Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is giving up one ambition to make room for another.
Kennedy ended her independent presidential campaign on Friday, endorsing former President Donald Trump. Announcing her decision, Kennedy said Trump had “asked me to join his administration,” but did not specify what role he would play.
Kennedy's running mate, Nicole Shanahan, said in an interview on Tuesday that the campaign was considering whether to “work with” Trump and suggested Kennedy would do a “great job” as secretary of Health and Human Services. Trump later told CNN that he would “probably” appoint Kennedy to some role.
“I wasn't aware that he was considering leaving the country, but if he was considering leaving the country, of course I would be open to that,” Trump said.
(Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, Trump's running mate, said Wednesday that there was no deal to endorse Kennedy in return for a Cabinet post and that discussions about a future role would be held separately.)
Neither Kennedy nor his campaign responded to requests for comment about what he would do if nominated and confirmed by the Senate to lead an agency with a budget of more than $1.5 trillion that former Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar described as “tremendous power at the stroke of a pen.”
Historically, Kennedy, a well-known anti-vaccination and conspiracy theorist, would be a strange choice for secretary of Health and Human Services. Previous appointees have come from a variety of backgrounds in medicine, government, law and public health. The current secretary, Xavier Becerra, served as California's attorney general.
Kennedy, who is also a lawyer, practices environmental law and founded Children's Health Defense, currently the most well-funded anti-vaccination group in the country. During the pandemic, he has become a purveyor of outlandish conspiracy theories, often targeting public health officials at the agency he now seeks to lead. Kennedy criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for the COVID-19 death toll, saying that Fauci should be prosecuted if he committed a crime. He also said that the attorney general should force medical journal editors to publish retracted research papers.
HHS oversees 13 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. During the campaign, on podcasts and in news interviews, Kennedy has said he wants to dismantle those agencies and rebuild them with like-minded radicals.
In an interview with NBC News last year outlining his plans for public health if elected president, Kennedy said agencies were “puppets” of the industries they regulate. He said he would not prioritize vaccine research, manufacturing or distribution in the face of a new pandemic.
“The priority is to find treatments that work and build up people's immune systems,” he said, mistakenly adding that “vaccines have probably caused more deaths than they have prevented.” He cited ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments, which he said worked against the coronavirus but which many studies have shown did not work.
Kennedy's campaign has been fueled and led by the anti-vaccination movement he helped build. In November, he credited activists at Children's Health Defense, where he served as president before taking time off to run for president, for boosting his campaign. Accepting the award at the group's annual conference, he said he would steer the National Institutes of Health away from research on infectious diseases like COVID-19 and measles and instead focus on chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity. Kennedy believes that environmental toxins, which fall into the same category as childhood vaccines, rather than infectious diseases, are the biggest threat to public health.
“To the scientists at NIH, I want to say: God bless you all,” Kennedy said at the time. “Thank you for your public service. We're going to give infectious diseases a respite for about eight years.”
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a longtime target of the anti-vaccine movement, said Kennedy's control of the Department of Health and Human Services, whose duties include overseeing health policy, delivering and regulating health care, supporting medical research and training and communicating with the public during emergencies, would be disastrous.
“He will undoubtedly try to produce studies to prove his point, thereby further undermining American confidence in vaccines, and will undoubtedly try to eliminate all mandates,” Offit said. “He has said he doesn't want to do infectious disease studies. He will exclude studies on real problems and focus on what he thinks are the problems, regardless of what good data shows.”
“It doesn't matter if the data shows he's wrong, he remains convinced he's right,” Offit continued, referring to Kennedy's focus on proving the harm of vaccines that have repeatedly been proven safe. “This is not going to advance human health in any way.”
In an interview with NBC News last year, Kennedy harshly criticized the FDA, NIH and CDC, saying he would “unravel the corrupt corporate control that has turned these agencies into predatory actors against the American people,” and vowed to fire their leaders and appoint people who “will turn these agencies back into institutions of care and public health.”
Though he avoids naming names, Kennedy has surrounded himself with people on the fringes of public health, praising “brave dissidents” like discredited vaccine scientist Robert Malone and Dr. Pierre Corey, whose medical license was revoked by the American College of Physicians this month for promoting and selling fake COVID-19 cures. Kennedy posted that doctors like Corey “help clear the smoke of corporate profiteering so we can clearly see the causes and solutions of our chronic disease epidemics.”
Last year, Kennedy told a group of anti-vaccination doctors and leaders at a roundtable on health policy that he planned to surround himself with “anti-establishment” people.
“Trust me and see what we do,” he said. “I think you'll be pleased.”
