Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the notorious vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist who experts warn will sabotage public health efforts worldwide, has been confirmed as President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
The chamber confirmed Kennedy by a vote of 52-48 largely along party lines. Former longtime Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voted against him.
Kennedy, an “unfathomable” nominee in the eyes of public health experts, has questioned the link between HIV and AIDS, tied gay and transgender identities to chemical exposure, pushed to remove fluoride from drinking water, suggested COVID-19 was genetically engineered to target certain races, claimed Black people may have different immune systems and suggested anti-depressants are more addictive than opioids and are linked to school shootings.
But he’s perhaps best known for the misinformation he’s spread about vaccines. He’s said they aren’t tested enough — something experts dispute — and has suggested vaccine trials that would be ethically dubious, potentially requiring children to go without protection against severe disease. He’s also falsely linked vaccines to autism. When given the chance to walk that claim back during his confirmation hearing, he refused.
Now that he’s been confirmed, he’ll have multipleavenues to curtail vaccine access and uptake, including by revising government vaccine advisories, abolishing the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, requiring additional post-market studies on vaccines, sowing public distrust in immunization and weakening legal protections for vaccine makers.
In 2023, when Kennedy was still a candidate for president, he said at an anti-vaccine conference that with him in charge, the country would “give infectious disease [research] a break for about eight years.” He has instead emphasized a focus on dietary issues and “chronic disease.”
An early test of Kennedy’s leadership may be his response to the growing outbreak of bird flu, which largely presents in animals but has begun infecting humans. Pandemic experts say they have serious concerns about the virus swapping genes with the seasonal flu, allowing it to spread more easily.
Despite his many misleading statements in the past, Kennedy spent much of his Senate confirmation hearings claiming that he’s supportive of vaccines. When confronted by Democrats with comments he’s made in the recent years ― from saying that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” in 2023, to saying he’d “pay anything” to go back in time and not vaccinate his children in 2020 ― Kennedy repeatedly said his remarks had been taken out of context.
The pushback against Kennedy from the public health community has been enormous. Last month, more than 700 experts in the field signed an open letter pleading with senators not to confirm him. Before that, more than 17,000 doctors signed a similar letter.
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“This appointment is a slap in the face to every health care professional who has spent their lives working to protect patients from preventable illness and death,” the doctors’ letter reads. “Americans deserve better.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who once roomed with Kennedy in law school, was blunt with him during the confirmation hearing.
“Frankly, you frighten people,” Whitehouse told him.