The growing opposition to the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services just ratcheted up a notch with the release of an open letter signed by over 700 health care workers, public health professionals, scientists and community-based providers urging the Senate to reject the nomination. In addition to the open letter, the campaign, organized by a new coalition called Defend Public Health along with Health Impact Partners, has also generated over 3,500 individual letters to senators. (Full disclosure: I’m assisting Defend Public Health with communications matters.)
The open letter calls out Kennedy’s complete lack of experience running an organization anywhere near as large and complex as HHS, which oversees key federal health and medical research agencies including the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, among many others. And it minces no words about Kennedy’s crackpot views: “Mr. Kennedy is well known for his conspiracy-driven theories on vaccines, COVID-19, HIV, and fluoridation. His unfounded, fringe beliefs could significantly undermine public health practices across the country and around the world.”
While it’s not unheard-of for a person with limited health expertise to head HHS, it’s unusual for that person to also have never run a large organization. More typical is Alex Azar, HHS secretary during the last half of Donald Trump’s first term in office, who had previously served as the department’s general counsel and deputy secretary in the George W. Bush administration, after which he held a series of positions with drugmaker Eli Lilly and Co. And there’s never been an HHS secretary who embraced the nearly endless array of crackpottery that Kennedy has spouted over the years.
Kennedy got attention during 2024 for a series of bizarre stories, including strapping the head of a dead whale to the roof of his car and driving it home and, on another occasion, leaving a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park, staged to look like a bicycle accident.
As a pair of actual medical experts, Weill Cornell Medicine Professor of Microbiology and immunology John P. Moore and New York Langone Medical College Associate Professor of Medicine Jonathan Howard wrote in December in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Kennedy’s track record as an anti-vaccine advocate and spreader of conspiracy theories about infectious diseases, some truly bizarre, combined with his inexperience administering a vast and complex set of health-care agencies, should render him unfit for this office.”
By early December, 77 Nobel Laureates had already urged the Senate to reject his nomination. Kennedy has been a leading source of potentially deadly vaccine misinformation for years, and when his misstatements are corrected, he simply doubles down. As Dr. David Gorski, professor of surgery at Wayne State University and managing editor of the site Science Based Medicine told the BBC last year, “Whenever presented with copious evidence and scientific studies that vaccines do not cause autism… or whatever health condition he attributes to them, it is never enough. He always moves the goalposts, demanding still more evidence.”
That’s a technique that those of us who battled the AIDS denialists—another set of anti-science crackpots Kennedy has embraced—remember well from decades past. Whatever data you showed them, they always found an excuse, no matter how far-fetched, to say that it wasn’t good enough. Kennedy actually goes a step farther: When he gets caught in a lie, he simply denies having said it, even when the lie has been captured on videotape.
And with the H1N1 bird flu virus ripping through US poultry and livestock amid increasing fears it might become a human epidemic as well, do we really need an HHS secretary who said, “I’m going to say to NIH scientists, God bless you all. Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years”? Those of us still suffering long-term effects from earlier bouts of COVID certainly don’t find that reassuring.
While RFK Jr. has gotten the most attention, Trump has proposed other equally problematic individuals to lead other federal health agencies. Jay Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, has been a vocal critic of what he misleadingly terms COVID “lockdowns” (which in nearly all cases were never really lockdowns in the US and most other countries). He served as the public face of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement calling for policies to protect the “old and infirm” while deliberately letting infection rip through the rest of the population.
The statement, released before COVID vaccines were available to the public, argued that such a policy would help to quickly create “herd immunity” and thus “allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.”
Herd immunity is a real thing. It refers to the fact that if the vast majority of a community is immune to a disease—say, by being vaccinated against polio—that will give substantial protection to the few who can’t be vaccinated, because very little of the disease will circulate in that community. But, as an opposing group of health experts quickly pointed out, it was an insane strategy to pursue at a time when there was no vaccine, much about the virus was still unknown, and many hospitals were overwhelmed with desperately ill COVID patients.
In the years since, it’s become abundantly clear that herd immunity was never feasible for COVID, for a number of reasons. First, while having been infected once confers some protection against reinfection, that protection is far from complete and may vary depending on the particular viral strains involved. The same, of course, is also true for current COVID vaccines, which protect well against severe short-term COVID symptoms, but don’t completely prevent infection. And it completely ignores the risk of Long COVID, a risk that increases with each infection, even a “mild” one.
Bhattacharya, who would lead federal disease research if he becomes NIH director, appears never to have backed away from his support for COVID herd immunity, despite the concept having now been thoroughly discredited. “I don’t think that Jay Bhattacharya belongs anywhere near the NIH, much less in the director’s office,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada told NPR. “That would be absolutely disastrous for the health and well-being of the American public and actually the world.”
And that’s not all. Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, physician and former member of Congress Dave Weldon, has also made false claims about alleged harm from vaccines. Indeed, the leader of a Mississippi antivaxxer group proclaimed, “He’s one of us!” upon hearing of his selection.
Weldon is a longtime ally of RFK Jr. and appeared in the anti-vaccine film Vaxxed, directed by British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, author of a discredited study that claimed to show a link between vaccines and autism. The journal that published Wakefield’s study, The Lancet, eventually retracted the study, finding it to be false. The UK General Medical Council ruled that Wakefield had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly” in his research and eventually removed him from the nation’s medical register. Weldon does not appear to have ever disavowed his association with Wakefield.
While in Congress, Weldon introduced legislation to ban the preservative thimerosal from use as a vaccine preservative, despite the fact that, as the FDA notes, multiple studies have shown it to be safe and its use has declined greatly. He also introduced a bill to remove oversight of vaccine safety from the CDC’s purview.
Finally, there’s Marty Makary, who Trump wants to lead the Food and Drug Administration. Some view Makary as less extreme than some of Trump’s other picks, and he at least has relevant experience. But he’s also recently expressed support for some of Kennedy’s sketchier views and is supporting Kennedy’s nomination to lead HHS.
The federal public health infrastructure certainly has its shortcomings, and no one—including Defend Public Health—would say it can’t be improved. But it’s hard to imagine a group of people less qualified to lead intelligent reforms or more likely to embrace anti-science disinformation than the people Trump wants to lead these key government health agencies.
