ELIZABETH VARGAS: Mr. Kennedy, one of the biggest controversies surrounding your candidacy is your stance on childhood vaccines. Nearly every scientific and medical organization including the CDC, FDA, the AMA, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, all say you're wrong on this issue. This leads us to our very first question from our audience--
KENNEDY: I would ask one thing, on what issue?
VARGAS: On childhood vaccines.
KENNEDY: What about them?
VARGAS: Whether they ever cause autism or damage kids. They all say these vaccines have saved millions of lives.
KENNEDY: They've never damaged kids?
VARGAS: I don't think anybody has said they never have. There might be a child here, but overall all those organizations say vaccines are safe and have saved millions and millions of lives. Let's get to our audience question from Dr. Butt.
DR. TARIQ BUTT: Eradication of chickenpox and polio in the U.S. and many parts of the world is a direct result of regular vaccines. Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and many diseases are preventable, and there is little to no evidence of these diseases in the vaccinated population. Your vaccine stance is dangerous to the health and well-being of millions. Medical experts are deeply concerned about your message. how can we help you to come to the side of science?
KENNEDY: What was the question? How can you help me come to my senses?
BUTT: No, no, the side of science, you are a very smart person.
KENNEDY: I think most people don't know what my stance is on vaccines. I've never been anti-vaccine and I've said that hundreds and hundreds of times, but it doesn't matter. Because that is a way of silencing me, using that pejorative as a way of silencing or marginalizing me. My position on vaccines is, I think, virtually every American would agree with my stance on vaccines, which is that vaccines should be tested like other medicines. They should be safety tested. And unfortunately, vaccines are not safety tested. of the 72 vaccine doses now mandated, essentially mandated -- they're recommended by essentially mandated for American children, none of them, not one of them has ever been subject to a prelicensing placebo-controlled trial.
VARGAS: Yes they have.
KENNEDY: No. Let me just say something. Dr. Fauci and many other people for many years said this, "Bobby Kennedy, what he says is wrong." I met with Dr. Fauci in 2016, when I agreed to go on Trump's vaccine safety commission. I was with Aaron Siri and Lynn Redwood and a number of other people and we said to him, "Can you show us one test from any vaccine?" Pre-licensing safety test. And he said, "I'll send it to you, I can't find one now." He never did, so we sued him. Aaron Siri and I sued HHS and after a year of litigation and stonewalling, they said they could not provide a single safety study for any vaccine that is on the childhood schedule. Pre-licensing safety study.
Anybody who wants to read that can go to the Children's Health Defense website and you can read HHS's admission that not a single one has ever been safety tested pre-licensing. What I've said is other medicines are required to do this and we should have to do that for vaccines. If I'm wrong, show me the test. Show me the study. You won't be able to. Because there are none.
That means we don't know what the long-term risks are -- the risk profile of those products.
You mentioned chicken pox. So, when CDC was thinking of recommending the chicken pox vaccine and mandating it for children, they did a study. And the scientist they hired to do that study was Dr. Gary Goldman, a contract scientist. He did the study in an isolated place in California called Antelope Valley, a long-term study. And what they found was if you give the chickenpox vaccine, mass vaccinate with chickenpox, it stops chickenpox but it causes shingles epidemics later on, which are 20 times as deadly as chickenpox.
Nevertheless, despite those studies, we mandate it for American children in this country. In Europe, they don't. If you go to the British National Health Service website right now, you can read where they say they do not recommend the chickenpox vaccine because it causes shingle epidemics later on. That's the problem. You can't just look at--
You can say this product is going to prevent this particular disease, but you have to look at the long-term impacts. Vaccines, like other medicines, have injuries that have long diagnostic horizons and long incubation periods. If you do not do long-term studies, placebo-controlled studies, comparing vaccinated populations with unvaccinated populations, you won't do it.
Let me give you one quick other example. The most popular vaccine in the world is the DTP vaccine, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. We got rid of it in this country because it was causing severe brain injuries or death to one in every 300 children. We used it in the 80s and that's why there was all this litigation against vaccine companies that precipitated the passage of the Vaccine Act that then gave them immunity from liability. But in Europe, they don't use it. In America, they don't use it, but we give it to 161 million African children per year.
So Bill Gates asked the Danish government to support that program and say it will save 30 million lives. The Danish government said, show me the data. He wasn't able to. So they went to Africa and did their own studies. They looked at 30 years of DTP data and what they found shocked them all. They found that girls who got the DTP vaccine were dying at 10 times the rate of unvaccinated girls, but they were dying of things that nobody had ever associated with the vaccine. They were dying of anemia, malaria, pulmonary disease, respiratory disease, and pneumonia. And nobody noticed for 30 years that it was the vaccinated girls and not the unvaccinated girls who were dying.
What happened is these girls were not dying of diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. The vaccine had protected them against those. But, it had also ruined their immune systems. And they were unable to defend themselves against other, minor diseases that other kids with hearty immune systems were able to fend off. So that's why you need these long-term studies, and that's why I'm worried that we don't do that here in the United States.
DR. BUTT: And we do have evidence of that, like there are clinical trials and randomized trials, and there's a difference between association and causation. Somebody can take a medication and get involved in a motor vehicle accident, it doesn't mean that that is associated, that it was caused by the medication, unless we get to the bottom of it. So many times, we should continue to figure out ways to, for the safety of vaccines, of course, and the medical community is always looking for that. But at the same time, you know, like, we can really come to and agreement that vaccines are important and do prevent those diseases. After all, smallpox was in the world, all around the world. It's not there anymore. So there is evidence of that.
KENNEDY: And there are diseases, you know, when we passed the Vaccine Act, when I was a kid there were only 3 vaccines. I was compliant. But when we passed the Vaccine Act, it made vaccines very, very valuable. And all of a sudden, there was a gold rush to add a lot of new vaccines to the schedule for diseases that aren't even casually contagious, like Rotavirus, like Hepatitis-B. Why are we giving Hepatitis-B vaccines to a one-day-old child? Hepatitis-B, you know, that the major factors for that are it is sexually transmitted or by needles. Why would you give that to one day old child? It's really a profit motive.
Now you're right that correlation is not causation, but the Institute of Medicine has looked into the vaccine schedule and said in their 2011 report there are over 150 injuries that are likely to be associated with vaccines that have never been studied. So it's the CDC's responsibility to do those studies and they have been ordered again and again and again to do them, and they have refused. And that's worn. We need an agency that is putting public health first and not pharmaceutical profits.
You were talking about the opioid crisis. The opioid crisis, you know, started with the Oxycodon, and now it is fentanyl. The same companies got the FDA to lie to us about the addictiveness, lie to every doctor in this country about the addictive of Oxycodon and get a whole generation addicted, those are the same companies that make these you know, other products.
The four companies that make vaccines in this country, Merck, Zinovy, Glaxo and Pfizer, have paid over $35 billion dollars in criminal penalties over the past decade for lying to doctors, for falsifying science, for defrauding regulators. And we need to keep an eye on them. We can't just trust them. If they say it's a vaccine, we all trust it. We need to have actual science on it. And I think that's all I say.
I don't want to get rid of vaccines. If you want to take a vaccine, you should be able to do it. But we need good science. And that's all I've asked for that.
VARGAS: So what do you say to people? I mean, it sounds like you're saying that every scientist, every government, our government and governments around the world, doctors like Dr. Butt are all lying about vaccines?
KENNEDY: I never said anything like that.
VARGAS: The AMA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, they all and the FDA says, and in fact, on its website, you can clearly see vaccines go through 3 stages of FDA testing against double-blind placebos. They already do that.
KENNEDY: Elizabeth, you can say that. I'm telling you... the FDA is not saying that.
VARGAS: Yes they do, on their website.
KENNEDY: They will not tell you that there's any vaccine that has ever undergone a long-term placebo-controlled trial prior to license. They will not because that's not true...
Let me say this. I'm not saying the AMA is lying or the doctors are lying. What I'm saying is the FDA does lie and the FDA lied to us about Vioxx. They knew that the Vioxx was causing heart attacks but they let doctors believe it was all a medicine that was good and beneficial for headaches and arthritis without telling you that it was going to kill them, and they ended up killing between 120,000 and 500,000 people.
VARGAS: So all these doctors and all scientists around the world who say vaccines are safe and have saved millions and millions of lives?
KENNEDY: The same people said Vioxx was safe. The same people said opioids and Oxycodon were not addictive. Because FDA said it and they believed them. And that's the problem, we have a corrupt federal agency that's lying to the AMA, to, you know, to all of those agencies, and all of the doctors, and they believe them.
But those agencies are controlled by Pharma and that is the problem. That's what I'm trying end to as president.
...
VARGAS: That leads to our next question from Kelhen here in Chicago.
KELHEN MARTIN: Hello sir, thank you so much for being here. As an undecided Democratic voter, I have a few concerns. And I'd like just to your your thoughts on an easing some of those concerns. We just heard about vaccines, that being one of them.
Another one being that you have attributed a connection between 5-G data and, in quotes, that "It will harvest our data and control our behavior," and then also ---
KENNEDY: Can I answer that? ... My concerns about 5-G is that the RF radiation from 5-G is dangerous. It penetrates and disrupts the blood-brain barrier. It also is associated with glioblastomas and other cancers. And it causes a lot of other dramatic health effects. There are literally thousands and thousands of studies on that. I've litigated on that issue and I've won and the federal court of appeals. So, you know, you can say it's a conspiracy theory. But the federal court of appeals, you know, I also won a case on Monsanto and glyphosates that called non-hodgkin's lymphoma, that was called a conspiracy theory.
What I've said about 5-G is it is dangerous. It is under-regulated. Other countries regulate it much better than us. And we need to protect our children. We should not be having these antennas on elementary schools. We should be warning people, probably do not put that cell phone next to your head. You've got, you where we're seeing this epidemic now of glioblastomas. And almost all of them are connected to the ear that you favor the cell phone with.
You know, there is study after study that shows that -- and I'm in litigation on that issue right now. And you know, if we get a fair trial, we're going to win that litigation as well.
VARGAS: But again, you're a lawyer and and activist. You're not a doctor or a scientist.
KENNEDY: Listen. We live in a democracy. We don't have a priesthood here. We don't have high priests who are telling us. We're in charge of our own lives, and Americans need to do their own research.
And you know, listen, people say "trust the experts," that became a mantra during Covid.
I brought over 500 cases. And almost all of them involved a sicentific controversy. My job is to read science to learn it and to be able to read it critically. And in every case I've ever brought, there's expert on that side and an expert on this side. When we brought the Monsanto case, it was 3 experts from Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. And we had experts from Harvard, and they were saying exactly the opposite thing.
You know, saying "trust the experts" to me makes no sense at all. Trusting the experts is a function of religion and totalitarianism. It is not a function of democracy. In a democracy, we question everybody.
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