President-elect Donald Trump said he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy and a prominent vaccine skeptic, to be the next health and human services secretary, a move with major implications for the federal public health infrastructure. The nomination is likely to spur a major confirmation battle in the Senate.
Trump said in a tweet that Kennedy will restore federal 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!”
Kennedy ran for president as an independent candidate largely on a public health platform, including remodeling the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, before dropping out and endorsing Trump.
Trump said in October that he would let Kennedy “go wild on medicines” and food policy in his administration.
“He wants to do some things, and we’re going to let him get to it,” Trump said of Kennedy in his election victory speech. “Go have a good time, Bobby.
But even before suspending his campaign, Kennedy had a phone conversation with Trump this summer, during which they talked about changing the vaccine schedule for children. Kennedy said he wanted to lower the doses of each vaccine to prevent babies from changing “radically.”
Kennedy eventually dropped out of the race to join Trump as an adviser under the banner of “Make America Healthy Again,” specifically targeted at the obesity epidemic, the high chronic disease burden in the United States, and vaccines that Kennedy says are unsafe and untested.
At a recent event in Scottsdale, Arizona, Kennedy said that, on Day One of the new Trump administration, 600 NIH employees would be fired and immediately replaced.
As the director of the vaccine-skeptical group Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy has long been an advocate of the disproven accusation that vaccines are a leading cause of autism spectrum disorder and other chronic neurological and autoimmune conditions.