Karl Rove rips Ron DeSantis’ ‘nutty idea’ to give RFK Jr. control over CDC, FDA

Karl Rove. Image via AP.

Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is ready to ‘sic’ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But that proposal has triggered plenty of pushback, even from Republicans.

One critic, political strategist and commentator Karl Rove, was especially blunt, condemning the “nutty idea” during an interview with Fox News.

“This is a guy who has got incredible conspiracy theories that are just outrageous,” Rove said.

He noted that Kennedy believed “vaccines cause autism because they have mercury preservative and they’re worse than the diseases that they could say that they’re going to save them from. We haven’t used mercury since 2001 in children’s vaccines, and it was never used in the most common, the three most common vaccines on children, and no scientific evidence supports this theory.”

Rove continued to recount various RFK theories.

“AIDS is not caused by HIV. He said Wi-Fi causes cancers in what he calls leaky brains: No evidence whatsoever for that. Chemicals and water cause transgender kids. It causes kids to become transgender. Antidepressants cause school shootings. And the U.S. has labs on which we’ve lavished hundreds of millions of dollars in Ukraine to develop genetic targeting to kill Russians and Chinese,” Rove said.

“This is just nutty stuff.”

Rove then outlined other issues that Kennedy sees “lots of conspiracies.”

“The 2004 Election was stolen as computers switched nearly a quarter of a million votes in Ohio from John Kerry to George Bush and thereby gave him the election. 5G is a mass surveillance tool, and the telecoms, the telephone companies are in on it. The CIA killed his uncle. Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill his father. And he defends Russia and Ukraine. It’s all Ukraine’s fault that Russia invaded him, and it’s killing his people.”

During an interview with Outkick, DeSantis lauded RFK, continuing praise for the Democratic presidential candidate.

“Yes, the medical stuff. I’m very good on that,” DeSantis said. “So that does appeal to me. … In that regard, it’s like, ‘OK, if you’re President, you know, sic him on the FDA, if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC.’”

Kennedy, whose vaccine skepticism predates DeSantis’ pandemic-driven interest, recently claimed COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Jewish and Chinese people. He has since said he should have been “more careful” with his words.

Though DeSantis trusts Kennedy with medicine and the food supply, he still isn’t entertaining the idea of Kennedy as a running mate, given the Democrat’s views on “affirmative action” not aligning with the “broad coalition.”

“He’s more liberal, you know, very liberal on some. I mean, he used to say — I don’t know if he still believes this — that, you know, if you deny climate change, you should go to jail, things like that. So, it’s like conservative voters, you know, they would want those positions fleshed out and, you know, he opposed the affirmative action ruling to say, you know, you can’t racially discriminate on that,” DeSantis explained.

“He would have wanted that to remain,” DeSantis added. “So, I just think at the end of the day, you know, you need somebody that’s going to reflect the values of the broad coalition.”

DeSantis had previously ruled out Kennedy as a running mate during an interview on “Wisconsin Right Now.”

“He and I have worked together on (Dr. Anthony) Fauci, and I think he’s right on Fauci, and I think there are issues that we can align, but I think on the bulk of issues, I think he’s a liberal Democrat, and so I’m going to choose somebody that is going to be conservative if elected,” the Governor said.