President-elect Trump's decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary will put some of the former independent presidential candidate's most controversial views under deep scrutiny.
Kennedy will need to win 50 Senate votes to get confirmed, and while that's far from impossible, a series of statements he's made in the past are likely to cause problems not only with Democrats, but some Republicans.
Here are five issues likely to come up at his confirmation hearings:
Vaccines and autism
Kennedy is perhaps best known for his opposition to vaccinations, though he has balked at being labeled “anti-vaccine.” He founded and led the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense (CHD) before stepping down to launch his presidential campaign in 2023.
Like many vaccine opponents, Kennedy has stated he believes the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal in vaccines causes childhood neurological disorders, autism in particular.
In 2005, he published an article in Rolling Stone and Salon titled “Deadly Immunity,” in which he claimed the federal government was colluding with the pharmaceutical industry to purposely cover up the alleged harms of thimerosal.
The online version of the article was ultimately retracted in response to criticisms, with former Salon editor-in-chief Joan Walsh writing in 2011 that it contained “flaws and even fraud tainting the science behind the connection” between vaccines and autism.
In 2017, during Trump’s first term, Kennedy said he had been asked to chair a commission investigating the link between autism and vaccines. By 2018, it appeared that the Trump administration abandoned those plans, and the commission never materialized.
The majority of childhood of vaccines today no longer contain thimerosal and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said there is no research linking the small amounts of the preservative used in vaccines to autism.
Senate Democrats like Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.)........