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President-elect Donald Trump says he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime leader in the promotion of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and falsehoods, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
"For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health," Trump wrote on social media. "The Safety and Health of all Americans is the most important role of any Administration, and HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country.
"Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!" he added.
The news was first reported by Politico. HHS is a massive Cabinet agency that oversees everything from drug, vaccine and food safety to medical research and the social safety net programs Medicare and Medicaid.
A longtime vaccine skeptic, Kennedy is an attorney who has built a loyal following over several decades of people who admire his lawsuits against major pesticide and pharmaceutical companies. He has pushed for tighter regulations around the ingredients in foods.
With the Trump campaign, he worked to shore up support among young mothers in particular, with his message of making food healthier in the U.S., promising to model regulations imposed in Europe. In a nod to Trump’s original campaign slogan, he named the effort “Make America Healthy Again.”
It remains unclear how that will square with Trump’s history of deregulation of big industries, including food. Trump pushed for fewer inspections of the meat industry, for example.
Kennedy’s stance on vaccines has also made him a controversial figure among Democrats and some Republicans, raising question about his ability to get confirmed, even in a GOP-controlled Senate. Kennedy has espoused misinformation around the safety of vaccines, including pushing a totally discredited theory that childhood vaccines cause autism.
After Trump’s victory last week, the scion of the Kennedy family proposed a massive overhaul of the federal health system with himself leading the charge. One day after the election, Kennedy Jr. gave multiple interviews from President-elect Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where he had gathered allies in recent days to watch election results come in and plot his next administration.
In the interviews with NBC News and NPR, Kennedy Jr. said he believed he “may be more effective in the White House, health czar or something like that” than he would be as HHS secretary, proposing massive changes to federal policy on the fluoridation of water and vaccines.
He also pitched eliminating entire departments and purging employees within the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kennedy, the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of former U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, left his family’s party to mount an independent bid for president before joining forces with Trump.
The president-elect has said Kennedy is going to “go wild on health” and oversee “the health of women, men and children, and he is so good and so into it.” Trump also said recently that he was open to Kennedy’s proposals to ban certain vaccines and advise local water authorities to remove fluoride from drinking water.
“He’s been very specific at what he said. He wants me to do three things. One, clean up the corruption of the agencies, particularly the conflicts of interest that have turned those agencies into captive agencies for the pharmaceutical industry and the food industry, the other industries that they’re supposed to be regulating,” Kennedy told NBC News on Wednesday. “Number two, to return those agencies to the gold standard science, the empirically based, evidence-based medicine that they were famous for when I was a kid. And number three, to make miracles again, to end the chronic disease epidemic.”
While there is undoubtedly potential conflicts of interests at agencies like the FDA and the CDC, Kennedy has long relied on junk science and misinformation to make his claims about the health of certain foods, vaccines, medications and fluoride.
The prospect of Kennedy’s influencing a wide array of federal policy has raised alarm bells among advocates of sound science. Public health experts have pointed to Kennedy’s pivotal role in spreading false information and sowing fear around the world about vaccines, as well as conspiracy theories about technology like 5G. While there are rare instances when people have severe reactions to vaccines, the billions of doses administered globally provide real-world evidence that they are safe. The World Health Organization says vaccines prevent as many as 5 million deaths each year.
Vaccines recommended in the United States and mandated for many public school children are widely deemed to be safe and effective by the broader scientific community, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Mayo Clinic, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and dozens of independent medical organizations across the country and the globe. Kennedy is a longtime, prominent proponent of debunked public health claims surrounding vaccines and has been accused of spreading harmful misinformation, including in the Pacific island nation of Samoa where one expert said his false claims “resulted in the amplification of the epidemic and an increased number of children dying” from measles. Kennedy has denied any responsibility to the growth of the anti-vaccine movement in Samoa.
And Kennedy has continued to promote the long-debunked claim that vaccines are linked to childhood autism, a claim that has no scientific merit and that the Autism Science Foundation has said “will absolutely increase the chance that a child could contract and die from a vaccine-preventable disease.”
Kennedy claimed “if vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away” in his NBC News interview, but continued to question the efficacy and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines. Trump has also said he would defund public schools with vaccine mandates.
“There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective,” Kennedy said on a podcast in July.
Last year, Kennedy claimed “COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Spectrum News’ Joseph Konig and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
