US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has admitted that people shouldn’t “be taking medical advice from me”.
The secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a vaccine sceptic who once claimed that chemicals in the atmosphere are causing children to come out as trans, told Wisconsin Democrat Rep. Mark Pocan during a House committee hearing that US citizens should not consider him a reputable medical source.
On Wednesday (14 May), Kennedy Jr. testified about vaccines, the measles outbreak in the US, and an approved spending bill. When quizzed about whether he would vaccinate his child for measles, if he had a child today, he responded that his thoughts on the matter are “irrelevant”.
“Probably for measles,” Kennedy Jr. said, before he backtracked on his word. “What I would say is my opinions about vaccines are irrelevant.
“I don’t want to seem like I am being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me,” he said to Pocan.
To this, Pocan responded: “That’s kind of your jurisdiction because [the] CDC does give advice.”
Kennedy Jr. replied: “What we’re trying to do is to lay out the pros and cons, the risks and benefits accurately as we understand them, with replicable studies.”
Last month, Kennedy claimed that measles vaccines are “leaky” and their effectiveness decreases over time, which scientists have since debunked.
The health secretary has been outspoken as a staunch anti-vaxxer. He has repeatedly shared debunked claims that certain vaccines can cause autism in children, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, he called the CDC a “sock puppet for Moderna and Pfizer”. He has even compared US vaccine requirements to the actions of Nazi Germany.
He also claimed that 100 per cent of the “first thousand” people to die during the Aids epidemic “were addicted to poppers” and were “part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends [and] taking a lot of injectable drugs”.
However, Kenedy Jr. has also previously skirted those views, saying: “I’ve never been anti-vaccine. If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away.
“People ought to have choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information, so I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy studies are out there and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.”
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