Putting Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy Jr. in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) may not be the most controversial cabinet decision President-elect Trump has made (or will make), but it reverberated both in financial markets and some quarters hardly known for bandying around red MAGA hats.
Pharmaceutical company stock prices dropped radically after the announcement, possibly as a reaction to Kennedy’s promise—or threat—to “stop the revolving door between industry and government.”
Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis—known as belonging to the more woke leftist wing of the party—wrote on X that he was “excited” by the news and was optimistic about “taking on big pharma and the corporate ag oligopoly to improve our health.”
Nutritionist and fitness expert Jillian Michaels, who said she had previously voted for Kamala Harris in California Senate elections, was elated after the announcement and thanked Trump for “being true to your word.”. Michaels, a former trainer on the TV show “The Biggest Loser,” told Fox News the American disease epidemic is caused by a collaboration between big farming, big food, big pharma, and big insurance. “We need change. We need it now. What they’re doing isn’t working, and it’s not working on purpose because it’s profitable for the very few.”
The 70-year-old Kennedy, the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, and the son of former Attorney General and Senator Robert Kennedy Sr., gathered poll numbers in the 20% range when he initially challenged incumbent Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. After accusing the Democratic Party of deliberately sabotaging his bid, he left the party and launched a candidacy as an independent. In August, Kennedy halted his own campaign and threw his support behind Republican Trump. For the rest of the campaign, he promoted his policies under the acronym ‘MAHA’—Make America Healthy Again—challenging the pharmaceutical and processed food industries that he blames for a “disease epidemic” in Americans, particularly children.
At a rally in Washington D.C., Brice Hamard, a contributor to The European Conservative, reported that Kennedy called for “independence from pharmaceutical companies, big food giants, and corporate interests.” Kennedy also said that in the 90s, tobacco companies bought food corporations and used their scientists to create addictive products with synthetic chemicals banned in Europe but permitted in the U.S.
Kennedy said in a post on X that he looked forward to working with DHHS staff to “free the agencies from the smothering cloud of corporate capture so they can pursue their mission to make Americans once again the healthiest people on Earth“ and “return our health agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science.”
Public health advocates and experts in the medical field have expressed concerns about the nomination, warning that Kennedy could influence the public to reject life-saving vaccines. Dr. Jerome Adams, who served as Surgeon General in the first Trump administration, told CNN Kennedy could “spread misinformation and take us back to the dark ages in regards to vaccine-preventable diseases.”
Mainstream media largely chimed in with alarm. Public broadcaster PBS said Kennedy had “promoted vaccine misinformation” and USA Today said he “has a history of anti-vax views.”
In an interview with News Nation, Kennedy contested the label, saying it was a way of “silencing or marginalizing him”:
I’ve never been anti-vaccine … Vaccines should be tested like other medicines. There should be a safety test. … Of the 72 vaccine doses now mandated—essentially recommended, but they’re really mandated—for American children, not one has ever been subject to a pre-licensing, placebo-controlled trial.
He also debunked accusations that he would take vaccines off the market, telling NBC News, “I’m going to make sure that scientific safety studies and efficacies are out there and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.”
Maybe the most contentious of Kennedy’s views is his insistence that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in vaccines, is the cause of increased health problems in children, including the rise in autism diagnoses—from 1 in 10,000 in his generation to 1 in 34 today, he says. The Center for Disease Control website states that decades of research has proven those claims untrue, adding, “Even after thimerosal was removed from almost all childhood vaccines, autism rates continued to increase.”
And of course, there is the issue of the most recent vaccines, developed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. When the mRNA vaccines came on the market, Kennedy warned that they could be “compared to genetically modified foods” and said they could cause “irreversible and irreparable” genetic damage. In a widely denounced statement at a private dinner, while discussing “ethnic bioweapons,” he said there was an “ethnic differential” in how the COVID virus affected different races, and that it was—deliberately or not—engineered to “ethnically target Caucasians and black people” while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese were “most immune” to the virus.
In a recent video from an event held by the political action committee Turning Point Action, Kennedy said the Trump administration will investigate “the collusion between the pharmaceutical companies and the medical boards” that revoked the license to practice from physicians treating COVID patients with alternative medications.
Whatever your take is on the Republican-supporting ‘black sheep’ of the Democratic Kennedy dynasty, he’s likely to make administration of health care issues worth paying attention to—if a majority of the Senate confirms his appointment.
