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Dark days ahead, folks—Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking charge of America’s public health. On Thursday morning, the U.S. Senate voted to approve President Donald Trump’s nomination of RFK Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Senate voted in favor of RFK Jr. by a tally of 52 to 48—with Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell being the lone Republican vote against him. Other Republican senators who initially expressed their misgivings about RFK Jr. have said they were satisfied by his responses, which included a promise to safeguard vaccinations. But many medical and public health experts fear he and Trump will cause colossal damage to the country’s public health.
RFK Jr.’s path to the chief of HHS has been twisty, to say the least. For many years, he was a well-lauded lawyer, environmental advocate, and Democrat, even initially running for president last election in the Democratic primary. But Kennedy also has a long history of making misleading or outright false statements about important health issues, particularly vaccination.
His first major proclamation on the subject, the 2005 article “Deadly Immunity” published in both Rolling Stone and Salon, promoted a debunked link between mercury-based thimerosal in vaccines and autism. The article was so riddled with errors that Salon added five corrections to it within days, and by 2011, both publishers pulled the article entirely (though only Salon posted a retraction notice explaining why).
After failing to make headway in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary, RFK Jr. chose to run a third party presidential campaign. By August, however, he dropped out and endorsed Trump for president. In return, Trump pledged that Kennedy would be given free rein to reshape the country’s public health agenda should he win—to “make America healthy again” in RFK Jr.’s words. Soon after his election win, Trump announced his nomination of Kennedy to head HHS.
Kennedy has spread misinformation about vaccines since 2005, serving as the chairman of the well-known anti-vaccination group Children’s Health Defense from 2015 to 2023. In one especially egregious moment, he and Children’s Health Defense promoted the local anti-vaccination movement in Samoa during 2019, with Kennedy even making a visit to the country that June to support advocates and meet with government officials.
There was a tragic incident in Samoa the year before, in which two children had died from measles shots that nurses had mistakenly mixed with muscle relaxant instead of water—a medical error that anti-vaccination advocates used to sow mistrust of the vaccine itself. Fueled by lowering vaccination rates, a massive measles outbreak struck Samoa in the fall of 2019, which led to the deaths of 83 residents, mostly children under five.
Kennedy has since minimized any potential culpability he had in the Samoa outbreak. During the Senate committee hearings to vet his nomination, he even suggested that fewer children may have died from measles than reported—a statement that Samoa’s current Director-General of Health Alec Ekeroma called a “total fabrication.”
Vaccines aren’t the only thing that RFK Jr. has made misleading statements about. In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy questioned whether AIDS was caused by HIV (it is), and has previously suggested that a “gay lifestyle,” particularly the use of recreational drugs such as poppers among the gay community, was the actual cause of AIDS. He’s suggested that water fluoridation is causing cancer (while there is a real ongoing scientific debate about the pros and cons of fluoridation, studies overall have not supported a cancer link). And he’s also supported the conspiratorial belief in chemtrails—the idea that planes are deliberately releasing hazardous chemicals into the atmosphere (in actuality, the trails these planes leave behind are mostly water vapor). In a post on X last summer, RFK indicated he would stop the “crime” of chemtrails if given the opportunity.
In the lead-up to the Senate vote, some Republican lawmakers did express hesitance about RFK Jr.’s fitness for the position, particularly given his past stances on vaccination. Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, a former physician, stated that he changed his mind after being promised that the Trump administration and RFK Jr. would work closely with the Senate health committee to protect “the public health benefit of vaccination.” He also stated that Kennedy “has been insistent that he just wants good science and to ensure safety.”
Other senators have argued that RFK Jr.’s positions on addressing the drivers of chronic illness make him well-suited to lead HHS. In explaining his yes vote to advance Kennedy’s nomination last week, Senator Thom Tillis argued that RFK Jr. would positively change the status quo of America’s health care system.
But there’s little to suggest that Kennedy’s approach to public health will mark any kind of advancement, according to Adam Gaffney, a critical care and pulmonary physician as well as a former president of Physicians for a National Health Program.
“RFK Jr. is unlikely to have any useful impact on chronic diseases because, on the one hand, he holds an array of pseudoscientific beliefs about chronic disease, and on the other, he is joining an administration that appears set to deregulate polluters and strip healthcare from millions—steps we know will worsen health for those with chronic ailments,” Gaffney told Gizmodo. “People don’t realize that his anti-vaccine beliefs are foundational to his distorted understanding of chronic disease: he believes that vaccines are a key driver of conditions such as autism. And while no one can disagree with his general support for improving childhood nutrition, he offers few concrete proposals that would make a difference—like universal free high-quality school lunches.”
Even when he highlights real issues—like the prevalence of unhealthy, processed diets—he often blames the wrong targets. He’s regularly singled out food ingredients like seed oils, or refined plant-based vegetable oils, as a major reason why we’re less healthy compared to other countries, for instance. But studies in general haven’t found a link between seed oil consumption and worsened health, while some research has even suggested that replacing certain sources of saturated fats with seed oils can improve cardiovascular outcomes. Processed foods tend to be less healthy, but mainly because they contain high levels of sugar, salt, and fat.
As the presumptive director of HHS (he still needs to be sworn in—a formality), Kennedy will be able to sway the priorities of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health, to name a few. But nothing about RFK Jr’s, Trump’s, or the GOP’s track records indicate that they will actually focus on the most important health issues facing Americans today. Even if he does leave vaccines mostly alone, for example, Kennedy has already promised to suspend government funding into vital initiatives like infectious disease research, just five years after the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic.
“The reality is that the Trump administration is almost certainly going to coddle, not confront, powerful corporate interests like the food industry. Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, Trump promised to repeal Biden-era power plant rules that will put more pollution in the air. Less MAHA, more ‘Make America Wheeze Again’,” Gaffney said. “Finally, Medicaid cuts currently being considered by Congressional Republicans could take healthcare from millions—and that would both cause and exacerbate chronic disease. For instance, lack of healthcare causes people with high blood pressure to go without care—and suffer chronic complications like heart disease and stroke as a consequence.”
To put it bluntly, neither the U.S. nor the world is likely to benefit from Trump and RFK Jr. leading the nation’s public health agencies.
