June 27, 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. held a Health Policy Roundtable featuring a panel of health freedom advocates, including yours truly; my good friend Dr. Patrick Gentempo; Maureen McDonnell, a holistic pediatric nurse; Dr. Pierre Kory, cofounder of the Frontline COVID Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC); filmmaker Mikki Willis; Sayer Ji, founder of Greenmed.com; and Dr. Sherri Tenpenny.
Opening Statements
The event was hosted by Mary Holland, former president and general counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), an organization founded by Kennedy. She’s currently on a leave of absence from the CHD to work on Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
“I’m on the campaign in large part because of Mr. Kennedy’s strong stance to protect freedom, including health freedom, and to protect fundamental human rights,” Holland said in her opening statement.
“Many of you watching are key supporters of the health freedom movement, and you’re familiar with a lot of the things Mr. Kennedy has been talking about over the years — about agency capture, corporate greed, corruption, pharmaceutical and medical harm, and abuse of government power, especially during COVID … and most of you agree that the U.S. healthcare system needs deep reform, which is our subject tonight.”
Charles Eisenstein, who has been working closely with Kennedy on policy and messaging moderated the event.
“What distinguishes the people on this panel is courage,” Eisenstein said. “This is not merely an abstract ideal — health freedom — for any of us here. It’s something that all of us have risked our careers for …
What unifies us is a certain independence of thought, and also a practicality that we’re actually seeking to do something about it, at a time when the information landscape has become so fragmented that it’s hard to tell who to trust and what to believe, when the traditional authorities have lost the trust of the public.
I hope that everybody listening will tune in both to the content of what is said [and] to the tone of the inquiry, and to trust your instincts on who is sincere and who is truthful. Run it by your reason and logic …
Many of us have been ‘alternative’ for a very long time. This is the moment where the collapsing center … the dysfunctional health system, finally opens up, and what has so long been alternative might become a new mainstream that could transform the health of this country. This is the … possibility that we’re engaged in.”
As expected, mainstream media have had nothing good to say about the event, attempting to smear Kennedy and the panelists with headlines like “RFK Jr. Claims ‘Vaccine Research’ Likely Responsible for HIV and the Spanish Flu”1,2 and “RFK Jr. to Hold Event With Doctor Who Says COVID Vaccine Makes Forks Stick to Your Body.”3 I suggest following Eisenstein’s invitation to listen to it and make up your own mind. Below I will summarize some of the central highlights from this Q&A.
How Kennedy Intends to Change the Health Care System
McDonnell asked Kennedy how he intends to transform our current disease care system into a health care system that “takes into account and effectively addresses root causes of illnesses, the underlying issues of these chronic conditions that are plaguing our nation.” Kennedy replies:
“That’s one of the issues that really makes me excited to be able to debate … and my capacity to actually get something done on that issue is one of the things that that really attracted me to make this run.
I think I know how to fix the problem … and a lot of the problem can be fixed from the Oval Office without the cooperation of Congress, so it can be done pretty quickly. The regulatory process usually takes about seven years, but you can change policy and guidelines overnight.
I need to end the financial conflicts, and to the extent I can do that with executive orders, I will … One is the advertising of pharmaceutical drugs on TV, which I can change with executive order. At least I can direct NIH, or I can direct FDA and the FCC … to institute a regulatory process to end that practice …
I’m also going to intervene directly with the journals. I’m going to call the journals into the Department of Justice and tell them that we believe they’re involved in racketeering with the pharmaceutical industry to systematically lie to the public — through their retractions, through their financial entanglements, which encourage them to publish false information to promote pharmaceutical products.
One thing I can directly do that I’m most excited about is, I can terminate a lot of the grants to infectious disease and virologists and redirect those grants … to study chronic disease. I’m going to pressure journals to publish the results of these studies.
We’re going to start funneling studies to a different group of scientists, to people who actually want to see where the chronic disease is coming from. I’m going to open up the vaccine safety DataLink, which is now in a lockbox. It’s like locked up like Fort Knox. I’m going to open it up so every scientist can get in there and look at the data.
That data you can do cluster analyses on because that’s the vaccination records in the health records of … at least 10 million Americans from the top 10 HMOs. What I would like to do is a real medical informatics system where you digitalize all that data, so you can do these … studies, literally in seconds.
You can say, show me the association between children’s hepatitis B vaccine within their first 30 days and diabetes, and ASD and autism … You can correlate all that stuff and look at very good data almost instantaneously … So, I’m very excited about having a real medical informatics system, not just to look at vaccines, but to look at every medicine.
If you’ve got two competitive diabetes medicines, why don’t we know which one is most effective? Why don’t we know which one is most likely to result in heart attacks or whatever?
We’ll be able to compare every medical intervention in the country instantaneously, and compare it to all the alternatives, and do hundreds of these studies in a day, and then notify the insurance companies. ‘Look, this isn’t a medicine that actually works, and this is a medicine that is going to cost you money over the long term.’”
Kennedy would also weed out scientists who have approved harmful interventions due to conflicts of interest. Scientists and leaders on medical approval committees have a sacred responsibility to protect American health, and if they’re not living up to that duty, they would be forbidden from serving on any federal medical commission ever again.
Preventing Political Bias in Research
Kory, in turn wanted to know how Kennedy intends to ensure that political bias is kept out of future funding decisions, particularly funding for research. While funding decisions need to go through Congress, Kennedy could make many changes that don’t require Congressional approval.
For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) no longer studies chronic disease and has instead become an incubator for drug development, from which the agency then collects royalties. “I’m going to end that, to the extent that I can,” Kennedy says. One way to end that scheme is to end the practice of allowing NIH scientists to collect royalties on products they’ve worked on.
“That’s just wrong,” Kennedy says. “Regulators should not be making money on products that they worked on at taxpayer expense. But mainly, I don’t think NIH should be in the business of incubating drugs for the pharmaceutical industry, unless there’s some compelling reasons that pharmacy is not going to develop that drug on its own.
By the way, I do not believe that infectious disease is an enormous threat to human health. We had a huge death rate from COVID in this country, but almost everybody who died had chronic disease … The real threat to American health is not coming from infections; it’s coming from chronic disease, and that is what we should target for all of our research.”
We Must End Gain-of-Function Research
Kennedy also vows to end all gain-of-function research, and will work to get all nations to sign onto a treaty to ban all such research.
“Gain-of-function research, it’s just a disaster,” he says. “It’s given us no benefits, it’s given us everything from Lyme disease to COVID, and many other diseases. RSV, which is now one of the biggest killers of children, came out of a vaccine lab …
There’s good evidence that even Spanish flu came from … vaccine research … Vaccine research has actually created some of the worst plagues in our history …”
Kennedy Stands for Constitutional Absolutism
Gentempo asked Kennedy how he intends to prevent the destruction of Constitutional rights in the name of “health care” or a “medical emergency,” as was done during the COVID pandemic. Kennedy replied:
“I’ll have to go to Congress … and change the criteria for the declaration of emergencies in this country. We need to make it clear that the Constitution is inviolable, and that even in the most dire emergency, you can’t waive the Constitution, and that you have to go through the democratic process.
Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t have short emergencies. But what we saw with this emergency was really extraordinary, because the entire democratic process was waived … But it doesn’t matter if the life of the nation is at stake — you cannot do [that]. The Constitution is more important even than the nation, or any amount of lives, and we need to go back to that.”
Redirecting the Democratic Party to Its Original Values
For my part, I chose to play the devil’s advocate and asked Kennedy why people should support another Democrat for President, seeing how the federal government has been hijacked by globalist billionaires, and the Democratic Party under the Biden regime has become the most authoritarian administration in United States history.
The barrier to Kennedy winning as a Democratic candidate seems near insurmountable, thanks to the Democratic National Convention (DNC) super PACs. Kennedy would have to get 66% of the vote to win those state delegates. So, why has he chosen to run as a Democrat, when the party has a massive arsenal with which to prevent him from winning? Kennedy replied:
“I’m not asking you to support the Democratic Party. I’m trying to recall the Democratic Party to its initial values. The values that I grew up with, that my uncle and father represented …
I think, for me, the best path to victory is through the Democratic Party, although, at this point, people can look at it and say it’s insurmountable. But I think we have a pretty good plan for getting there. I ask you to have faith and watch what we do, and I think that you’ll be pleased.
A lot of people say, ‘Maybe you should run as an independent.’ But if you run as an independent, there is no primary process. Nobody pays attention to the independent until the general election, and that is a year from now.
I right now have 800 press requests, and I’m somebody who couldn’t get on the press for 18 years. For the first time, I’m able to talk to broad swaths of the public about these issues, to be completely honest about them, and debate them for the first time.”
How Kennedy Will Choose His Science Team
Tenpenny was next:
“We spent the last three and a half years under the tyranny of [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and [Dr. Deborah] Birx. I don’t know why Birx is still walking around. She admitted lying to the president. We have no Department of Justice, which I hope you will address as a lawyer.
But my question for you is based on how the country was hijacked by Fauci and Birx and a few of their comrades. How are you going to choose your medical advisory team? And where do the three-letter agencies like the NIH and the CDC fit in? How are you going to go about choosing the people you’re going to listen to?”
Kennedy replied:
“I’ll have a diverse medical advisory team. I feel like I’m pretty much an expert on parsing medical information and figuring it out … I’m going to have people who are dissidents. I’m going to have people who are moving away from the pharmaceutical paradigm.
I really want to try to move this country away from the pharmaceutical paradigm and move our objectives … [to] metrics that show better health. Are we reducing chronic disease? Are medical bills going down? Are our children healthier? Do we have better infant mortality?
Do we have better longevity? And base everything on empiricism, on evidence-based science. Let’s do the studies and make sure these interventions work. And then, not be closed minded to natural remedies and to integrative medicine …
I’ve been litigating against all of those agencies for many, many years … the NIH, CDC and FDA. So I know the people who I trust within each of those agencies. I have kind of a cadre of people whose judgment I believe is independent; wise people who are discerning and prudent and also understand what the problem is.”
Where Kennedy Stands on the Pandemic Treaty
Ji’s question revolved around Kennedy’s stance on the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Treaty and the amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHRs), which threaten the sovereignty of our nation and the right of people to make informed medical choices.
“Under my presidency, we’re not going to be submitting to any WHO treaty,” Kennedy replied. “I’m going to be reevaluating the U.S. relation with WHO. The WHO has gotten away from what it did really well, which was nutrition, hygiene, local economic development … things that were really helping … locally based strategies that were rooted in local culture …
They’ve instead been checked by big corporations who want to promote … cookie cutter technology for every problem … I want to help people develop their own solutions rather than having U.S. corporations impose technological solutions for problems that people have been solving themselves for thousands of years, and help them do what they want to do.
The same with medicine. I don’t think good health comes in a syringe. I think good health comes from … good water, good nutrition, healthy foods. That’s what stops the mortality from infectious disease, and the switching of priorities away from traditional hygiene, nutrition, economic development and local health care, has really destroyed any kind of … legitimacy to the WHO and we need a complete reboot of that agency.”
Where Does Kennedy Stand on Climate Change?
The next question came from Willis, who stated that, even as a long-time progressive environmental activist, he’s now starting to see the dark side of the climate change narrative. “I am now aware that the climate change narrative has been grossly exaggerated by power hungry politicians,” he said.
How does Kennedy feel about the current climate change narrative? “I believe that the climate is an existential threat, and I believe that carbon contributes to climate change,” Kennedy replied. But as for how much of climate change is being caused by carbon dioxide, he’s not sure.
“Climate science is so complex and requires so many disciplines. I don’t understand the mathematical modeling, the physics or the chemistry well enough to make any independent assessment,” he said. However, he believes the climate scientists who predict dire outcomes are correct. Willis interjected:
“What I’m most concerned about … is the way that politicians have exaggerated the narrative such that we now have a generation of young people vowing never to have children because they think that our world is going to end …
I think the misinformation of the climate narrative has taken our eye off the ball and is stopping us from correcting pollution and things that we could actually have the funding and the technology for today.
It’s the doom narrative that is terrorizing so many Americans, particularly young people, and I would love to know, are you going to carry on with that narrative? Or what will you do to put our next generations at ease such that they won’t pass up one of the greatest gifts ever, which is creating a family?”
Kennedy agreed that the climate narrative has indeed been hijacked by the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates and the like, and is being used by globalists to consolidate power, diminish democracy and constrict civil rights and human rights.
“I think the climate crisis right now is being used in that way by those people,” Kennedy said. “My approach to climate has always been a free market approach. For 40 years, I’ve said that we should use marketplace rules rather than top-down controls. We should reward the cheapest, most efficient energy sources, and those are going to be renewable sources, generally speaking, depending on where you are in the world …
If we have market-based rules, carbon will disappear anyway. What I focused on during my career is not scaring people with carbon, but talking about what’s really happening … I’ve spent a lot of time in West Virginia, and we have now … flattened an area larger than the state of Delaware, 1.4 million acres …
We’ve filled 2,200 miles of rivers with rubble. That’s one of the costs of coal. The other costs is mercury contamination of every freshwater fish in America and most of the big saltwater fish. We have acid rain that has destroyed 150 lakes and the Appalachians are now sterilized. That forest cover has disappeared …”
Kennedy’s View on Vaccine Mandates
Next, Tenpenny inquired where Kennedy stands on vaccine mandates, be they related to emergency situations or childhood vaccinations mandated to attend school.
“I’m not against vaccines any more than I’m against medicine,” Kennedy replied. “If you show me a vaccine that works — so that people who take it, 10 years from now are safer and healthier and more alive in every respect … I would take that vaccine, and I would urge other people to take it as well.
But I wouldn’t ever mandate it. I’m against vaccine mandates or any kind of medical mandates. I’m against mass aids … So mandating those is something I would not allow as President.”
Uniting the Country Through Honesty
In closing McDonnell asked how Kennedy intends to unite this sorely divided country, in which people can’t seem to see eye-to-eye on anything.
“We have a nation that’s so divisive. It’s so divided over gender, over religion, over politics. I heard you speak when you announced your candidacy in Boston, and one of the interviewers said to you, ‘Your own siblings don’t agree with you; they’re not supporting you.’
And you said something very profound. You said, ‘In my family, we’re allowed to debate, we’re allowed to discuss, we’re allowed to disagree, but we all love each other.’ So, my question to you is, with that sentiment, can you help bring the country together? How would you do that?” McDonnell asked.
Kennedy replied, “Honestly, I think the reason people are all angry at each other is that they’re being lied to.” If government and media, institutions that are supposed to be trustworthy, quit lying and started telling the truth, much of that anger would dissipate.
“Journalists have become propagandists for official narratives, and people know that they’re being lied to,” Kennedy said, “and so they look for other sources of information. And they have to be punished for doing that, because that’s a heresy. And so, they’re silenced, or they’re deplatformed, or they’re gaslighted.
They’re told that they’re lying, and that makes people angry. So, I think most of the anger is rooted in people lying, censorship and all the reactions to the lies. The principal antidote for that is a government that is rigorously truthful [and] that starts encouraging in various ways the media start telling the truth to the public.
The first thing I’m going to do when I get in there — besides pardoning Julian Assange and a bunch of other things I promise to do — is to put out an executive order [that says] federal agencies cannot participate in either propagandizing the American public or censoring the American public. That will be step one, and then I’m going to do a lot of other strong stuff to make sure … it never happens again.”
Sources and References
