Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is setting aside one ambition and making room for another.
Kennedy ended his independent presidential campaign Friday and endorsed former President Donald Trump. While announcing his decision, Kennedy said Trump had “asked to enlist me in his administration,” though Kennedy did not specify a role.
On Tuesday, Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, told an interviewer the campaign was weighing whether to “join forces” with Trump and suggested that Kennedy would do an “incredible job” as secretary of health and human services. Trump later told CNN that he “probably would” appoint Kennedy to some role.
“I didn’t know he was thinking about getting out, but if he is thinking about getting out, certainly I’d be open to it,” Trump said.
(Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s vice presidential nominee, said Wednesday that there was no quid pro quo deal to offer Kennedy a Cabinet post in exchange for his endorsement and that any conversations about a future role would be separate.)
Neither Kennedy nor his campaign responded to requests for comment on just what he would do if he were nominated and approved by the Senate to serve in a position former HHS Secretary Alex Azar described as having “a shocking amount of power by the stroke of a pen,” at the head of a department with a more than $1.5 trillion budget.
By historical comparisons, Kennedy, a famous anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist, would be an odd pick for HHS secretary. Previous appointees have had varied backgrounds in medicine, government, law and public health. The current secretary, Xavier Becerra, served as attorney general of California.
Kennedy, also an attorney, practiced environmental law and founded Children’s Health Defense, which is now the most well-funded anti-vaccine organization in the country. During the pandemic, he became the purveyor of wild conspiracy theories, often aimed at public health officials in the agencies he now seeks to lead. Kennedy has criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, for Covid’s death toll and said Fauci should be prosecuted if he committed a crime. He has also said the attorney general should force editors of medical journals to publish retracted studies.
HHS oversees 13 agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. On the campaign trail, in podcasts and in news interviews, Kennedy has described wanting to dismantle those offices and rebuild them with like-minded fringe figures.
The agencies have become “sock puppets” for the industries they regulate, Kennedy told NBC News in an interview last year, in which he laid out his plans for public health if he were elected president. Faced with another pandemic, Kennedy said, he wouldn’t prioritize the research, manufacture or distribution of vaccines.
“The priority should be finding treatments that work and building people’s immune systems,” he said, falsely adding that “vaccines have probably caused more deaths than they’ve averted.” He mentioned ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments — which he says worked against Covid, even though numerous studies say they didn’t.
Kennedy’s campaign has been supported and led by the anti-vaccine movement he helped build. In November, he credited activists at Children’s Health Defense, which he chaired until he took leave to run for president, for boosting his campaign. Accepting an award at the group’s annual conference, he said he would stop the National Institutes of Health from studying infectious diseases, like Covid and measles, and pivot it to studying chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity. Kennedy believes environmental toxins, a category in which he places childhood vaccines, to be the major threat to public health, rather than infectious disease.
“I’m going to say to NIH scientists, God bless you all,” Kennedy said at the time. “Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a longtime target of the anti-vaccine movement, said a Kennedy reign over HHS — a department tasked with overseeing health policy, providing and regulating care, sponsoring medical research and training, and communicating with the public during emergencies — would be disastrous.
“He no doubt will try to perform studies that prove his views and thus further weaken America’s trust in vaccines and, no doubt, try to eliminate all mandates,” Offit said. “He said he doesn’t want to study infectious diseases. He would eliminate studies around real problems and gear them toward what he thinks the problems are, independent of what good data show.
“It doesn’t matter whether the data show that he’s wrong; he’s still going to be convinced that he’s right,” Offit continued, referring to Kennedy’s focus on proving the harms of vaccines that have repeatedly been proven to be safe. “In no way would this advance human health.”
In Kennedy’s interview with NBC News last year, he sharply criticized the FDA, the NIH and the CDC and said he would “unravel the corrupt corporate capture of these agencies that turned them predatory, against the American public.” He said he would boot the officials in charge and appoint people who would “turn them back into healing and public health agencies.”
He declined to name names, but he has surrounded himself with those on the fringe of public health. He has praised “brave dissidents,” including discredited vaccine scientist Robert Malone, and Dr. Pierre Kory, who was stripped of his certification by the American Board of Internal Medicine this month for promoting and peddling false cures for Covid. Kennedy posted that doctors like Kory “help clear away the smoke of corporate profiteering so that we can see clearly the causes and solutions to the chronic disease epidemic.”
Last year, candidate Kennedy told a group of anti-vaccine doctors and influencers assembled for a health policy roundtable that he would surround himself with “dissidents.”
“Have faith and watch what we do,” he said. “I think you’ll be pleased.”
