Public health experts, physicians, and scientists responded with fury and disgust to the news that President-elect Donald Trump will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the secretary of health and human services. If Kennedy—who has also promoted dangerous and ludicrous ideas about fluoride, 5G technology, and the causes of HIV/AIDS, among innumerable other pseudoscientific claims—assumes the position, “the damage he could do is near infinite,” warns Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist.
“He will do great harm—generational harm.”
The scope of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is immense: It sits over 13 other agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Indian Health Service.
Kennedy, an environmental attorney by training with no background or credentials in medical or public health, is the founder of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense. He became one of the loudest voices in the anti-vaccine movement when he began falsely claiming nearly 20 years ago that the shots are tied to autism.
Kennedy’s nomination didn’t come as a surprise. After Kennedy abandoned his own independent presidential campaign, he promptly endorsed Trump’s. As they campaigned together, Trump pledged to let him “go wild on health” in a new administration, as he phrased it, as part of Kennedy’s so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—proposals that amount to dismantling and defunding the government health agencies Kennedy has long railed against.
Having Kennedy in such a powerful role, according to University of Alberta law and public health professor Timothy Caulfield, is “horrifying. A genuine catastrophe.”
“This is a person who has spread deadly lies and conspiracy theories,” Caulfield, the author of several books on pseudoscience’s impact on public health, added. “He ignores evidence. He ignores experts. I have no doubt that he will do great harm—generational harm—to public health, trust in science, and biomedical research. Moreover, at the international level, he will platform, normalize, and legitimize pseudoscience and health misinformation, making it more ubiquitous and difficult to fact check.”
Dr. Peter Hotez, a recognized expert on vaccines and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, is also deeply concerned. He told Mother Jones that he’s preparing a paper on “what could happen to our vaccine ecosystem,” he said.
“It could collapse and we could see polio in the wastewater and the return of regular measles and pertussis outbreaks,” he said. “And, of course, preparedness for H5N1 and other pandemic threats could suffer.”
Love, who tracks health misinformation online and recently faced vitriol from people aligned with the MAHA movement, sees a laundry list of threats to public health under a Kennedy-run department. “Honestly,” Love said, “if you look at the purview of HHS secretary, the damage he could do is near infinite. And none of his long history gives any indication he will actually do anything to improve health, especially for those of lower socioeconomic status.”
“I can honestly say it has never been this bad.”
He could “skew, redirect, and reallocate grant and research funding” toward “fringe research,” Love warns, “cut funding for education and public health initiatives like vaccine campaigns or other public health interventions like fluoridation,” and slow or halt regulatory approval “for vaccines, biologics, immunotherapies, and other critical medical interventions.” Because Kennedy has wrongly demonized Covid vaccines as “gene therapy,” Love suspects that he will be hostile to genuine applications of that science—“the leading edge of our research in cancer, autoimmunity, genetic disease, and latent viral infections. The hit to biotech is sure to be substantial.”
“Conversely, he could also loosen regulatory requirements for less-robust wellness interventions like his ‘peptides’ and ‘chelating’ therapies to get those through regulatory and give them an appearance of legitimacy,” she explained.
“This role would give him a global platform to spread misinformation…He can lie, spread falsehoods, and undermine scientific evidence beyond what he’s already done,” Love says. “I would expect he would spread more lies about causes of cancer, the ‘chronic disease’ epidemic, ‘toxic chemicals,’ and more. He can also delay or withhold communicating actual factual information” during public health crises like epidemics.
In charge of HHS, Kennedy could appoint what Love called “unqualified and ideological individuals” within the department and the agencies it oversees, who could “erode and erase these critical agencies from within. He could replace qualified advisory board members with unqualified people, further dismantling these agencies.”
Not everyone responded negatively to Kennedy’s nomination. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), himself a physician and former member of a fringe medical group that promoted vaccine suspicion, cheered the news, writing on Twitter/X: “Finally, someone to detox the place after the Fauci era. Get ready for health care freedom and MAHA!” Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also posted a welcoming message, saying Kennedy “helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA.” (A Polis spokesperson later released a statement saying the governor remained “opposed to RFK’s positions on a host of issues, including vaccines and banning fluoridation.”)
Even before Trump tapped him, Kennedy signaled a radical vision to reshape some of the US’ public health agencies to his liking. At an entrepreneurship conference last week, he laid out plans to fire and replace 600 workers at the National Institutes of Health. The NIH declined to comment on the plan, but the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees civil service workers, provided a statement: “OPM and the Biden-Harris Administration have a deep appreciation and respect for our country’s civil servants and the importance of a nonpartisan, merit-based civil service. We cannot comment on the actions of future administrations.”
Caulfield, the University of Alberta professor, summed up what many medical and public health professionals seem to be feeling as they look toward the prospect of Kennedy taking the job. “As someone who has worked in this space for decades,” he said, “I can honestly say it has never been this bad. It feels like we are stepping toward a new Dark Age.”