Former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he won’t take away vaccines from people when President-elect Trump takes office in January.
Kennedy, who is expected to serve in a second Trump administration, said in a Wednesday interview with NBC News that he wants the American people to have the information to make informed decisions about vaccines.
“I’m not going to take away anybody’s vaccines,” Kennedy told NBC News when asked whether there were specific vaccines that Kennedy would want to remove from the market.
“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have [a] choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information,” he said.
“So I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and efficacy are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them,” Kennedy added.
The comments come after Trump-Vance transition team co-Chair Howard Lutnick said in a CNN interview on Oct. 30 that Kennedy wants to conduct studies so that he could prove vaccines are unsafe and eventually cause them to be pulled from the market.
Lutnick, in the interview with CNN, also pushed back on reports that Trump pledged to tap Kennedy for the job of secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
“He’s not getting a job for HHS,” Lutnick said, adding that does not Kennedy want the job — a statement Kennedy later refuted.
“He wants the data, so he can say, ‘These things are unsafe.’ He says, ‘If you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe.’ And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off, off of the market,” Lutnick told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
“So, that’s his point. He’s not trying to do anything, but things that made sense,” Lutnick added.
The interview prompted further questions about what role Kennedy would play in a potential second Trump term.
Kennedy said in an interview Sunday that Trump had “assured” him that he would have a White House job in a second term. Kennedy added, however, that he had not yet decided whether he wants to be HHS secretary.
“I want to be in the White House. And he’s assured me that I’m going to have that,” Kennedy said Sunday, when asked about whether he would get the HHS job.
“I want to be in the position where I’m most effective to end the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy continued. “And I’m confident that if I wanted to do HHS secretary, the president would fight like hell to make that happen.”
Trump on Sunday did not rule out banning certain vaccines when asked about Lutnick’s remarks regarding Kennedy in a separate NBC News interview.
“Well, 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 said about Kennedy, when asked whether banning certain vaccines could be a possibility under his administration.