President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday that he will nominate vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Health and Human Services Department.
If the Senate approves Kennedy, the former independent presidential candidate will lead a sprawling department responsible for the huge Medicare and Medicaid health coverage programs, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kennedy, 70, is the son of Robert F. Kennedy, the late U.S. attorney general and Democratic senator from New York who was assassinated in 1968 by a gunman in Los Angeles as he ran for president. He is the nephew of former President John Kennedy who was assassinated in 1963.
Trump in October said that if he was elected, he would let Kennedy “go wild on health.”
Kennedy told NBC News in a recent interview that Trump has said he wants Kennedy to “clean up corruption” at federal health agencies, return those agencies to science-based policies and “make America healthy again.” Kennedy said that “there are entire departments, like the nutrition department at the FDA, that have to go.”
The stock prices of shares of vaccine makers fell earlier on reports that Trump would tap Kennedy for the HHS post.
Kennedy last year suggested that the Covid-19 virus, which CDC played a major role in combatting, was engineered to “attack Caucasians and Black people,” and to be less likely to harm “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” people.
He previously promoted theories that autism was linked to childhood vaccines, a connection that has been disproved.
Kennedy outraged many of his siblings by endorsing Trump in August after abandoning his long-short presidential candidacy.
Trump’s selection of Kennedy came a day after the Republican president-elect tapped Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general.
Gaetz’s selection immediately sparked controversy due in large part to the fact that the Department of Justice, which he would lead as AG, previously investigated him for possible sex trafficking of a 17-year-old girl.
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