Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Tuesday that the Trump administration had turned its back on vaccine skeptics, including himself, after initially expressing interest in creating a group to look into their safety.

“He told me that he wanted to create a vaccine safety commission and that he wanted me to chair it,” Kennedy said in response to a question at the Connecticut Vaccine Science Forum. “He asked me to announce it at a press conference, to the press at Trump tower and almost immediately I started feeling a lot of blowback within the administration.”

Kennedy said that at the beginning of the administration, he met with Trump, former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, senior adviser Jared Kushner, former senior advisor Steve Bannon and counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway about setting up the commission.

“I was very optimistic about it,” he said, adding that he initially was given “high level meetings” with “agencies” and presented a powerpoint detailing his group’s belief that vaccines were harmful to children.

“We left convinced the White House was going to follow up and then the White House went dark,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy put blame for his ostracism on the administration’s hiring of “pharmaceutical lobbyists who are very pro-vaccines” to run the Centers for Disease Control and other healthcare-related agencies. “Policy, the president likes to say, policy is personnel, well, he put in those positions, personnel that represent the policies that he wants which is very, very pro-pharma agenda,” he said. “I’m sorry to report.”

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