RFK Jr.: ‘We’re not gonna take vaccines away from anybody’

Anti-vaccine activist and former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s been promised a prominent health care role by President-elect Donald Trump in his administration, sought to allay concerns Wednesday that he would seek to halt vaccinations.

“We’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody,” he told NPR in an interview this morning after Trump’s overnight victory. He repeated the message a few hours later in an interview with MSNBC.

Instead, Kennedy said he wants to improve the science of vaccine safety, which he said “has huge deficits in it,” so Americans can have all the right information to choose whether to get vaccinated.

“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,” he told MSNBC.

Kennedy has made false claims about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, alleging they have caused an increase in autism, but he told MSNBC he’s “never been anti-vaccine.”

Why it matters: The former presidential candidate, who dropped out this summer and endorsed Trump, revealed more of what Trump has promised him.

“President Trump has given me three instructions: He wants the corruption and the conflicts out of the regulatory agencies; he wants to return the agencies to the gold standard, empirically-based, evidence-based agents in medicine that they were once famous for; and he wants to end the chronic disease epidemic with measurable impacts on a diminishment of chronic disease within two years,” Kennedy told NPR.

That could mean firing federal workers, such as those at the Food and Drug Administration’s nutrition division, “that are inept, that are not doing their job,” he told MSNBC.

“They’re not protecting our kids. Why do we have Froot Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients, and you go to Canada, and it's got two or three?” Kennedy asked, referencing the cereal made by Michigan-based WK Kellogg Co.

He also said the Trump administration would recommend against fluoride in drinking water. Many water systems in the U.S. have added the chemical to drinking water for decades to fight cavities, but Kennedy claims “it’s almost certainly” causing neurological development issues and loss of IQ in children.

He pointed to a recent ruling by an Obama-appointed judge in California, who concluded that a "preponderance of the evidence" showed that fluoridation at 0.7 milligrams per liter, the level considered optimal in the U.S., poses unreasonable risk of reducing children’s IQ.

In that lawsuit, EPA experts argued that while fluoride can be hazardous at certain concentrations, the relationship between dosage and health risk at lower exposure is unclear.

However, the judge recommended the EPA regulate fluoride in drinking water.

“I think fluoride is on the way out because of that court decision. I think the faster that it goes out, the better,” Kennedy told MSNBC.

He also said fluoride is included in toothpaste and thus not needed in drinking water to prevent cavities and pointed out that Austria and Germany don’t add the chemical to water and have “either the same or lower cavity issues” as the U.S.

What’s next? Kennedy told NPR that he and Trump have not decided whether Trump would name him to a Senate-confirmed position “but that is a possibility.”

He has previously said that Trump promised him control of some federal agencies, including the Health and Human Services and Agriculture departments.

Emmy Martin contributed to this report.