Nov. 6 (UPI) — Former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to have a role within President-elect Donald Trump’s administration and says fluoridated water and vaccines are priorities.
“President Trump has given me three instructions,” Kennedy told NPR host Steve Inskeep during a phone interview on Wednesday.
“He wants the corruption and conflicts out of the regulatory agencies,” Kennedy said. “He wants to return the agencies to the gold standard [of] empirically based, evidence-based science and 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 said Trump’s new administration immediately will recommend state and local governments cease adding fluoride to local water supplies.
He said a federal judge appointed by former President Barack Obama on Oct. 4 ruled the Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t done health and safety studies regarding the effects of fluoride in public water supplies.
“One of the findings … was that at this level, fluoride is almost certainly causing neurological development,” Kennedy said, “and loss of IQ in our children as well as arthritis, bone breakage, thyroid problems, bone cancer and a number of other diseases.”
He said adding fluoride to water “made sense in the 1940s” but no longer does because it’s added to toothpaste.
Kennedy cited Austria and Germany removing fluoride from their respective water supplies and said both nations have about the same or lower cavity rates than the United States.
Kennedy also said he will “immediately” begin work to ensure proper research is done on vaccines to better ensure “vaccine safety.”
“We’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody,” Kennedy said. “We are going to make sure that Americans have good information right now.”
He said the “science on vaccine safety” is lacking and it’s important to ensure “scientific studies are done to enable people to make informed decisions regarding vaccinations for themselves and their children.”
Inskeep asked Kennedy about his famous family’s liberal ties and his former status as a Democrat, which Kennedy renounced and became a Republican earlier this year.
“You’re now joining an administration that appears to be dominated by a handful of billionaires — Elon Musk, John Paulson [and] Trump himself,” Inskeep said. “How do you view what somebody might see as an extreme concentration of wealth and power that’s coming here?”
“The Republican Party now only controls 30% of the wealth in our country,” Kennedy responded. “The Democratic Party controls 70%, and this is really a metamorphosis that took place because of Donald Trump.”
Trump chased billionaires out of the GOP and the Republican Party “now is the party of labor unions [and] and the party of working people,” Kennedy said.
The GOP “is the party of the American poor,” he added. “And those are the people who voted for Donald Trump. Those are the people that he’s going to keep those promises to.”
Kennedy said every presidential administration, including the Biden administration, has billionaires funding it, which is why the Biden and Harris campaigns outraised Trump by a two-to-one margin.
“If you want to worry about billionaires in government,you should have been asking that questions for the past four years,” Kennedy said. “That is something that I’ve been concerned about my whole life.”
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