The former acting director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has criticized Robert F Kennedy Jr’s nomination by Donald Trump as secretary of the country’s health and human services (HHS), calling his false vaccine theories “cruel”.

In a new interview on ABC, Richard Besser, who led the CDC during Barack Obama’s administration, called Kennedy’s push to falsely link vaccines to autism a “cruel thing to do”, adding, “There are things we do for our own health, but there are things we do that are good for ourselves, our families and our communities and vaccination falls into that category.

“Having someone who denies that in that role is extremely dangerous,” Besser said about Kennedy.

“We need to, as a nation, address chronic diseases in children and one of the dangerous things about RFK Jr is that there are bits of things he says that are true and they’re mixed in … It makes it really hard to sort out what things you should follow because they’re based on fact and which things are not,” he continued.

Besser went on to say that experts should address chronic diseases – including autism – but to “keep [on] lifting the idea [that] that has something to do with vaccinations is really a cruel thing to do”.

In a separate interview on Sunday, Deborah Birx, the former White House coronavirus response coordinator under Trump’s administration, said that Kennedy would require a team that has “really come out of the industry” in order to manage the HHS.

“I think the most important thing is what team he would bring with him, because you’re talking about really a large … corporation with a highly diverse group, which you have to really bring together and, frankly, eliminate some of the duplication set between these agencies to really become more cost effective,” said Birx.

“Having a management person at his side, a chief of staff, perhaps that has really come out of industry that would know how to bring and look and bring those individuals together that are running the other agencies because … HHS is probably one of our most complicated departments,” she added.

Birx also agreed that there was no scientific evidence that vaccines cause autism, saying: “I’m actually excited that in a Senate hearing he would bring forward his data and the questions that come from the senators would bring forth their data.

“That hearing would be a way for Americans to really see the data that you’re talking about, that we can’t see that causation right now,” she said.

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Kennedy has previously said that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” However, following Trump’s re-election, Kennedy said that he “won’t take away anybody’s vaccines”.

His nomination has been widely criticized by health experts who condemned him as a “clear and present danger” to public health.