Since riding Donald Trump’s coattails to power, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has taken his haphazard anti-vaccine views and enshrined them as a core tenet of US health policy.
According to 16 current and former health officials who spoke to Reuters, RFK Jr has taken much more drastic measures to push his anti-vaccine agenda than was previously known.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, two officials told the news agency that RFK approached National Institute of Health director Jay Bhattacharya earlier this year with a proposal to spend up to $5 billion in tax dollars to establish links between vaccines and autism.
As Reuters notes, that kind of spending would encompass ten percent of the NIH’s annual budget, a massive waste that would fly in the face of decades of established science showing vaccines definitively don’t cause autism.
