Robin Rayne/Zuma
Public health experts, physicians, and scientists responded with fury and disgust to the news that 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 Health and Human Services is immense: it sits over 13 other agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare and 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 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, the ex- president 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 which amount to dismantling and defunding the government health agencies Kennedy has long railed against.
Having Kennedy in such........