To put it mildly, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is no fan of Anthony Fauci.
The Democratic presidential candidate was asked in a recent interview about his criticism of Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, who became a national hero to some during the COVID pandemic.
“I think he was a genuinely bad human being,” Kennedy told podcaster Lex Fridman.
Fridman is a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies machine learning, according to his website.
Fridman’s two-and-a-half-hour conversation with Kennedy covered a broad range of topics, including diet and exercise, God and religion, and Kennedy’s 14-year struggle with addiction, starting a year after his father’s death.
At one point, Fridman asked Kennedy about the 2021 book he wrote entitled “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”
Fridman attempted to reconcile Kennedy’s stance with that of the people who support Fauci.
“What is the biggest positive thing you think Anthony Fauci did for the world? What is good that he has done for the world, especially during this pandemic?” Fridman asked.
Kennedy was firm.
“You know, I don’t want to sit here and speak uncharitably by saying the guy didn’t do anything, but I can’t think of anything,” he told Fridman.
“In terms of his principal programs, of the AIDS programs and his COVID programs, I think that the harm that he did vastly outweighed the benefits.”
“Do you think he believes he’s doing good for the world?” Fridman asked, but Kennedy refused to go down that road.
“I try not to speculate about things that I don’t know about or I can’t prove,” he said. “I cannot tell you what his motivations were. … He’s done a lot of things that I think are really very, very bad things for humanity and very deceptive.”
Fridman asked Kennedy if he thought the difficulty of Fauci’s job had anything to do with his failures.
Kennedy discounted that theory. “No,” he said. “No. I think he was a genuinely bad human being.”
He added, “There were many, many good people in that department over the years. … Many people whose careers [Fauci] destroyed because they were trying to tell the truth. One after the other, the greatest scientists in the history of [the National Institutes of Health] were run out of that agency.”