Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke to a room full of vaccine skeptics Thursday afternoon as though he was coming home.
“I think I know most of the people in this room,” he told dozens of attendees at a one-day conference in downtown D.C. put on by Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group he chaired from 2015 to 2023.
Kennedy’s presence at the conference — which featured speakers railing against vaccines as a major threat to children — highlighted his close ties to the anti-vaccine movement even as he runs the government health agency that administers major federal insurance programs, regulates drugs and oversees public health.
Kennedy assured attendees that President Donald Trump, who recently signed an executive order aimed at amending the childhood vaccine schedule, is their ally.
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“Let me be clear: You have a strong and steadfast friend at the White House,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy spent the first part of his 75-minute address touting his efforts to address chronic illness. But he quickly pivoted to more fringe topics, receiving spirited applause from the crowd as he vowed to probe for answers to their longstanding skepticism of vaccines, chemtrails and electric and magnetic fields.
Kennedy ticked through a list of vaccine-related initiatives at Health and Human Services, touting new research into the causes of autism, changes to childhood shots and efforts to change how adverse vaccine effects are reported.
But at one point, he seemed apologetic that HHS hadn’t achieved more changes in the 19 months he has served as secretary.
“A lot of people in this community … expected me to come in and upset this whole system,” Kennedy said. “We are doing this one day at a time.”
Kennedy stayed more disciplined in his criticisms of vaccines than other speakers at the conference. Before Kennedy spoke, the crowd heard from Mark Gorton, president of the MAHA Institute, a thank tank aligned with Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement.
In a presentation that included multiple charts and graphs, Gorton argued that giving children vaccines — which he called “nightmares” — has caused the worst-ever health crisis in the United States.
“Vaccine injuries are the largest scandal in the history of medicine,” Gorton said.
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