Former president Donald Trump suggested Sunday that he is open to banning some vaccines, in line with the deranged views of his conspiracy theorist and reporter-sexting surrogate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“I’m going to talk to him and talk to other people, and I’ll make a decision, but he’s a very talented guy and has strong views,” Trump told NBC News, when asked about the former independent presidential candidate’s anti-vaxxer views and whether he would ban any inoculations.
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Kennedy has a long track record of making false medical claims, including linking vaccines to autism.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Kennedy railed against state and federal restrictions and later made the bewildering false claim that the virus was “ethnically targeted” to exempt “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center noted that he and his nonprofit were responsible for spreading disinformation about measles vaccines in American Samoa, “contributing to one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent memory” that sickened over 5,700 and killed 83 people in 2019."
Speaking to NBC on Friday, Trump called RFK Jr. “a great guy” who “wants to make people healthy.”
RFK Jr. dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump in August. He has since adopted the cringe MAGA-lite slogan “Make American Healthy Again,” sticking it on t-shirts and merch in an effort to pay off the debt for his broke campaign.
He’s also inserted himself as something like the Trump campaign’s resident non-expert health guru, which has been increasingly embraced by the candidate and his team, despite RFK Jr’s whacko views on a number of subjects.
On Saturday, Kennedy suggested a future Trump administration would remove fluoride, which helps dental health, from drinking water — another questionable move that Trump didn’t rule out.
“I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds okay to me,” he told NBC News.
At a MAGA event with Tucker Carlson—no stranger to crazed beliefs, like his recent disclosure that he was allegedly attacked by a demon—on Thursday, Trump suggested Kennedy could be charged with reviewing vaccine and pesticides policies if he were elected.
“He can do anything he wants,” he told Carlson. “He wants to look at the vaccines. He wants everything. I think it’s great.”
