Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one of the country’s most vocal anti-vaxxers with longstanding ties to far-right figures and conspiracy theorists. On Mar. 29, 2021, Kennedy appeared on Bards of War, a podcast hosted by Scott Kesterson, a QAnon influencer who pleaded guilty in 2017 to stealing thousands of dollars in donations collected for a friend’s cancer treatment.

Kesterson often uses hashtags like #ChildSexTraffickingIsReal, #ChildExploitation, and #Millstones — a reference to the Biblical passage Matthew 18:6 — in his podcast descriptions. And guests on his show have included former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and election denier/pillow magnate Mike Lindell.

On Bards of War, Kennedy repeatedly attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci (then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), whom he accused of sabotaging the effort to treat COVID patients with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. He also referred to the COVID-19 vaccine as experimental, and claimed that vaccine mandates violated the Nuremberg Code.

“What I would like to go back to, though, in your discussion about informed consent. Because right now we’re dealing with an experimental injection — what some are calling a vaccine but that’s even questionable because it’s not curing anything,” Kesterson said of the COVID vaccine. He asked Kennedy about the “legal ramifications” of mandating such a vaccine.

Kennedy agreed with Kesterson’s contention that the vaccines were “experimental” and claimed that this was “really, probably the reason that Tony Fauci worked so hard to kill ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and other remedies.” He explained that the COVID vaccines “cannot get emergency use authorization if there is another drug that is already licensed for any purpose that shows a beneficial impact on COVID.”

“So in order for [Fauci] to get his vaccine enterprise to work he had to kill anything that actually helped patients. And he did that methodically, deliberately, and systematically,” Kennedy said.

Neither ivermectin nor hydroxychloroquine were proven effective in treating or curing COVID-19. Kennedy is also incorrect in his claim that federal laws or regulations prohibit a vaccine from receiving emergency use authorization if other treatments are available.

Kennedy continued to attack Dr. Fauci by repeating the false claim that Fauci’s agency, presumably referring to the National Institute of Health, “owns half the patent” of the Moderna vaccine and will “collect 50% of the royalties.” He also accused Fauci of “ensur[ing] loyalty from his staff” by “paying them off through these pharmaceutical kickbacks,” and said that “everybody is in on the fix.”

He added that the “good news” is that “legally they cannot force you” take the vaccine, and suggested that a person who is forced by their school — for example, Rutgers — to take it and becomes injured due to the vaccine should sue the school.

“Because it’s illegal, even in this country today, to force human beings to participate in an experiment in which they’re given a experimental medical intervention,” Kennedy told Kesterson. “You know, we signed treaties after World War II, the Nuremberg protocol, etc., that said we’d never do that.”

He added that it is a longstanding medical principle that “you cannot force people to participate as guinea pigs and lab rats in experiments.”

The COVID vaccines, of course, were not “experimental” and vaccine mandates are not a violation of the Nuremberg Code, which requires that human participants in medical experiments give informed consent.

In May 2021, unvaccinated staffers at a Houston hospital sued over the hospital’s vaccine mandate, alleging that it was a violation of the Nuremberg Code. The suit was dismissed by a federal judge, who wrote that “Equating the injection requirement to medical experimentation in concentration camps is reprehensible. Nazi doctors conducted medical experiments on victims that caused pain, mutilation, permanent disability, and in many cases, death.”

This was also not the first time that Kennedy had made offensive comparisons to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Last year Kennedy apologized for a January 2022 speech in which he compared the plight of anti-vaxxers to that of Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager who died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. And in a recently unearthed video from 2020, Kennedy compared mask and vaccine mandates to medical experiments conducted on Jewish prisoners in concentration camps.