"I Kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Out of the West Wing. Now I Owe Him an Apology," Says Former White House Adviser
“Consider this my excommunication from the public health cult."
This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Brenda Baletti, Ph.D.
For years, Katy Talento kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. away from senior officials, managed the concerns of vaccine-skeptical parents, and trusted the public health establishment she had spent her career serving. Now she says that was a mistake.
A former White House public health adviser today publicly admitted that during the first Trump administration, she was directed to limit Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s access to senior officials.
In a Substack post titled “Confessions of a White House Public Health Priestess,” epidemiologist Katy Talento, who served on the White House Domestic Policy Council, describes an internal effort to manage which voices were allowed into federal health discussions.
“I kept Robert F. Kennedy Jr. out of the West Wing. Now I owe him an apology,” Talento wrote.
Talento did not say who specifically directed her to limit Kennedy’s access.
Commenting on the essay, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) CEO Mary Holland said:
“I wish that more people would come out and say that they were mistaken. I think it is a brave thing to do and the world would benefit from more people saying, ‘I was misled, and I did things that I now regret.’”
Talento’s essay is a retrospective on two decades in public health, including roles advising lawmakers and working at senior levels of federal policymaking.
She details her transformation from a key player advising on mainstream vaccine and public health policies, and supporting vaccines “religiously … because I had been trained in the orthodoxy of public health,” to becoming skeptical after what she calls a “cascade of eye-opening episodes.”
She describes witnessing — and participating in — the public health policymaking process, and laments that she didn’t take up key fights earlier in her career.
Autism moms ‘treated like a problem to manage’
Talento recounts how certain groups — particularly parents of children with autism — were treated within policy circles.
She says her job was to manage and deflect their concerns.
“Autism moms” who petitioned federal health authorities to study vaccine safety and the connection between vaccines and autism in the early 2000s were deliberately sidelined from the policymaking process.
Talento says she was “torn” after hearing the mothers and naively trusted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
She describes herself as being under pressure to toe the line, but was also an adviser on these issues. Her job was “to recommend, when it came to public health, which bills to write, which bills to move, which bills to kill, which issues to conduct oversight on and which agencies to subpoena.”
From 2002-2004, Talento worked in the Republican Office of the U.S. Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). She advised senators, including Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who several times introduced legislative language that would place more restrictions on families seeking fair compensation for vaccine injuries.
Several of those bills, including one introduced in 2002 while Talento was serving as an adviser, proposed to block cases altogether.
Laura Bono, mother of a vaccine-injured child with autism and vice president emerita of CHD, told The Defender:
“I’m grateful for Ms. Talento’s honesty and welcome her help in righting the egregious wrongs put in place by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act. While it’s painful to revisit the days of being ignored or gaslit by staffers like Talento on Capitol Hill, as so many of us were, I appreciate that she now wants to join us.”
Bono said she looked forward to Talento’s efforts to attain concrete goals, including repealing laws that protect vaccine manufacturers from legal liability for injuries and deaths caused by their products, and advancing successful biomedical treatments needed by the vaccine-injured.
“Many of us will be watching closely and hope to see her future actions match her present words,” Bono said.
Talento arranged for RFK Jr. to meet with Fauci and Collins ‘far from public view’
Talento said that she treated Kennedy, whose views made him a controversial figure in Washington at the time, in the same way she treated the autism moms.
“It was my job to make this problem go away,” she writes.
Before Trump’s first term, Kennedy had persuaded Trump to commit to establishing a Vaccine Safety Commission, she said. Once in office, the administration didn’t want to follow through, she said.
Talento arranged for Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci to meet with Kennedy, the Informed Consent Action Network’s (ICAN) Del Bigtree and attorney Aaron Siri “off-site somewhere, far from the White House and the public view.”
In the meeting, Fauci told them that he would send them the “mountains of studies demonstrating vaccine safety” — but never did.
ICAN filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain the documents, and the CDC was compelled to admit that it didn’t have the studies.
‘Consider this my excommunication from the public health cult’
Talento says her real transformation came during the COVID-19 pandemic. She initially celebrated the appointment of Deborah Birx to lead the White House response. But Birx’s masking and lockdown policies led Talento to experience “cognitive dissonance.”
Friends introduced her to the film “Vaxxed,” produced by CHD.TV’s Polly Tommey, which detailed the CDC’s efforts to cover up a link its researchers found between autism and vaccines.
Talento became a naturopath and familiarized herself with public health law — including the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, or PREP Act, which protects vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits over injuries caused by COVID-19 vaccines.
She began promoting treatments, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. She said health officials had to suppress or discredit those treatments to justify liability protection for the makers of COVID-19 vaccines. The emergency use authorization vaccines were eligible for liability protection under the PREP Act only if there were no approved treatments for the virus.
Talento says she “devoured” Kennedy’s book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” when it was released in the fall of 2021. She was particularly moved by the chapters that detailed how HIV drugs were tested on “the broken bodies of forgotten children” — a subject close to her, because she had worked on HIV issues in cities across the globe early in her career.
“If untrue, the claims in Kennedy’s book were so utterly defamatory that they should have spurred a parade of lawsuits,” Talento writes. “To my knowledge, no such lawsuits have ever been filed.”
These experiences led her to conclude that her 2017 resistance to Kennedy’s Vaccine Safety Commission proposal was “a massive mistake.” She became involved with the alternative health movement, embracing homeopathy and German New Medicine.
Talento closes her essay by thanking the autism moms, scientists such as Dr. Andy Wakefield, who published a 1998 paper in The Lancet, later retracted, on the possible link between vaccines and autism and was viciously attacked.
She also thanked CDC whistleblower William Thompson, Ph.D., Kennedy and others who have dissented from mainstream public health policies.
“Consider this my excommunication from the public health cult,” she writes.
Kennedy, now leading the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, responded to Talento’s apology on X. He wrote, “Thank you Katy for coming clean and for your support. All is forgiven!”
Related articles in The Defender
Pharma’s Gatekeeper: How the PREP Act Protects Everyone Except Those Injured by Vaccines
‘Guinea Pig Kids’: Fauci’s Legacy of Cruel Experiments on Kids
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