Healthcare industry braces for RFK Jr.

Healthcare industry braces for RFK Jr.


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President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to nominate vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the HHS caused a stir last week, with some politicians and industry groups applauding Kennedy’s anti-establishment ideas, while others worried his leadership could send the nation backward on public health. 

Kennedy has espoused a number of controversial views about healthcare in recent years, including that Wi-Fi causes cancer, that the Food and Drug Administration is waging a “war on public health” and that AIDS may not be caused by HIV

If confirmed, Kennedy will oversee an 80,000-strong department, including the FDA and CMS, which provides insurance coverage to more than 160 million people. Trump has promised to let Kennedy have free reign over healthcare policy.

Although Kennedy hasn’t laid out his agenda yet, he has expressed interest in curbing the influence of drug makers, promoting alternative medicine and cutting the number of medical experts working inside the HHS. 

“What we don’t really need at HHS is more medical expertise. What we need is an expertise on decoupling the agency from institutional corruption. Because it’s the corruption that has distorted the science,” Kennedy said during a town hall in September. 

Such comments have alarmed some public health experts, including Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, who served as the White House COVID-19 response coordinator from 2022 to 2023.

“This is an extraordinarily bad choice for the health of the American people,” Jha wrote on X on Thursday. “His ideas may sound good on bumper stickers but are unserious and often downright harmful.”

Hugh Taylor, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society, echoed that sentiment.

We must leverage this sizeable platform and role to embrace established science and champion medical and scientific advancement, debunk disproven conspiracy theories, and mitigate the spread of dangerous misinformation about such topics as the safety and efficacy of vaccines,” Taylor said in a statement to Healthcare Dive. “Mr. Kennedy falls alarmingly short of these critical qualifications.”

All eyes on vaccines

Although Kennedy has said he’s not anti-vaccine, his track record suggests a deep skepticism of them. Kennedy wrote a now-retracted article linking vaccines to autism in 2005 and made controversial statements about vaccines during the pandemic.

He also promoted a book on X that claimed COVID vaccines contributed to a mass of sudden deaths and insisted that most vaccines had been inadequately tested and children did not need them.

Kennedy’s nomination is being cheered by groups that oppose vaccination requirements, including the Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom, and come as polio and measles cases are rising for the first time in years — in part due to misinformation around vaccines.

Twila Brase, co-founder and president of Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom, said Kennedy’s nomination represented a “180-degree regime change in the Washington-D.C. public health establishment.”

“We expect to see more truth, fewer bureaucrats, and hopefully, in combination with the new Department of Government Efficiency, less wasteful use of taxpayer dollars for political pet projects that violate the patient, parent, and privacy rights of citizens,” Brase said in a statement to Healthcare Dive.

Other healthcare industry groups — including the American Public Health Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics — decried the nomination.

“A serious candidate for this position would follow the decades of real-world evidence that shows that vaccines are safe and prevent as many as 5 million deaths each year,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the APHA, in a statement Monday.

The head of the FDA’s vaccination program is simply asking that Kennedy “keep an open mind” about vaccines.





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