RFK Jr. apologizes after condemnation for Anne Frank comment

Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., apologized Tuesday for suggesting things are worse for people today than they were for Anne Frank, the teenager who died in a Nazi concentration camp after hiding with her family in a secret annex in an Amsterdam house for two years.

Kennedy's comments, made at a Washington rally on Sunday put on by his anti-vaccine nonprofit group, were widely condemned as offensive, outrageous and historically ignorant. It's the second time since 2015 that Kennedy has apologized for referencing the Holocaust during his work sowing doubt and distrust about vaccines.

“I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors,” Kennedy said in a tweet Tuesday morning. “My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control. To the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.”

Kennedy's wife, the actress Cheryl Hines of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, distanced herself from her husband in her own tweet about 20 minutes later. She called the reference to Anne Frank “reprehensible and insensitive.”

“The atrocities that millions endured during the Holocaust should never be compared to anyone or anything. His opinions are not a reflection of my own,” Hines tweeted.

Kennedy, a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and the son of his slain brother, former U.S. attorney general, civil rights activist and Democratic presidential contender Robert F. Kennedy, on Sunday had complained that the nation’s leading infectious disease doctor, Anthony Fauci, was orchestrating “fascism.”

“Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he told the crowd.

An investigation by The Associated...