Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in an evening zoom call with supporters that President-elect Donald Trump handed him a major role in the Department of Health and Human Services.
“The key, which President Trump has promised me, is control of the public health agencies, which is HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others. And also the USDA, which is, you know, key to making America healthy …” he said.
In a post on X, RFK stated, “President Trump has asked me to do three things: 1. Clean up the corruption in our government health agencies. 2. Return those agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science. 3. Make America Healthy Again by ending the chronic disease epidemic.”
Kennedy has made his stance on the current establishment very clear, claiming that currently, public health entities like the CDC, NIH, FDA, and USDA “have become sock puppets for the industries that they’re supposed to regulate.” “In some categories, their entire departments, like the nutrition department in the FDA, they have to go,” he said. [quote] He promised that under Trump, he will replace leaders of the current government health-sector with “honest public servants.”
However, Kennedy’s past has sparked several concerns over his new commanding position. Many have spoken out about fearing an increase in medical misinformation under Kennedy’s administration. Under his anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy has perpetuated several health related conspiracies, such as the link between vaccines and autism, a major talking point surrounding Trump’s decision. “By elevating his message, it normalizes people, parents, opting out of the vaccination schedule,” said associate professor of public policy at the University of Southern California Genevieve Kanter. “I think we could reasonably predict that there would be a decline in vaccination rates among children, and perhaps vaccination overall.”
“If RFK has a significant influence on the next administration, that could further erode people’s willingness to get up to date with recommended vaccines, and I am worried about the impact that could have on our nation’s health, on our nation’s economy, on our global security,” said Trump’s former Surgeon General Jerome Adams.
Additionally, Kennedy has also been outspoken about the supposed influence the cavity-fighting fluoride in drinking water has on children’s sexualities. He attributes the uptick in conversation and prevalence surrounding “sexual identification” and “gender confusion” among children to an increased exposure to what he believes are “endocrine disruptors” found in drinking water.
“I want to just pursue just one question on these, you know, the other endocrine disruptors because our children now, you know, we’re seeing these impacts that people suspect are very different than in ages past about sexual identification among children and sexual confusion, gender confusion,” Kennedy said in a statement on one of his podcast episodes. “These kinds of issues that are very, very controversial today.” However, multiple experts have confirmed that there is in fact no link between endocrine disruptors and children’s gender and sexuality, and the effects that Kennedy referenced in his claims apply to amphibious creatures, namely frogs, and have not been observed in humans.
These aren’t the only opinions Kennedy expressed that professionals believe could pose a concern to public health. Kennedy’s history with his promotion of the use of chelation as a treatment for autism is perturbing to many doctors. Dr. Jeffery Brant voiced his doubts that “any legitimate physician” believed that chelation was an acceptable treatment for autism, citing an instance from 2005 where, in western Pennsylvania, a 5-year-old boy died from cardiac arrest after a doctor tried to treat his autism with chelation. “It was a huge problem and there are people out there that are pushing it,” Dr. Brent said.
Furthermore, RFK’s endorsement of drinking raw milk as opposed to pasteurized has raised several eyebrows in the medical community, including those of Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. In a statement, he said that silencing the FDA from warning about the risks of raw milk is “probably a bad idea.” When considering the numerous species of bacteria found in raw milk, one of which is a strain of kidney-failure inducing E. coli, and the spread of the viral H5N1 bird flu among dairy cows, it becomes clear why Benjamin has made such a claim.
RFK is one of several figures Trump’s campaign team have named as a leading figure during the president-elect’s term. “We’re gonna let him go wild for a little while, then I’m gonna have to maybe reign him back, because he’s got some pretty wild ideas, but most of them are really good,” Trump said at the Al Smith dinner in early October. “I think he’s a he’s a good man, and he believes, he believes the environment, the healthy people. He wants healthy people, he wants healthy food. And he’s going to do it. He’s going to have a big chance to do it, because we do need that.”
