Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed to take Anthony Fauci down three years ago. Soon enough, he may replace him as the nation’s top health official.
If former President Donald Trump is elected president, the nation’s loudest anti-vaccine proponent could conceivably be in a position to drastically transform U.S. health policy.
Last week during a Zoom organizing call, Kennedy, who sits on Trump’s transition team, said in leaked remarks that the Republican nominee has promised him “control of the public health agencies,” including but not limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick quickly denied to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that there were any plans to put Kennedy up for secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) if Trump were re-elected. “He’s not getting a job for HHS,” Lutnick said, though that doesn’t rule out an appointment as a senior White House adviser in second Trump term.
Newsweek reached out to Kennedy via email for comment.
After a failed bid for the presidency, first as a Democratic candidate and then an independent candidate, Kennedy suspended his campaign in August and endorsed Trump. Despite publicly feuding earlier this year, their unlikely alliance has blossomed.
Trump, who once called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of the dynastic Kennedy clan, promised his antagonist-turned-ally “a big role” in the federal public health bureaucracy during a Friday stop in Dearborn, Michigan.
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“He’s going to have a big role in health care, a very big role. He knows it better than anybody,” Trump said, adding that Kennedy “has some views I happen to agree with strongly and I have for a long time.”
Over the weekend, Trump also said that Kennedy could work on anything with the exception of oil policy, saying the Democratic scion wants “women’s health, he wants men’s health, he wants kids, he wants everything.”
“I’ve known him a long time and all he wants to do is very simply he wants to make people healthy and I think it’s important,” Trump said.
Kennedy is the nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of former attorney general and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Both his uncle and father were assassinated.
Paul Offit, a nationally-recognized pediatrician who serves as the director of the vaccine education center at Children Hospital of Philadelphia, told Newsweek that he was unsure how Kennedy would work with public health agencies, given the fundamental ethos of those organizations.
“Those are all science-based agencies,” he said. “They make decisions based on science. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a science denialist. He doesn’t believe in science if it contradicts his other beliefs.”
“What could be more dangerous than having someone having sway over these agencies?” Offit added.
Should Trump win, he could use Kennedy to usher in an extreme shake-up of federal public health policy. Here’s what may come:
Drinking Water
Kennedy has vowed to immediately remove fluoride from drinking water, a major reversal in a decades-long practices that has been praised for drastically reducing cavities and strengthening teeth.
Adding low levels of fluoride—a naturally occurring mineral found in many foods—to drinking water has long been considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the last century and has been recommended by the U.S. Public Health Service since 1962.
“On January 20, the Trump White House will advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water,” Kennedy said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, Sunday.
“Fluoride is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”
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Kennedy, who is also an environmental lawyer, has built a reputation for fighting for clean water with Waterkeeper Alliance, which he founded in 1999.
Officials lowered their recommendation for fluoride levels in drinking water in 2015 to address a tooth condition called fluorosis, while a federal agency determined in August “with moderate confidence” that there is a link between very high levels of fluoride exposure and lower IQ in kids. According to the CDC, more than 200 million Americans drink from fluoridated water systems.
What has Trump said?
Asked about the fluoride proposal on Sunday, Trump told NBC News that he had not spoken to Kennedy yet, “but it sounds OK to me. You know it’s possible.”
What does the expert say?
“Fluoride has clearly been shown to decrease cavities,” Offit said. “Dentists do far less drilling than they did when I was a kid.”
Vaccines
Kennedy, who is on leave as the chair of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, has long repeated the debunked claim that childhood vaccines cause autism. Despite insisting that he is not anti-vax and claiming that he’s never told the public to avoid getting vaccinated, he is a vocal opponent to immunizations.
Asked on the Lex Fridman podcast if there are any good vaccines, Kennedy said in July, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”
When Fridman pushed Kennedy on his stance, asking specifically about the polio vaccine, Kennedy suggested that it may have killed more people than it saved. The CDC estimates that the polio vaccine, which is widely considered one of the other greatest medical advances of the 20th century, has saved more than 1.5 million lives and prevented paralysis in more than 20 million children.
Kennedy also came under criticism for advocating against COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic as well as statements he made comparing lockdowns to Nazi Germany and claiming that the virus “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
Asked in February if he would have allowed the FDA’s emergency approval of certain COVID vaccines to move forward, Kennedy responded, “I would have said that they need to do science to show that the vaccine is actually going to avert more problems than it’s causing.”
What has Trump said?
The Trump campaign has gone all-in on Kennedy’s views in recent weeks, embracing his anti-vax rhetoric and suggesting that a vaccine ban could happen during a second Trump presidency.
Asked about the possibility of banning a vaccine Sunday, Trump told NBC that he would talk to Kennedy and “other people, and I’ll make a decision.”
“But he’s a very talented guy and has strong views,” Trump added.
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Trump’s running mate Senator JD Vance also told Joe Rogan last week that he had been “red-pilled” about the COVID vaccine, saying that he had a worse reaction to the initial dose than to the virus itself.
“I was in bed for two days, my heart was racing, I was like, the fact that we’re not even allowed to talk about that. Even, you know — no like, serious injury, but even the fact that we’re not even allowed to talk about the fact that I was as sick as I’ve ever been for two days and the worst Covid experience I had was like a sinus infection,” Vance said.
The CDC has repeatedly disputed such claims, stating that the worse side effect from COVID vaccines are not worse than the potential effects of the virus itself and that vaccines do not increase the risk of death, while the virus does.
Lutnick also told CNN that Kennedy wants access to health data to prove that vaccines are unsafe.
“He says, if you give me the data, all I want is the data and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off of the market,” Lutnick said. “So that’s his point.”
It’s unclear what data Lutnick is referring to. Extensive research on vaccine safety is publicly available.
What does the expert say?
Offit said that at the time the COVID vaccine was introduced, it was a “lifesaver” because the only other option was avoiding human-to-human contact. But as vaccine mandates became common, vaccinations “rubbed a significant percent of the population the wrong way.”
“There was never really a politics to the anti-vaccine movement,” Offit said.
For a long time, anti-vaccine voices came from both the far-left and the far-right. On the far-left was the all-things-natural, crunchy granola types. On the right were the get-the-government-off-our-back libertarians.
“When Trump says, ‘We’ll let Bobby do what he wants,” Offit said the former president is trying to appeal to those voices on the right.
He also warned that as more parents exempt their children from getting vaccinated, “we’ll get to a point where that’s not acceptable.” Pointing to the 2014 measles epidemic in southern California, Offit said the outbreak was what ultimately pushed parents to change their minds.
“It’s a shame that it would have to come to this,” he said.
Reforming Public Health Agencies
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Kennedy has vowed to “clean up” public health agencies that “have become sock puppets for the industries they’re supposed to regulate.”
“FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” Kennedy said on X last month. “This includes its 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,” he warned.
Kennedy also proposed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that half of NIH’s research budget should be spent on “preventative, alternative and holistic” medicines.
What has Trump said?
Trump said on the Rogan podcast last month that he told Kennedy he could “focus on health, you can do whatever you want.”
“I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines,” Trump added at his Madison Square Garden rally in new York.
When he was president, Trump’s administration repeatedly undercut the FDA.
In the early days of his first term, he proposed to slash the agencies regulations by 75 to 80 percent, which critics said could “fundamentally destroy the ability of the agency to protect patients and consumers from unsafe or ineffective medications and medical devices, hazardous foods and dietary supplements, and dangerous tobacco products, among other things.”
“The end result would be countless preventable deaths, injuries and illnesses across the U.S.,” Dr. Michael Carome, the director of Public Citizen’s health research group, said in a January 2017 statement.
What does the expert say?
“Regulation is a good thing,” Offit said. “You want drugs and airplanes to be regulated. You want that safety net.”
He said that “if these agencies stand tall and do the regulation they’re in charge of,” then there won’t be major reversals in public health policy even with Kennedy as a leading official.
Offit also added that it would be difficult for any president to come into office and overturn major health care regulations without the help of Congress.
