As news broke that Donald Trump was nominating Robert Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, CNN’s Jake Tapper gave blunt assessment of what’s ahead: “Well, America, I hope you like measles.”
Kennedy, who waged a third party presidential bid before endorsing Trump, has spent the better part of his recent career on a crusade against childhood vaccines, which have been an essential component of public health since World War II. Many studies have continued to show that autism is not linked to vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Kennedy would oversee the CDC, among other agencies.
“This is somebody, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been pushing quackery, who has been pushing lies, who has been pushing conspiracy theories,” Tapper said to CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta at another point on The Lead.
“It’s not often that the entire medical and public health community is going to be in lockstep on something, but they are pretty close on this in terms of their significant concerns, horror even,” Gupta said. “As someone said to me today, ‘I can’t think of any individual who can be more damaging to public health than RFK.”
Gupta said that there were “these kernels of agreement” that Kennedy had with the medical establishment on some of his other signature issues, like food supply.
“Then there is these other things … they are not alternative views, they are false views,” Gupta said, noting that the vaccine-autism link was the subject of massive study yet did not establish causation.
Kennedy did get some praise from Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado.
Polis wrote on X, “He helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA. I hope he leans into personal choice on vaccines rather than bans (which I think are terrible, just like mandates) but what I’m most optimistic about is taking on big pharma and the corporate ag oligopoly to improve our health.”
Polis got some pushback for the comment — including by some who thought his account had been hacked — and the governor posted a follow up.
He wrote, “Lest there by any doubt, I am vaccinated as is my family. I will hold any HHS Secretary to the same high standard of protecting and improving public health.”
Back in August, Polis reacted to Kennedy’s assertion in a Fox News interview that he wanted to leave “healthy children” as his legacy.
Polis wrote then, “Not sure how bringing back Measles and bringing back Polio makes anyone more healthy…”
