Approximately 11,000 viewers watched live as Dr. Pierre Kory, Maureen McDonnell, Mikki Willis, Dr. Joseph Mercola, Patrick Gentempo, Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, Sayer Ji and Del Bigtree asked Kennedy, founder and chairman on leave from Children's Health Defense (CHD), a series of questions about how his administration would address key issues of concern to the medical freedom movement.
"This is the moment when the collapsing center, the disintegrating 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," roundtable facilitator and author Charles Eisenstein said, kicking off the discussion.
McDonnell, a holistic pediatric nurse and founder of Millions Against Medical Mandates, asked Kennedy how he would transform a healthcare system from one controlled by Big Pharma "where for every ailment there's a drug and for every infection there's a vaccine or one in the pipeline" to one that treats the root causes of the illnesses and chronic conditions plaguing the nation.
Kennedy said Pharma's "mercantile ambitions" have been allowed to overwhelm the healthcare system, and conflicts of interest have to be eliminated.
That includes ending advertising by Pharma, redirecting grants toward studying chronic diseases, making public health data such as the Vaccine Safety Datalink available to researchers, and having the U.S. Department of Justice hold journals accountable for "racketeering with the pharmaceutical industry to systematically lie to the public," he said.
Kory, founder and president of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, asked Kennedy if expanding funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to expand oversight and data collection would help to ensure commercial and political bias stayed out of research.
Kennedy said he thought NIH didn't need more money, it needed a new focus.
He said NIH ought to study the etiology of chronic disease rather than studying infectious diseases, which pose a lesser threat to human health, and incubating new pharmaceutical products. NIH scientists personally profit from inventing new products, which is a practice he said needs to end.
Most importantly, Kennedy said, he would "end all gain-of-function research," which he said is just a disaster. "It's given us no benefits. It's given us everything from Lyme disease to COVID and many many other diseases."
Comment: For more information on gain-of-function research as it relates to Lyme disease, see the following:
Gentempo talked about the "tyranny [that] can take hold all in the name of medicine and all in the name of science" as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. He asked what Kennedy thought could be done so it never happens again.
"We need to make it clear that the Constitution is inviolable and that even in an emergency, the most dire emergency, you can't waive the Constitution and that you have to go through the Democratic process," Kennedy said. To protect that, he said, Congress must change the criteria for declaring states of emergency.
Osteopath and natural health specialist Mercola talked about the suppression of dissenting ideas. "The Biden regime has been the most authoritarian administration in the United States' history," he said, and ideas like those being discussed in the round table were "relentlessly censored from head to toe."
Kennedy said this censorship was a betrayal of liberal ideology, which "is about ideas ... triumphing in the marketplace of ideas."
He talked about the recent controversy over his proposed debate with Dr. Peter Hotez, where people defending Hotez's refusal to debate did so on the grounds that he is an "expert" who should not debate non-experts.
Kennedy said:
"What they're saying is there's kind of a high priesthood of people who are experts, and they should not debate anybody else because they're the high priest and they should just be trusted. ...
"Now what they can say is, well, I'm a crazy person. And it, you know, and it, it just gives credence to my crazy ideas. But my ... crazy ideas already have credence. ...
"By the way, science is rooted in reason. It's rooted in empiricism. And if you can't defend science on the battlefield of reason ... you're not really a scientist, as I or any scientist is expected to defend their hypothesis in debate, in heated, fierce debate."
Comment: More on Peter Hotez's refusal to publicly debate the topic of COVID and vaccination:
- Joe Rogan savagely bullies scientist by inviting him on podcast to explain his position
- Joe Rogan challenges vaccine enthusiast Peter Hotez to debate RFK Jr on 'misinformation'
Responding to Tenpenny's question about how he would select his medical advisory team, Kennedy said he would draw from his extensive network of people with government, public health and scientific experience — people like Kory and Dr. Meryl Nass.
He added that his advisors would be dissidents who were moving away from the pharmaceutical paradigm to "center all of our objectives on actual metrics that show better health."
Sayer Ji, the founder of alternative medicine portal GreenMedInfo, asked Kennedy where he stood on the World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic treaty and the proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations, which he said could threaten U.S. sovereignty.
"Under my presidency, we're not going to be submitting to any WHO treaty, and I'm going to be really reevaluating the U.S. relationship with the WHO on a lot of bases," Kennedy said.
He said the WHO previously did important work, rooted in localized processes and contexts, but that today the WHO has been "hijacked by big corporations who want to promote their technologies and promote one cookie cutter technology for every problem."
Willis, who produced the "Plandemic" documentaries, told Kennedy that as a veteran environmental activist, he was concerned with the way "the climate change narrative has been grossly exaggerated by power-hungry politicians," and asked whether Kennedy agreed with that assessment and how he would retell the climate story.
Kennedy said he believes climate change is an existential threat. He said as an outdoorsman, he watched the climate change, and the idea that carbon traps heat has long been known.
He also said he studied the science produced as early as the 1970s by the Exxon scientists who predicted the corporation's practices would have devastating climatic effects.
But he agreed with Willis that the "climate narrative has been hijacked" by actors such as the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates and other elites "to consolidate their power, diminish democracy, constrict civil and human rights, and to impose top-down totalitarian controls."
Kennedy proposed a "market-based" rather than top-down approach to dealing with climate issues, where the cheapest and most efficient energy sources would be rewarded.
Those would generally be renewable sources, he said, providing examples of the environmental costs created by coal and gas exploitation that would have to be internalized in the type of system he's advocating.
He added that people didn't have to believe in global warming to see that coal dependency has to end.
Tenpenny said Kennedy's position on vaccines had been mixed and asked for clarification about whether he was against vaccines.
"I'm not against vaccines any more than I'm against medicine," Kennedy said, adding that he would support a vaccine if there was evidence it made people safer and healthier.
But, he added that he was against vaccine mandates and all medical mandates.
Finally, McDonnell brought up the challenges of building collaboration in the health freedom movement and asked Kennedy how he would deal with political divisions on all of these issues, and beyond.
He said he thought people's anger is rooted in the fact that they are being lied to, censored and gaslighted. "The principal antidote for that is a government that is just rigorously truthful," he said.
Documentarian and journalist Bigtree, who spoke last, said the health freedom movement is "truly a people's movement. And it doesn't matter what the media says about it. They will not be able to stop us."
Vice and Rolling Stone immediately published articles criticizing the roundtable and its panelists.
Comment: RFK Jr.'s stance against the medical-industrial complex and his insistence on spreading truth paints him as a genuine threat against the establishment. It will be very interesting to see how far he progresses towards the 2024 elections, given that his position on both domestic and foreign issues appears to be diametrically opposed to many other candidates in his party. One thing is for sure... he will need to be very careful in the coming years so that he doesn't suffer the same fate as his father and uncle.