RFK Jr: HHS 'subsumed by commercial aspects of vaccine production', 'deconstruction of Constitution'
Kennedy says industries like pharmaceuticals can turn US agencies into 'sock puppets'
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of the late former U.S. attorney general and nephew of a senator and a president, joined "Tucker Carlson Today" on Fox Nation to discuss his new book, "The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health."
Kennedy, a longtime environmentalist attorney and activist, told host Tucker Carlson that it has been wrong for officials in the United States to impose "bizarre … totalitarian controls, a deconstruction of the Constitution" during the era of coronavirus:
"The rise of censorship, the rise of suppression of kind of religious freedoms, of property rights, closing a million businesses without just compensation or due process, the abolition of jury trials, which are guaranteed the Sixth and Seventh Amendment for any vaccine company that hurts you, all of these-- and the rise of kind of track-and-trace surveillance state, has been troubling to people, both Democrats and Republicans," Kennedy said.
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"People who support vaccines, people who oppose them, are looking at this and wondering what's happened."
Kennedy said that his years of practicing environmental law showcased how government agencies engage in "corporate capture" – wherein they sometimes make money and/or exert control over otherwise private interests like pharmaceutical companies.
"Regulating industries [sometimes] assert control over the agencies that are supposed to regulate them, and essentially turn them into sock puppets," he said. "I've been working on vaccine issues since 2005. And the kind of regulatory capture that you see in that space is really capture-on-steroids, because … the FDA gets 45% of its budget from vaccine companies, from the [pharma] industry," he claimed.
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Kennedy compared that idea to a hypothetical situation in which the EPA would be fiscally assisted by fossil fuel companies.
The Kennedy scion also said he has crossed paths with Biden medical adviser Anthony Fauci multiple times over the years, somewhat owing to his late uncle Edward's role as longtime Massachusetts Democratic lawmaker and onetime chairman of the Senate Health & Education Committee.
"Tony Fauci's agency owns half of the Moderna patent, and stands to make billions and billions of dollars on sales of the Moderna vaccine," Kennedy claimed.
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According to an Axios report, Fauci's agency, the Bethesda, Maryland-based NIAID, "may own intellectual property that undergirds a leading coronavirus vaccine being developed by Moderna."
The outlet published obtained accompanying documents to that effect.
In a statement to Axios, NIAID's umbrella agency, the National Institutes of Health responded that:
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"NIAID scientists created stabilized coronavirus spike proteins for the development of vaccines against coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2. Recognizing the importance of these novel immunogens, NIAID has sought patents to preserve the government’s rights to these inventions and to provide incentive for commercial partners to invest the capital and resources needed to advance their development, commercialization, and public use as vaccines."
The agency added that it has therefore adopted a "non-exclusive licensing approach" to allow other companies to develop competing vaccines.
Kennedy said his family and the federal health bureaucracy have decades-old "entanglements" going back to his grandmother, Rose Fitzgerald-Kennedy:
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"[Sen. Edward Kennedy] was writing the budgets for Tony Fauci, and Francis Collins, and all these agencies for years. Some of the key institutions within NIH and HHS are named for members of my family [including the] Shrivers," he said.
"So, I had kind of a unique perspective on what was happening at the beginning of 2020, and was able to kind of predict how they were going to handle this, how they would suppress; I've watched Tony: I've known Tony Fauci for years."
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