Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal vaccination skeptic, says president-elect Donald Trump has asked him to chair a commission on vaccine safety.

“President-elect Trump has some doubts about the current vaccine policy, and he has questions about it,” Kennedy said, speaking to reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday. “His opinion doesn’t matter, but the science does matter, and we ought to be reading the science, and we ought to be debating the science.”

Kennedy is an advocate for the belief that trace amounts of minerals in vaccines cause autism — a claim for which there is no evidence.

Spokesmen for the transition did not immediately provide additional details about the commission.

Trump has also voiced doubts about vaccinations, notably expressed support for the theory at a Republican presidential debate in 2015.

“You take this little beautiful baby, and you pump . . .” he said of vaccinating children. “We had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, 2 years old, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”

The comments were widely denounced by medical professionals who say that there is no evidence that vaccines lead to autism. In fact, the study that popularized the idea has been retracted and discredited as fraudulent. Multiple high-quality studies have found no link between vaccines and autism.

Trump has tweeted in the past that he knew a child who developed autism after receiving immunizations. He did not supply evidence for that claim.

He also has advocated for children to get smaller doses of vaccines spread out over time.

Kennedy, son of former Attorney General and New York Sen. Robert Kennedy, has advocated for parents to be allowed to opt out of vaccinations for their children, arguing that mercury-based additives in vaccines explain the purported link to autism.

“They get the shot. That night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone,” Kennedy said at the premier of an anti-vaccination film screening in California in 2015. “This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

With files from Star wire services

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