Trump tells RFK Jr. he agrees with his anti-vax stance in a leaked video

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, criticized childhood vaccines and appeared to promise a place in his administration, should he win, to anti-vaccine activist and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a video posted on X.

Trump’s inaccurate statements about vaccines on Sunday, the day after he was shot at a Western Pennsylvania rally, are heard in a leaked video created by Kennedy’s son, Bobby Kennedy III. It shows RFK Jr. listening to Trump on the phone. The younger Kennedy posted the video on Tuesday, then took it down.

Trump says in the video that he believes that children get too many vaccinations, explaining, “It’s like 38 vaccines [that] look like they’re meant for a horse, not a 10- or 20-pound baby. ... And then you see the baby radically change. I’ve seen it too many times.”

Then Trump appears to ask Kennedy to work with him if Trump defeats President Joe Biden in November: “I would love you to do something. ... It would be so big for you.”

Asked to review the video, Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said Tuesday: “It’s not surprising. Trump has been against vaccinations before.”

In recent campaign speeches, Trump has pledged to “not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.” Trump has waffled on the issue. In 2019, he supported measles shots during an outbreak, reversing his previous claims linking child vaccinations to autism, as Kennedy does. And Trump was vaccinated against COVID-19.

Offit has said that Kennedy’s purported vaccine-autism connection makes Kennedy a “bona fide source of disinformation.”

“Years of research in 10 countries don’t support RFK’s claim,” Offit said in an interview Tuesday. “That RFK Jr. could have a place in Trump’s administration can only be bad for children.”

Correcting Trump, he added that children and adolescents receive a total of about 17 vaccinations, not 38, as Trump said.

Offit also criticized Trump’s statement that a baby will “radically change” after vaccinations. “Like Trump’s seen all of this, as if he were closely watching how children develop.”

Offit added that Trump’s praise of Kennedy and his anti-vaccine stance is especially puzzling since “the greatest accomplishment of his administration was Operation Warp Speed,” the public-private partnership that accelerated the development and distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Trump himself said in 2021, “The [COVID-19] vaccine is one of the greatest achievements of mankind.”

Yet, Offit added, “Now, he’ll withdraw fed funds with any school with vaccine mandates.”

Kennedy’s son wrote that he posted the video of his father on the phone with Trump. “I’m a firm believer that conversations like this should be had in public,” he wrote on X before removing the post.

Chagrined that the video was seen, Kennedy posted his own statement on X on Tuesday, saying, “When President Trump called me I was taping with an in-house videographer. I should have ordered the videographer to stop recording immediately. I am mortified that this was posted. I apologize to the president.”