RFK Jr. Is Trump's Pick for HHS Secretary

At his Oct. 27 rally at Madison Square Garden, President-elect Donald Trump said he was going to give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. free rein over healthcare.

“I've been friends of his for a long time, and I'm going to let him go wild on health.

I'm going to let him go wild on the food. I'm going to let him go wild on medicines,” Trump told the crowd.

Today Trump took a bold step toward making good on those statements by announcing in a social media post he was nominating Kennedy to head the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services, which encompasses the FDA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. If Kennedy becomes HHS secretary, he will have influence over every aspect of U.S. healthcare and ultimately, the health and well being of Americans, ranging from vaccine recommendations to Medicare payment to cancer research priorities,

Kennedy’s opinions about Medicare and Medicaid programs are not well known, and his selection could signal that head-on attacks of the Affordable Care Act, a focus of the first Trump administration, will be relegated to the lower tier of Trump 2 administration’s list of healthcare priorities.

But Kennedy’s views on vaccines, fluoridation and pharmaceutical influence over the FDA and CDC have caused alarm among public health officials, drugmakers and others in the healthcare industry. Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again campaign may unleash and platform a populism sentiment about healthcare that is suspicious of government officials and sees pharmaceutical and other corporate interests in the sector as having harmful influence over the approval and use vaccines, drugs and food additives.

“Together we will clean up corruption, stop the revolving door between industry and government, and return our health agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science,” Kennedy wrote in a Thursday post on the social platform X.

“I look forward to working with the more than 80,000 employees at HHS to free the agencies from the smothering cloud of corporate capture so they can pursue their mission to make Americans once again the healthiest people on Earth,” the statement continued.

Ashish K. Jha, M.D., M.P.H., dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and White House COVID-19 response coordinator in the Biden administration, called Kennedy an “extraordinarily bad choice” in an interview on CNN and said while some of his ideas sound good on a bumper sticker, others about vaccines and raw milk are “really off the wall ideas that are not based on evidence-based science.

In an interview, also with CNN, before Trump’s selection of Kennedy was announced, Paul Offit, M.D,. director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, called Kennedy a “science denialist, a virulent anti-vaccine advocate and a conspiracy theorist.” Offit added, “He simply decides his own scientific truths. It is a dangerous moment.

Kennedy says that he is unfairly labeled as being anti-vaccine and that what he favors is more vigorous testing of vaccines. “I am called that [anti-vaccine] because it is a way of silencing me. But I have said for 17 year I am not anti-vaccine. I just want good science,” Kennedy said on April 26, 2024, on comedian and commentator Bill Maher’s television show.

Kennedy might not resist the healthcare populist label. He has been sharply critical of the “regulatory capture” of the FDA and CDC by drug and vaccine makers and has drawn a through-line between his early work as an environmental attorney fighting polluters of the Hudson River on behalf of fisherman and his criticism of federal health agencies. In a speech in March 2023 at Hillsdale College, a conservative liberal arts college, Kennedy described NIH as an “incubator for pharmaceutical products” and said that more than 50% of the FDA’s budget comes from pharmaceutical companies. He said that $5 billion of the CDC’s $12 billion budget goes toward buying and distributing vaccines. “If you work at the CDC, you don’t get promoted by finding problems by finding problems with vaccines. You get promoted by increasing uptake,” he said.

In that speech, Kennedy painted a picture of vaccine development and approval as being controlled by vaccines developers and driven by money-seeking by universities that conduct early phase trials and others. He said Anthony Fauci, M.D., then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, ushers vaccines through the regulatory process through appointments to CDC and FDA advisory committees. “I saw this process and how it works. It was regulatory capture on steroids,” he said. Kennedy also attacked Offit in that speech, calling him a liar.

Kennedy vaulted the Children’s Health Defense into prominence when he joined its board — he is currently on leave as its board chairman — and the organization casts doubt on the safety of vaccines with movies and studies. Among the organization’s movies are

“Vaxxed III, Authorized to Kill,” a documentary that the blurb on the company’s website says involves people sharing their experiences “after taking the COVID-19 vaccine, revealing tragic outcomes of either death or serious injury.”

The announcement of the Kennedy nomination came a day after Trump announced that he would nominate former Rep. Matt Gaetz. Gaetz’s selection was a surprise, and the Wall Street Journal and other news sources are reporting that Senate Republicans won’t approve the nomination. Whether Kennedy will run into opposition from Republican

Kennedy, 70, is the son of U.S. attorney general and senator Robert F. Kennedy, and a nephew of the U.S. president John F. Kennedy and senator Ted Kennedy. He initially sought the Democratic presidential nomination and then switch to an independent bid. In August, he suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. Kennedy speaks with a strained, raspy voice because of spasmodic dysphonia, which he said has been treated with surgery performed only in Japan. He is married to Cheryl Hines, who played Larry David’s wife on the long-running comedy series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”