Former President Donald Trump said this weekend that he would let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild on health.”
But exactly what he means by that isn’t clear.
“I’m going to let him go wild on health,” Trump said at his Madison Square Garden rally Sunday. “I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on the medicines.”
Kennedy told his supporters during an event Monday that Trump has promised him “control” over the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture if Trump is elected. Were Kennedy to be nominated as secretary of either department, that nomination would require Senate confirmation — a prospect that is not necessarily assured.
Kennedy, a former presidential candidate who dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump this past summer, has branded himself as a health care champion via his Make America Healthy Again PAC.
Over the past two months, he has made appearances throughout the country to share his story on the state of Americans’ health, one that he says is characterized by corrupt regulatory agencies, children sickened by “ultra processed” foods and Americans burdened by chronic disease.
His game plan to address these challenges appears to start with HHS and its agencies.
In an Oct. 25 tweet, Kennedy declared that the Food and Drug Administration’s “war” on public health was “about to end” and hinted at plans to gut the agency of employees who don’t agree with his vision.
He accused the agency of “aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma. 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.”
Speaking at a roundtable last month hosted alongside Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., Kennedy criticized the FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, saying that industry has transformed the agencies into “sock puppets” for its interests.
“If America fails, the chief reason will be because we let our country get sicker, more depressed, fatter, more infertile at an increasing rate, while crippling our national security, bankrupting our national budget with health care costs,” Kennedy said at the event.
Kennedy also asserted that former President Barack Obama’s signature health care law incentivized insurers to increase premiums by capping the amount of money they could take from premiums at 15 percent.
A look at Trump’s previous handling of his health agencies could offer a glimpse into what a Kennedy-influenced health care portfolio could look like.
Trump’s FDA also took fewer enforcement actions against companies compared to the Obama administration’s, according to a 2019 analysis by Science. The Trump administration’s FDA handed out 1,033 warning letters between his inauguration and May 2019, compared to the Obama administration’s 1,532 during the same time period.
Medical experts have expressed concern that a Kennedy-influenced HHS could lead to a rise in anti-vaccine rhetoric.
Kennedy founded Children’s Health Defense in 2018, a group that has been vocally skeptical about childhood vaccination and shared information that experts have flagged as medical misinformation.
Kennedy has also made anti-vaccine comments during the pandemic, calling child vaccination “criminal medical malpractice” at a 2021 event in Southern California, though he has since denied that he is anti-vaccine.
Under Trump’s administration, the White House attempted to accelerate the development of the COVID-19 vaccine, a controversial move that some were concerned appeared politically motivated. But Trump has distanced himself from touting the accomplishment on the campaign trail and has promised cuts to schools that mandate vaccinations, KFF Health News reported last month.
Jerome Adams, who served as surgeon general under the Trump administration, expressed concern earlier this week that Kennedy’s influence could deter people from getting vaccinated.
“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,” Adams said at the American Public Health Association’s conference Monday, according to The New York Times.
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