Kennedy suspended his presidential campaign in April and endorsed former President Trump's reelection bid. Shortly afterwards, Trump tapped his former opponent to be part of his transition team.
Howard Lutnick, co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team, said in a Wednesday interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Kennedy wants data from the federal government to check that vaccines are safe.
“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.’”
“So, that’s his point. He’s not trying to do anything, but things that made sense,” Lutnick added.
- During the interview, Lutnick pushed widely debunked claims about vaccines, including one linking childhood vaccines to rising cases of autism.
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He spent two and half hours with RFK Jr this week, he told Collins, and in that time Kennedy explained some theories about vaccines that he said made sense to him.
Meanwhile: Lutnick contradicted claims made by RFK Jr. earlier this week that Trump promised to give him control over several public health agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services.
“The key that … President Trump has promised me is — is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its subagencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and then also the USDA, which is … key to making America healthy,” Kennedy said in video viewed by The Hill.
"Because we’ve got to get off of seed oils, and we’ve got to get off of pesticide intensive agriculture.
But during the interview Wednesday, Lutnick stressed that Kennedy “is not getting a job for HHS” nor does he want one.
