Greg Gutfeld launched an impassioned defense of vaccine shots in a resurfaced Fox News clip from 2015. In the video, Gutfeld goes after Donald Trump for trying to link vaccines to autism, arguing the future president’s claims amounted to a “hysterical anti-science point of view” that was “stupid” and “dangerous.”
“This is a really bad thing to happen to the Republican Party, an anti — hysterical anti-science point of view about vaccines,” Gutfeld told his co-hosts of “The Five” in the September 2015 clip, which also showed Trump claiming a little girl had developed autism after getting a vaccine. “And using the anecdote with a child is destructive and it’s ignorant because it’s not science.”
But that was a decade ago, just after a Republican presidential primary debate in September 2015, and Trump was not yet a two-term president. Now, Gutfeld has tried to welcome Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into his fold. He even defended Kennedy after senators eviscerated him at a hearing last week after he pushed out the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and claiming Democrats were “unglued” in their attacks on him.
“I can disagree with RFK on a lot of things and I have and I’ve written about it actually,” Gutfeld said on “The Five” just last week. “But I will never call him a liar. And I have seen him debate people who actually seriously disagree with him. And he does something that Democrats don’t do: He listens.”
The media monitoring service Media Matters for America compiled a clip composed of Gutfeld defending vaccines from Republican skeptics while, years later, boosting Kennedy as Trump welcomed him into his second administration. It reflects a wider shift in the Fox News ecosystem from one that appeared largely skeptical of Trump and his endeavors but has since walked in tandem with the president as he cemented his grip on the Republican Party.
Gutfeld went on in the 2015 clip, saying it was a “false causal argument to say because vaccines and autism symptoms appear at the same time, ergo, the vaccines cause autism.”
“That’s the same as saying, you know when you have ice cream and you get sunburns in the summertime, therefore ice cream causes sunburns,” he said. “It’s stupid and it’s bad for Republicans.”
But things have changed for Republicans since then. Since his confirmation to the Health and Human Services post earlier this year, Kennedy has pushed out several vaccine-focused officials from the government’s health sphere, prompting an exodus of top CDC scientists, and has hired officials to determine whether vaccines cause autism despite decades of studies ruling out any linkage.
Fox News did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
Gutfeld’s defense of Kennedy dates back to earlier this year as Kennedy went through the confirmation hearings for his cabinet position. He argued to his co-hosts of “The Five” in January that Kennedy was “passionate,” “persuasive” and “not woke” but he noted at the time that “he has stuff on vaccines and autism that seems more reliant on his gut instinct than science.”
But still, he said, he’d want to see him as part of the cabinet.
“If I were in the Senate — and who’s to say I’m not? — I would vote for him,” Gutfeld said. “All Republicans should say yes.”
Kennedy’s nomination eventually cleared the Senate despite opposition from all Democrats — and one Republican, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who survived childhood polio and has been a vaccine advocate.
Now, come September, Gutfeld appears to have shifted even more into the MAGA camp of vaccine deniers.
“RFK Jr. defending his vaccine policies against Democrats on Capitol Hill, furious over his ousting of the CDC director,” Gutfeld said on “The Five” last week as he introduced a clip of the hearing, without a hint of skepticism. “Junior says it’s time for new blood at the health agency after they failed Americans during COVID.”
You can watch the 2015 clip in the video above.
