Former White House COVID chief Anthony Fauci on Monday appealed to independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., recalling an earlier meeting in which Kennedy spoke out strongly about vaccines.
Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist, has long pushed the debunked theory that vaccines are linked to autism and some diseases. Fauci shared in a podcast interview with CNN's David Axelrod about when the two met to talk about vaccines early in the Trump administration.
Kennedy gave a presentation to Fauci and lobbied for his appointment as head of a White House committee to investigate vaccine safety.
“The first slide I remember him showing is 'Vaccines have been shown to be responsible for the following diseases,' and he gave every disease in the world,” Fauci said. “The next 40 minutes or so he showed slide after slide after slide that day that made no sense at all.”
Fauci recalls seeking out Kennedy after the meeting and trying to talk him out of it.
“We walked out of the room at the moment that [National Institutes of Health]I went to him and said, 'Bobby, I believe you care about children, and you don't want to hurt them,' Fauci said. 'But you have to realize that from a scientific standpoint, what you're saying doesn't make sense.'
Kennedy wrote a 2021 book about Fauci, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” in which he attacks Fauci for his leadership of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his work leading the country’s early COVID response. Fauci said the book alleges he “was responsible for killing so many people with vaccines.”
“I don't know what's going on in his mind, but it's not good,” Fauci said of RFK Jr.
Kennedy is the nation's most prominent anti-vaccination activist and has criticized both President Biden and former President Trump for their response to the COVID pandemic and their advocacy for the COVID vaccine.
His campaign as an outsider for president has attracted a unique coalition of disaffected voters from both parties, and his supporters could well disrupt the November election.
Kennedy has 8.1 percent support nationally, according to the average of polls compiled by The Hill/Decision Desk HQ. Trump has an average lead of 2.1 percentage points over Biden when Kennedy is in the race.
