President-elect Trump’s decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a divisive anti-vaccine campaigner and misinformation crusader, to lead the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services has raised eyebrows.
If the US Senate confirms Kennedy, he will oversee several federal agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health—the largest source of funding for university research, which has received more than that. $30 billion for HHS by 2022.
“Over the limit. Down the rabbit hole. He is completely insane,” Jeffrey Flier, a professor and former dean of Harvard Medical School, wrote in X in response to Kennedy’s nomination. “I couldn’t believe that this could happen until now. With total political independence, this must be seen as unacceptable in 2024. “
Ashish Jha, director of the Brown University School of Public Health, wrote in X that because the Secretary of HHS “shapes health policy in profound ways,” Kennedy “is the worst choice for the health of the American people.
“Our health care system is far from perfect,” wrote Jha, who also served as President Biden’s White House COVID-19 response coordinator. “But it has spurred tremendous progress that has benefited the American people. This appointment, if confirmed, puts all that at risk.”
Among the many agencies Kennedy will oversee, he may first look to the NIH, given his public comments about his plans to cut the agency on his first day in office.
At an event in Arizona a few days before Trump chose him to lead the department, Kennedy said that, on January 21, 600 people “will enter the NIH offices and 600 people will leave,” NPR reported. (About 20,000 people work at the NIH.)
Despite the layoffs, Kennedy said he wants to shift NIH’s focus from infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, to chronic diseases such as obesity. Last November, according to NBC News, Kennedy told the anti-vaccination group, “I will say to the NIH scientists ‘God bless you all. Thanks for the community service. We’re going to give infectious diseases a break for about eight years.’”
NBC News also reported that Kennedy, who has spread the discredited claim that vaccines cause autism, said he wants to force medical journals to publish retracted studies.
“It’s a mix of complaints, some of which may have broad ideological support from a populist agenda,” including things that “don’t have a solid basis in research like his opposition to policies,” said David Guston, professor and co-founder. director of the School for the Future of Social Innovation at Arizona State University. “It gives the opportunity to have partnerships that may be strange to make various changes, some of which are not based on research. [and] others would not have been there.”
Even if the Senate confirms Kennedy, he and other department heads “only have a lot of leeway to make changes,” Guston said, noting that the most important thing is how they communicate with the public.
“The most dangerous situation is that the propaganda and the focus of RFK can provide a strong anti-vaccination movement to emerge even from widely accepted childhood vaccines,” he said. “That will be a problem if you look at the public because the public doesn’t follow things through peer-reviewed books, but through the way they are represented on X or other social media platforms.”
Within Higher Ed Kennedy could not be reached for comment Friday.
After Trump announced him as his pick to lead HHS, Kennedy told X: “We have a great opportunity to bring together the greatest minds in science, medicine, industry and government to end the chronic disease epidemic. I look forward to working with the more than 80,000 employees at HHS to free agencies from the cloud of corporate capture to pursue their mission of making Americans the healthiest people on Earth.”
Kennedy also wrote that he would work to “return our health care institutions to their rich tradition of golden, evidence-based science,” promising to provide Americans with “transparency and access to all the data to make their own choices and make informed decisions.” their families.”
Trump quoted Kennedy’s words on Truth Social, his social media platform, saying, “Mr. Kennedy will return these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and the lights of transparency, to end the epidemic of Chronic Disease, and make America Great and Healthy Again!”
The president-elect had previously said he would let Kennedy go “wildly.”
Jim Olds, a professor of neuroscience and public policy at George Mason University who headed the Biological Sciences Directorate at the US National Science Foundation from 2014-18 and previously worked in the NIH research program, said. Within Higher Ed that Kennedy’s public skepticism about water fluoridation and vaccines has troubled him.
“I hope that if RFK Jr. is confirmed,” Olds said, “his unorthodox views on vaccines will not be the main driver of that. [HHS] first.”
Although Kennedy’s public criticism of the department was aimed at the NIH, Medicare and Medicaid Services make up the bulk of the HHS budget. He also won’t be able to influence NIH funding since final decisions must go through Congressional appropriations committees, which during Trump’s first term, ignored the president’s calls to drastically cut research funding.
And even as the academic community’s deep-seated fears about the Trump administration’s initial calls to cut science funding didn’t materialize, Olds said he “feels very confident” in the NIH’s leadership. Between that and the powerful lobbying groups that support the NIH, he predicted that the agency would likely never meet the level of disaster that some predicted in Kennedy’s nomination.
However, he does not rule out the possibility that the Republicans will make changes in this organization. Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers called for an overhaul of the NIH in response to allegations that it allows dangerous experiments during times of violence.
With Republicans in control of Congress and the White House, Olds said such proposals could “have legs.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some changes,” he said. “But change has never hurt the NIH. It has been around for a long time and came about through continuous evolution.”
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