Dr. Anthony Fauci says he’s truly perplexed by what’s happening inside independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s head.

In a new episode of the “The Axe Files” podcast, Fauci told CNN’s David Axelrod about how he once walked away from a meeting with the prominent anti-vaccine advocate with serious concerns about his grasp on scientific facts.

“I don’t know what’s going on in his head,” Fauci told Axelrod, a former advisor to President Barack Obama. “But it’s not good.”

At the beginning of Donald Trump’s term in the Oval Office, Fauci decided to hear Kennedy out at the request of presidential son-in-law and former White House advisor, Jared Kushner, and Francis Collins, the then-director of the National Institute of Health.

While Kennedy was there to make a case for being appointed as head of a White House commission investigating vaccine safety, Fauci, the former chief medical advisor to the president, found the presentation rife with misinformation.

Over the years, Kennedy has consistently claimed that vaccines can cause autism and other conditions, despite strong evidence to the contrary.

“The first slide I remember he showed is that ‘It has been shown that vaccinations are responsible for the following diseases,’ and he gave every disease in the world,” Fauci recalled. “For the next 40 minutes or so, he showed slide after slide after slide that day that make no sense at all.”

Following the presentation, the doctor said he tried to reason with Kennedy about his science of vaccines to no avail.

“We were walking out of the room at the [National Institutes of Health], I went over to and I said, ‘Bobby, I believe you care about children, and you care that you don’t want to hurt them,’” Fauci said. “‘But you got to realize that from a scientific standpoint, what you’re saying does make no sense.’”

In the years since their meeting, Kennedy has come to vilify the physician. In 2021, he published an entire book attacking Fauci’s response to COVID.

“He’s done a lot of things that I think are really very, very bad for humanity,” Kennedy claimed during a 2023 interview on podcaster Lex Fridman’s show, adding, “I think he was a genuinely bad human being.”

Amid his outsider run for the presidency, Kennedy’s fringe beliefs have found a foothold with voters with a deep skepticism for the major party candidates.

A poll from Decision Desk HQ and The Hill has the independent tracking at around 8% support nationally, which while nowhere near enough to secure the White House, does have the potential to majorly sway election results.