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To a late last week in Arizona, anti-vaccine activist and member of Donald Trump’s transition team, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said he would fire and replace 600 people at the National Institutes of Health as soon as the “first day” of a second Trump term. The NIH is one of the public health agencies Kennedy hates most — and while he still has no defined role in a new administration, he clearly relishes the opportunity to promise retaliation against them.

In comments that have been first reported by ABC NewsKennedy said, “We need to act quickly, and we want to have these people in place by January 20, so that on January 21, 600 people come into the NIH offices and 600 people leave.” »

Kennedy, a longtime opponent of vaccines, has consistently criticized the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and other federal agencies that are part of the basic public health infrastructure. Her The real Anthony Fauci attacked Fauci, a former NIH director, in the length of a book, but with what a doctor critical called “numerous errors and gross misrepresentations.”

The remarks offering concrete details about Kennedy’s alignment with Trump and “Make America Healthy Again” program came during a scene interview at an entrepreneurship event in Scottsdale, which included discussions about Kennedy’s workout routine and his relationship with the former and future president.

Calley Means, a self-described health care reform activist who played a role in Kennedy’s independent presidential campaign, sat next to him during part of the interview. He characterized the MAHA movement as “driving special interests and the deep state” out of government, calling the NIH an “orgy of corruption.”

Kennedy made other eyebrow-raising claims during the interview, such as saying that “pilot studies” showed anorexia could be cured with a “keto diet and other types of diets.”

“The NIH won’t do these studies because they don’t want to know the source, or the cure, or the treatment of chronic diseases,” he said. He also returned to his hobby horse, asserting links between vaccines and the spread of autism.

“I never saw anyone with autism when I was a kid,” Kennedy said. “Never.” He added that men his age – Kennedy is 70 – do not suffer from “full-blown autism,” which he defined as “wearing helmets,” “not being potty trained” and “the headbutts, the stimulations, the walking on tiptoes”.

(Experts believe that autism was underdiagnosed until recent decades; the oldest prevalence were not carried out until the 1960s and 1970s. Autistic adults have a range of abilities and autistic self-advocates have said that Kennedy uses offensive and ableist language talk about autism: rather than “full-blown”, public health experts would generally say “profound autism.” Kennedy also still uses the term “Asperger’s.” an outdated sentence referring to a scientist who worked with the Nazis during the Holocaust.)

Kennedy also used his appearance in Scottsdale to continue flattering Trump, saying the new president “has an aura of greatness around him” for his role in resisting what he called “the globalist project.”

He also criticized his own extended family, many of whom criticized his presidential campaignand some called it “tragically wrongon vaccines as early as 2019. Kennedy said these relatives were “all under this kind of hypnosis” and were “persuaded by this wall of propaganda to turn against their own values.”