Governments’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic was more about power grabs than genuine public health concerns, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told RT DE in Berlin in August 2020. He was nominated by US President-elect Donald Trump for the position of secretary of health and human services (HHS) on Thursday.
Back in 2020, authorities around the world responded to the coronavirus outbreak with strict lockdowns followed by the introduction of rapidly developed vaccines, with jabs being mandatory for certain categories of people in some countries.
The measures sparked massive protests in Germany and elsewhere. Kennedy, who emerged as a critic of the Covid-19 response by governments around the world, took part in one rally in the German capital. An RT DE crew approached him for a comment at that time.
“Governments love pandemics for the same reason they love wars. It gives them a capacity to impose authoritarian controls on the population. We’ve seen many, many controls that do not make sense to people,” he told RT, commenting on the situation as of August 2020.
According to Kennedy, the authorities rushed to introduce policies designed to save people from Covid-19 infection without proper “risk assessment.” Saving people from the disease only to let them suffer from “unemployment, isolation, food shortages, from obliteration of the middle class” was not a good strategy, he said.
“We need government policies that reflect the best for our democracy, that respect our democracy and respect our humanity and we’re not getting that,” Kennedy added. He also stated that he was “not against vaccines” in general but wanted “safe vaccines.”
“I want regulators that are free from financial entanglements with the vaccine industry. We need this because many vaccine programs around the world are very corrupted,” he claimed, adding that many vaccines were not undergoing sufficient safety tests.
Kennedy also criticized what he called an obsession with linking healthcare to technology, which he said was exemplified by billionaire Bill Gates, among others. “Bill Gates has a belief that human health comes from technology, that the only way to stay healthy is in a syringe,” he said, adding that many other more traditional aspects of healthcare like “nutrition, sanitation, hygiene, development” get neglected as a result.
Kennedy also sharply criticized what he called “preoccupation with [genetically modified] crops and chemical fertilizers.”
“People are eating oil, essentially,” he told RT at the time.
A long-time vaccine skeptic and proponent of organic agriculture, Kennedy will oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other sub-agencies if his nomination is confirmed.
He has been a vocal critic of all those agencies and has promised sweeping reforms if placed in charge of them.