Trump picks anti-vaccine activist RFK Jr. as health secretary

President-elect Donald Trump has picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., perhaps the United States’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist, to lead the  Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency in charge of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which recommends vaccines for use, and other key health and science agencies.

Kennedy joins a slew of other lightning-rod picks by Trump in recent days, including a Fox News host for secretary of defense and a man who was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for attorney general. Given Kennedy’s many years of promoting a non-existent link between childhood vaccines and autism—an idea that sprang from a now-retracted study by a UK doctor who lost his medical license—public health experts watched warily as Kennedy moved closer into Trump’s orbit earlier this year.

Yet, one of the co-chairs of Trump’s campaign recently denied that Kennedy would get a job with the Department of Health, claiming that Kennedy just wanted data on vaccines. Some experts believed Kennedy was too controversial even for Trump. Getting confirmed by even a Republican-led Senate might be difficult for Kennedy, but in recent days, Trump has promoted the idea of using “recess appointments,” which don’t require a Senate vote, to install his choices into key roles.

“I expect this – and some of his other nominations – is why he is suggesting he needs recess appointments, to subvert the ability of the Senate to vote on his nominees,” Dorit Reiss, who researches vaccine law and policy at the University of California College of Law, San Francisco, posted on X, referencing the Kennedy pick.

In addition to his anti-vaccine views—Kennedy founded the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, a prominent platform for vaccine skepticism—Kennedy said while he was running for president that he would like to shift the infectious disease focus of NIH. “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, God bless you all,” Kennedy said, according to NBC News. “Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”

Kennedy appears to have ambitions of sweeping change at US health and science agencies. He told a town hall that he’d been asked to, in his words, “reorganize” the agencies that have a portfolio that affects human health. He has said he would fire officials and claimed that the Food and Drug Administration had “suppressed” raw milk and unproven treatments for COVID-19. Health authorities have warned against drinking unpasteurized milk lately as it may contain H5N1 avian influenza—a virus that experts have been watching as it spread from birds to mammals, including dairy cattle. “If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags,” Kennedy posted on X in late October.

Many experts will likely view the future as being bleak for public health and medical research should Trump be successful in promoting Kennedy to the top of the Department of Health and Human Services. If Kennedy gained a prominent role in the next administration, the country would begin “down a path of fatal science denialism,” wrote infectious disease expert Georgios Pappas in the Bulletin after Trump’s election.