Newly resurfaced video from 2018 suggests that President Donald Trump scrapped plans for a vaccine safety commission in 2017 following a conversation with Microsoft founder and vaccine enthusiast Bill Gates, who told the Trump “don’t do that” because researching vaccine safety was “a dead end.”
The commission, strongly encouraged by vaccine safety critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was expected to move forward in early 2017, as Trump assumed office, but ultimately never materialized despite President Trump pledging to make great efforts to establish it.
“Why would anybody not want a vaccine safety commission?” Kennedy said at an event with actor Robert De Niro at the National Press Club in Washington at the time.
DeNiro, whose son has autism, joined Kennedy at the event because his main focus was on “safety issues, not politics.”
“Trump I don’t care about. If he does the right thing, he does the right thing,” De Niro said.
Kennedy previously explained that Trump’s transition team first called him in December of 2016, and he first spoke with the president-elect by phone in early January in 2017. According to Kennedy, Trump said he knew the pharmaceutical industry would fight any efforts to question vaccine safety, and push back on the commission.
“I’m not going to back down,” Trump said at the time, according to Kennedy.
“He was considering a commission to look into the ill effects of vaccines… And I said no, that’s a dead end. That would be a bad thing.”
– Bill Gates in 2018
Kennedy noted that Trump himself once claimed that he had five friends whose children had “changed” following vaccination.
Some may also remember the once-viral tweet from Trump’s banned Twitter account, in which he referenced concerns about vaccines and autism that have been largely dismissed by experts.
“Healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes – AUTISM,” wrote Trump in 2014. “Many such cases!”
According to the recently unearthed video, Bill Gates apparently had two meetings with President Trump – one at Trump Tower and the other at the White House in March of 2017.
At both meetings, Gates said, Trump asked him about whether or not vaccines were safe, and at one point discussed RFK Jr.’s vaccine safety commission, which had been in the works around January and February of that year.
“In both of those two meetings, he asked me if vaccines weren’t a bad thing because he was considering a commission to look into the ill effects of vaccines, and somebody, his name is Robert Kennedy Jr., was advising him that vaccines were causing bad things,” Gates said.
“And I said ‘no,'” Gates chuckled, “‘that’s a dead end. That would be a bad thing. Don’t do that.'”
Newly resurfaced video shows Bill Gates appearing to take credit after Trump scrapped his "vaccine safety commission" that had the support of vaccine skeptic RFJ Jr.
“I said ‘no,'” Gates chuckled, “‘that’s a dead end. That would be a bad thing. Don’t do that.'” pic.twitter.com/njGqFWAGSB
— Valiant News (@ValiantNewsLive) March 16, 2022
The commission appeared to be officially pronounced dead the following year after the White House had cut off all communications with Kennedy.
“I would say there’s zero progress,” Kennedy told the Guardian in February 2018. “We were told President Trump wanted to meet directly with us. Not only did nothing happen, they’ve cut off all communication with people who care about this issue. The administration has decided to go in another direction.”
“They pump [vaccines] into this little body and then all of the sudden the child is different”
– Trump at a Republican debate in 2015
“I’ve seen a tremendous deflation among a community of parents and children’s health advocates across the country who believed the promises that President Trump made to the campaign, who put tremendous faith in him and now are feeling enormous betrayal and disappointment,” said Kennedy, who had not received contact from the White House for at least 6 months.
Trump himself in 2012 appeared to be concerned with vaccine’s apprant links to childhood autism. In 2012, he tweeted “Massive combined inoculations to small children is the cause for big increase in autism.”
During a 2015 Republican Primary debate, Trump once claimed that a child of someone who worked for him had become autistic following vaccination.
“It happened to somebody that worked for me recently. I mean, they had this beautiful child, not a problem in the world, and all of the sudden they go in and they get this monster shot … they pump this in to this little body and then all of the sudden the child is different a month later,” he said.
According to Kennedy, the reason that President Trump had not followed through on his promise to establish the vaccine safety commission was due to “corruption” in regards to the administration and the pharmaceutical industry, which he said has historically stifled research into vaccine safety because of self-interest.
“Much of what happens in this administration is obscure so there hasn’t been transparency,” he said of the Trump administration.
“The mainstream science indicates that there’s a serious problem with mercury and other metals in vaccinations,” Kennedy explained. “And then you have industry science which is challenging it, which is big science.”
Kennedy added that “President Trump is on the side of the industry and against science.”
