Source: The New York Times
President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, setting up a debate over whether Mr. Kennedy, whose vaccine skepticism and unorthodox views about medicine make public health officials deeply uneasy, can be confirmed.
Mr. Trump is stocking his administration with people whom even some Republicans find alarming, including former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida as attorney general and Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host, as defense secretary. In choosing Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Trump is picking someone who is at war with the very public health agencies he would oversee.
In a statement on Truth Social, his social media platform, Mr. Trump said Mr. Kennedy would restore the nation’s health 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!”
Mr. Kennedy, who has railed against the revolving door between industry and government, vowed on social media 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.”
If he is confirmed, Mr. Kennedy would have sweeping control of a department with 80,000 employees across 13 operating divisions that run more than 100 programs. Its agencies regulate the food and medicine that Americans encounter in their daily lives, decide whether Medicare and Medicaid will pay for drugs and hospital treatments, guard against infectious disease, and conduct billions of dollars of medical research into diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Many Democrats and public health experts were appalled by Mr. Trump’s selection. Dr. Richard E. Besser, the chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the C.D.C., said that having Mr. Kennedy in the health secretary job “would pose incredible risks to the health of the nation,” because Mr. Kennedy’s assault on the nation’s public health apparatus was worsening the mistrust lingering after the coronavirus pandemic.
“Robert F. Kennedy is part of the problem and cannot be part of the solution,” Dr. Besser said.
Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and a former chairwoman of the Senate Health Committee, said the selection was “catastrophic” and “could not be more dangerous.” She characterized Mr. Kennedy as a “notorious anti-vaxxer” and “fringe conspiracy theorist” who could harm public health in myriad ways.
But on the campaign trail, while he was running for president and also after his campaign merged with Mr. Trump’s, Mr. Kennedy found support from people across the political spectrum who shared his suspicion of the pharmaceutical and food industries and applauded his emphasis on nutrition and removing additives from foods.
But Mr. Kennedy has spread false information about vaccines, including that they cause autism — a theory that has long been debunked. He has publicly contradicted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation that communities fluoridate their water to guard against tooth decay.
He has embraced raw milk, despite the Food and Drug Administration’s warning that drinking it is risky, particularly amid a bird flu epidemic among dairy cows. And he has promoted hydroxychloroquine, a drug whose emergency authorization as a Covid-19 treatment was revoked by the Food and Drug Administration after a study of 821 people found it lacked effectiveness.
Whether the Senate, even one controlled by Republicans, will confirm Mr. Kennedy is an open question. In addition to his outside-the-mainstream views about medicine and health, he has been associated with a number of peculiar activities, like dumping a dead bear in Central Park and supposedly decapitating a whale. In interviews before Mr. Trump’s announcement, some Republican senators said Mr. Kennedy gave them pause, but none ruled out voting for him.
“I find some of his statements to be alarming, but I’ve never even met with him or sat down with him or heard him speak at length,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, a centrist whose vote could be critical to Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation prospects. “So I don’t want to prejudge based just on press clippings that I have read.” However, she added, “I think it would be a surprising choice.”
Republicans more closely aligned with Mr. Trump were enthusiastic. “One hundred percent,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama and a member of the Senate Health Committee, said when asked if he would vote to confirm Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Tuberville said he was a fan of Mr. Kennedy because of the work he had done with food and vaccines, adding, “More than anybody that I know of, he’s had an open mind.”
The strange political marriage between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kennedy, who endorsed Mr. Trump after suspending his presidential campaign, has been beneficial for both men. The merger gave Mr. Kennedy a platform he previously lacked: slickly produced rallies and roaring MAGA crowds.
But Mr. Kennedy gave Mr. Trump something as well: a core of new supporters, in particular, disaffected Democrats and “crunchy granola moms” who might not have otherwise voted for a felon with strongman tendencies. Mr. Trump grew impressed with Mr. Kennedy and vowed to let him go “wild on health.”
Lately, Mr. Kennedy has shifted his language from vaccines and toward ending what he calls the “chronic disease epidemic,” a goal that public health experts say is laudable. If he puts nutrition at the top of his agenda, he might find common cause with scientists and public health officials.
“I think there’s interest amongst policymakers on food,” said Dr. Anand Parekh, the chief medical officer at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Dr. Parekh said he had been “pleasantly surprised” to see Mr. Kennedy emphasizing nutrition and “veering off his usual vaccine and environmental health narrow lanes.”
Mr. Kennedy is an environmental lawyer with no formal training in medicine or public health. He would not be the first lawyer to run the agency; the current health secretary, Xavier Becerra, is a former congressman and attorney general of California. Past secretaries have been governors; they include Tommy Thompson under President George W. Bush and Kathleen Sebelius under President Barack Obama.
Mr. Kennedy has said little about health care delivery programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, that fall within the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services. Instead, he has taken aim at regulators and public health and research agencies: the Food and Drug Administration, the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health.
