Days before the election, Donald Trump’s transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick was asked on CNN if there was a possibility that vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would serve as the Health and Human Services secretary if Trump were elected. “No,” Lutnick said. “Of course not.”
But in the week after the election — following several nominations that seemed extreme to many lawmakers in Trump’s own party — the president-elect announced on Thursday that Kennedy would be his nominee for HHS. “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,” Trump announced in a creatively capitalized post on X. “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!”
Kennedy has long condemned the addition of unhealthy additives to food in the United States and was pivotal to the movement in the 1990s to clean up New York’s waterways. Over the past few decades, he has also embraced many conspiracies surrounding vaccines — including a belief he voiced last summer that COVID was “ethnically targeted” to “attack Caucasians and Black people,” with the “most immune” being “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people. He has long (and erroneously) believed that vaccines cause autism.
If he is confirmed by the Senate, Kennedy will oversee a massive agency with a $1.7 trillion budget that is responsible for pandemic prevention, scientific research, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Over the weekend, he expressed his wish to fire 600 staffers at the National Institutes of Health on the first day of the second Trump administration.
