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... A U.S. health secretary prepared to spend billions to seek a link between vaccines and autism. Vaccine skeptics shaping policy. A proposal to eliminate the entire federal immunization schedule for American children.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought a series of once-unthinkable public-health proposals to the highest levels of the Trump administration since becoming health secretary early last year, according to Reuters interviews with 16 current and former officials with direct knowledge of the discussions.

The officials, from the U.S. health department and White House, shared details of internal discussions on condition of anonymity. Their first-hand accounts of Kennedy's previously unreported efforts reveal a tenacious activist who has pushed through some of the biggest changes to U.S. vaccine policy in decades -- and who sought to go much further than previously known to dismantle the status quo.

"He's an anti-vaccine activist. That's who he is. That's who he's been for 20 years. To expect that as secretary of Health and Human Services he'd be anything other than that is wishful thinking," said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a long-time immunization adviser to the CDC. ...