White House officials are reportedly telling Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to cool it on his vaccine diatribes because it’s denting President Donald Trump’s pride in his handling of the pandemic.
The health and human services secretary’s repeated criticism of COVID-19 vaccines has apparently prompted White House officials to message the long-standing anti-vaxxer and his team with demands to “tone down his rhetoric,” The New York Times reported, citing two sources with knowledge of the discussions.
Aides reportedly made the move amid concerns over Kennedy’s ongoing crusade against inoculations among Trump’s allies and even the president himself, given the stock Trump apparently places in the Operation Warp Speed initiative, which promoted the vaccines during his first stint in the White House.
Operation Warp Speed has lately also proven a source of some cognitive dissonance for Kennedy, who told a Senate hearing last week that Trump ought to receive a Nobel Prize for the initiative despite the health secretary’s simultaneous criticism of the COVID-19 vaccine schedule.
The Daily Beast has reached out to both the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services for comment on reported tension between the two men. A Trump spokesperson told the Times that the president “maintains full confidence” in Kennedy, while a department spokesperson said the secretary and Trump “are united in their commitment to make America healthy again.”
It nevertheless follows after the president strongly implied he doesn’t necessarily agree with the secretary on everything. “He’s a different kind of guy,” Trump told reporters Sunday. “He’s got a lot of good ideas—but he’s got a lot of ideas.”
Scott Gottlieb, who served as Food and Drug Administration commissioner between 2017 and 2019 in Trump’s first term, was decidedly less subtle during a CNBC appearance Monday.
While “the president seems to be supportive of Kennedy,” Gottlieb told the network that “I had many opportunities to talk to the president about vaccines,” adding that “always affirmed the importance of the pediatric schedule, and a few times that he went out and spoke publicly about this forcefully, it was always to encourage people to get vaccinated.”
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