Ex-CDC acting director calls RFK Jr's false vaccine theories 'cruel'

Source: The Guardian

Sun 17 Nov 2024 16.08 EST
Last modified on Sun 17 Nov 2024 16.32 EST


The former acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has criticized Robert F Kennedy Jr’s nomination by Donald Trump as secretary of the country’s health and human services (HHS), calling his false vaccine theories “cruel”.

In a new interview on ABC, Richard Besser, who led the CDC during Barack Obama’s administration, called Kennedy’s push to falsely link vaccines to autism a “cruel thing to do”, adding, “There are things we do for our own health, but there are things we do that are good for ourselves, our families and our communities and vaccination falls into that category.”

“Having someone who denies that in that role is extremely dangerous,” Besser said about Kennedy. “We need to, as a nation, address chronic diseases in children and one of the dangerous things about RFK Jr is that there are bits of things he says that are true and they’re mixed in … It makes it really hard to sort out what things you should follow because they’re based on fact and which things are not,” he continued.

Besser went on to say that experts should address chronic diseases – including autism – but to “keep [on] lifting the idea [that] that has something to do with vaccinations is really a cruel thing to do”.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/17/rfk-jr-false-vaccine-theories-cruel