men his age—Kennedy is 70—don’t have “full-blown autism,” which he defined as “wearing helmets” and “not being toilet trained” and “head-banging, stimming, toe-walking.”
(Experts believe that autism was underdiagnosed until recent decades; the earliest prevalence studies weren’t conducted until the 1960s and ’70s. Autistic adults have a range of abilities, and autistic self-advocates have said that Kennedy uses offensive and ableist language to talk about autism: rather than “full blown,” public health experts would generally say “profound autism.” Kennedy also still uses the term “Aspergers,” an outdated phrase referencing a scientist who worked with Nazis during the Holocaust.)
Kennedy also used his appearance in Scottsdale to continue fawning over Trump, saying the incoming president “has an aura of greatness around him” for his role in standing up to what he called “the globalist project.”
He also spoke critically about his own extended family, many of whom were critical of his presidential run, and some of whom called him “tragically wrong” about vaccines as far back as 2019. Kennedy said those relatives were “all under this kind of hypnosis” and have been “persuaded by this propaganda wall to turn on their own values.”
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