(LifeSiteNews) — Dr. Deborah Birx, one of the top architects of the White House response to COVID-19, appeared to welcome Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as President-elect Donald’s Trump pick for Secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), praising him as a “very smart man.”
In an interview aired Sunday on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” Birx was on the defensive about RFK Jr. at times while maintaining her own favorable view of vaccines in contrast to RFK Jr.’s criticism of them. Asked by Brennan why she believes rates of vaccination are declining, Birx acknowledged that there has been an explosion in autism in the U.S., pointing out, “That’s scary to moms and dads. They want to know why.”
“So it’s not good enough for us to just say vaccines don’t cause autism,” said Birx, adding that government health experts should be expected to find the cause of autism and work to reverse it.
Brennan took aim at RFK Jr. linking autism to vaccines that stems from his work as an attorney for tens of thousands of families seeking compensation for autism that quickly developed in their children after vaccination. Brennan alleged, as does the mainstream media establishment, that there is “no scientific basis” for the claim that vaccines cause autism.
Yet, major media outlets receive generous funding from the pharma companies that develop vaccines. For example, Pfizer has sponsored many mainstream TV programs, including CNN Tonight, ABC News Nightline, CBS Healthwatch, and Good Morning America.
Birx agreed with Brennan’s claim that there is no “scientific basis” for a link between vaccines and autism but looked forward to the information RFK Jr. would present on the subject.
“I’m actually excited that in a Senate hearing he would bring forward his data and the questions that come from the senators would bring forth their data,” Birx said. “What I know for sure is he’s a very smart man who can bring his data and his evidence base forward, and we can have a discussion (about what) many Americans believe already is a problem.”
Trump announced in a social media post on Thursday that he is nominating Kennedy, a former independent presidential candidate, as HHS Secretary, lauding his plans to restore American health agencies to “the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research” and “end the Chronic Disease epidemic.”
“HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country,” wrote Trump, naming Kennedy’s passion projects that have been refined during the attorney’s long career defending Americans harmed from such chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
As a longtime Democrat, Kennedy held and continues to hold left-wing views on most issues, including abortion, but has attracted support from some conservatives for his strong criticism of the COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, and shots. Trump, by contrast, initially backed the lockdowns and embraces the shots to this day (while opposing making them mandatory). Kennedy has also expressed opposition to “gender transition” practices for minors, including puberty blockers, hormones, and transgender surgeries.
If Kennedy is confirmed by the Senate, he will oversee a broad range of health organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
In a late October interview, Kennedy shared that Trump has tasked him with cleaning up the corruption in these agencies and ending their conflicts of interest.
In recent years, Kennedy has spoken much about the pattern of corruption and conflicts of interest that he witnessed firsthand during his many years as an environmental attorney. During Kennedy’s presidential run, he discussed how the “corporate capture” of regulatory agencies is the “biggest threat to American democracy.”
According to Kennedy, the problem is pronounced in health agencies. For example, the FDA “gets 50 percent of its budget from Big Pharma” and the NIH “collects royalties when (a) pharma company sells (its) product,” as he explained in an interview last year.
He also cited statistics showing unprecedented, drastically poor patterns of health in Americans, especially in children. The numbers are staggering: When John F. Kennedy was president, six percent of Americans had chronic disease. Today, that number is 60 percent, according to RFK Jr.
“This is an existential threat to the country,” said Kennedy, adding that Trump wants his “legacy to the American people” to be “the end of the chronic disease epidemic.”
In contrast to Kennedy’s approach of extreme caution toward vaccines, as former White House coronavirus response coordinator during Trump’s first term, Birx helped encourage a highly risky vaccine strategy that effectively played Russian roulette with the lives of Americans. Under her watch, COVID shots using novel mRNA technology with extremely limited testing and poor safety data were rolled out.
A significant body of evidence links serious risks to the COVID shots, including the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which ordinarily only reports a small fraction of total vaccine deaths and injuries. As of October 25, VAERS reports 38,068 deaths, 218,646 hospitalizations, 22,002 heart attacks, and 28,706 myocarditis and pericarditis cases, among other ailments.
Birx was also a crucial part of the effort to convince Trump to support widespread lockdowns in 2020 and admitted two years later to using what she called “strategic sleight-of-hand” and “subterfuge” to shift the White House’s more limited original COVID guidance to more draconian measures.
She later admitted “thousands” of Americans could have been harmed by the controversial COVID shots while continuing to insist their net impact was positive, even after hundreds of thousands of reports of jab injuries.