To put it mildly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no fan of Anthony Fauci.
The Democratic presidential candidate was asked in a recent interview about his criticism of Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, who became a national hero to some during the COVID pandemic.
“I think he was a genuinely bad human being,” Kennedy told podcaster Lex Fridman.
Fridman is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies machine learning, according to his website.
Fridman’s two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Kennedy covered a broad range of topics, including diet and exercise, God and religion, and Kennedy’s 14-year struggle with addiction, starting a year after his father’s death.
At one point, Fridman asked Kennedy about the 2021 book he wrote entitled “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”
Fridman attempted to reconcile Kennedy’s stance with that of the people who support Fauci.
“What is the biggest positive thing you think Anthony Fauci did for the world? What is good that he has done for the world, especially during this pandemic?” Fridman asked.
Kennedy was firm.
“You know, I don’t want to sit here and speak uncharitably by saying the guy didn’t do anything, but I can’t think of anything,” he told Fridman.
“In terms of his principal programs, of the AIDS programs and his COVID programs, I think that the harm that he did vastly outweighed the benefits.”
“Do you think he believes he’s doing good for the world?” Fridman asked, but Kennedy refused to go down that road.
“I try not to speculate about things that I don’t know about or I can’t prove,” he said. “I cannot tell you what his motivations were. … He’s done a lot of things that I think are really very, very bad things for humanity and very deceptive.”
Fridman asked Kennedy if he thought the difficulty of Fauci’s job had anything to do with his failures.
Kennedy discounted that theory. “No,” he said. “No. I think he was a genuinely bad human being.”
He added, “There were many, many good people in that department over the years. … Many people whose careers [Fauci] destroyed because they were trying to tell the truth. One after the other, the greatest scientists in the history of [the National Institutes of Health] were run out of that agency.”
Robert Kennedy Jr trashes Dr. Fauci:
“I think he was a genuinely bad human being. He’s done a lot of things that I think are really, very bad things for humanity. Very deceptive.” pic.twitter.com/QChOVaQz7N
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) July 6, 2023
The conversation then shifted to what Kennedy referred to as “Big Pharma” in the Fauci book.
Kennedy didn’t pull any punches when it came to the companies that manufacture the 72 vaccines now “effectively mandated” for American children. He flat-out called them a “criminal enterprise.”
“Collectively, those companies have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade,” Kennedy told Fridman, “and I think, since 2000, about $79 billion. So these are the most corrupt companies in the world. And the problem is that they’re serial felons. They do this again and again and again.”
“We found, when we sued them, the memos from their bean counters saying, ‘We’re going to kill this many people, but we’re still going to make money.’ … Those calculations are made very, very regularly. And then when they get caught, they pay a penalty.”
“The way that the system is set up … nobody ever goes to jail, so there’s really no penalty. It all becomes part of the cost of doing business,” he said.
Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, is on leave from his duties as chairman of the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, whose mission is described on its website as seeking to “end childhood health epidemics by working aggressively to eliminate harmful exposures, hold those responsible accountable and establish safeguards to prevent future harm.
“We fight corruption, mass surveillance and censorship that put profits before people as well as advocate for worldwide rights to health freedom and bodily autonomy.”