Generally speaking, when a president-elect is going about assembling his cabinet, one thing he should avoid is giving conspiracy theorists jobs running the government. Obviously, there’s no law against hiring conspiracy theorists, but it’s just a good rule of thumb. Unfortunately for America, it’s a rule of thumb that Donald Trump has chosen to ignore, particularly in the case of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his pick for Health and Human Services secretary.
Kennedy’s dangerous views on vaccines have long been known; among other things, he’s promoted the thoroughly debunked claim that childhood vaccines cause autism. But in a 2020 video recently unearthed by The Bulwark, Kennedy said the government may have planned the COVID-19 pandemic that killed 1.2 million Americans. Speaking at a press conference in August of that year, Kennedy declared: “Many people argue that this pandemic was a ‘plandemic,’ that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme. I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to me. I don’t know. I will tell you this: If you create these mechanisms for control, they become weapons of obedience for authoritarian regimes no matter how beneficial or innocent the people who created them.”
Kennedy does not appear to have been asked about these statements since he joined Team Trump; it might have been slightly uncomfortable if he had, considering the fact that Donald Trump was in office at the time of the pandemic.
In the same 2020 remarks, Kennedy compared public health efforts to combat COVID to Nazis testing “vaccines on Gypsies and Jews,” and called the government’s public health policies “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.” And now Trump has put him—pending confirmation—in charge of the very agencies that will be relied on to protect the public in the event of another public health crisis.
A spokesperson for Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment from The Bulwark. Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told the outlet: “It is not surprising that he would veer towards this whole plandemic concept. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. never misses an opportunity to embrace a conspiracy theory. Now more than ever we need some really smart people that are going to be at HHS and heading the agencies. And if you put someone who is so easily susceptible to conspiracy theories in charge, it can only spell disaster for the American people.”
In addition to conspiracy theories re: COVID, Kennedy has also claimed, among other things, that 5G high-speed wireless network service is used to “control our behavior” and that antidepressants have been linked to mass shootings.
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