Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denied comparing CDC to “Nazi death camps.” Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

By PJ Grisar January 29, 2025

In a tense exchange at the first day of his confirmation hearing for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denied that he once compared the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s work to “Nazi death camps.”

During his questioning, Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat from Georgia, said that Kennedy, who would oversee the CDC if confirmed, made the comparison and also said the CDC’s work was akin to that of sexual abusers in the Catholic Church.

“Senator, I don’t believe that I ever compared the CDC to Nazi death camps,” Kennedy responded. “I support the CDC. My job is not to dismantle or harm the CDC.”

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When Kennedy denied saying it, Warnock read back a transcript, taken from a 2013 question-and-answer session for the nonprofit AutismOne. According to NBC News, Kennedy was asked about the CDC’s motives for not calling autism an epidemic.

He said, in remarks quoted by Warnock, that it was “like Nazi death camps,” asking, “what happened to these kids? One in 31 boys in this country, their minds are being robbed from them,” a reference to the rate of autism in boys.

“I was not comparing the CDC to Nazi death camps,” Kennedy responded to Warnock, “I was comparing the injury rate to our children to other atrocities. And I would not compare, of course, the CDC to Nazi death camps. To the extent that any statement I have made has been interpreted that way, yeah I don’t agree with that.”

Warnock: You have compared the CDC's work to Nazi death camps. You've compared it to sexual abusers in the catholic church.

RFK JR: I never said it.

Warnock: Actually, I have a transcript. pic.twitter.com/d56nFEdbO8

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 29, 2025

Kennedy’s full remarks at the 2013 meeting, in which he pushed the disproven link between vaccines and autism, went on to say that he couldn’t explain why the CDC would not acknowledge the rising rate of autism just like he “can’t tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust.”

Kennedy has a history of making Holocaust comparisons. In 2015, he described vaccine mandates as “a holocaust” and in 2020 compared mask mandates to Nazi experiments.

“They’re going to have the right to compel unwanted medical interventions on us,” Kennedy said in a leaked video from Aug. 2020. “The Nazis did that in the camps in World War Two – they tested vaccines on gypsies and Jews.”

In 2022, at an anti-vax rally by the Lincoln Memorial, Kennedy said that vaccine mandates were more dire than the Holocaust.

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you can hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” Kennedy said. “Today the mechanisms are being put in place that will make it so none of us can run, none of us can hide.”

He later apologized for the remarks.

Earlier in the confirmation hearing Wednesday, Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, pressed Kennedy over his claim that COVID was engineered to target white and Black people and spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

“I didn’t say it was deliberately targeted,” Kennedy responded.

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