The idea of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an outspoken vaccine skeptic who has also made baseless claims about fluoride and other scientific issues, serving as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services has the medical community panicking over the potential implications. President-elect Donald Trump has said that he would let Kennedy “go wild on health” and on “the food and “the medicines" by giving Kennedy control of federal health policy.
“Somebody said to me today, ‘I can’t think of any single individual who would be more damaging to public health than RFK,'" Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CNN’s chief medical correspondent, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer Thursday.
Gupta said that the medical community was near-unanimous in its "horror" over Trump's flirtation with picking Kennedy to lead HHS, and was particularly troubled over his stance on vaccines. “He talked about COVID specifically being bioengineered to attack certain demographics of populations, but when it comes to vaccines and him talking about the connection between vaccines and autism, I think that probably gets the most attention,” he said.
Kennedy's vaccine views have drawn the attention of White House officials. Mandy Cohen, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said at a health summit Wednesday that she didn't want to see science to "go backwards."
“We have a short memory of what it is like to hold a child that has been paralyzed with polio, or to comfort a mom who has lost her kid from measles. It wasn’t that many generations ago,” she said. “And I don‘t want to have to see us go backwards to remind ourselves that vaccines work. They work. They protect our kids. They are our best defense against these terrible illnesses.”
Routine childhood vaccines — which have for decades acted as the primary safeguard against measles, chickenpox, polio and other illnesses that used to kill people in large numbers — have prevented roughly 508 million illnesses and more than 1.1 million deaths among children born within the past 30 years, according to the CDC.
In 2018, two infants died in Samoa when nurses accidentally prepared the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine with expired muscle relaxant instead of water, causing the local government to temporarily suspend its vaccine program. Kennedy and his anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense took the opportunity to spread falsehoods about vaccinations across the island, leading a drastic decline in vaccination rates.
One year later, a measles outbreak infected 57,000 Samoans and killed 83 of them, including children. Kennedy has since declared that he bears no responsibility for the deaths.
“Well America, I hope you like measles,” CNN's Jake Tapper said sarcastically after Kennedy's nomination was announced on Thursday.
The prospect of federal health policy resembling Kennedy's meddling in Samoa and Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has scientists and doctors worrying of a looming health disaster under their watch. “Robert F Kennedy Jr. is a clear and present danger to the nation’s health. He shouldn’t be allowed in the building at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), let alone be placed in charge of the nation’s public health agency," Public Citizen, a progressive nonprofit organization focusing on consumer advocacy, said in a statement.
"By appointing Kennedy as his secretary of HHS, Trump is courting another, policy-driven public health catastrophe,” the organization added.
Kennedy has weighed in on other health issues. After endorsing Trump, he repeatedly claimed that fluoride, a mineral that strengthens teeth and reduces cavities, is the culprit of multiple health issues and said that the president-elect would push all federal water systems to eliminate it, even though the supply of drinking water is typically up to local government. He also touted also touted the effectiveness of raw milk and ivermectin, an anti-parasitic drug that scientists have proven is not an effective COVID cure. It's not known whether he took a dose of it when he purportedly had a parasitic worm in his brain "which ate a portion of it and then died."
“Imagine, if you will, giving the keys to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s data vaults to someone who has spent years spreading misinformation about vaccines,” Dr. Kavita Patel, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and former government official, wrote in an op-ed. “It’s like asking a flat-earther to pilot our next mission to space.”
