The Secretary of Health and Human Services oversees an enormous federal agency in charge of Medicare, Medicaid, federally funded biomedical research, public health, and drug approval. In other words, it’s a very important job—and the health of the American people is in that person’s hands.
In choosing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the role, president-elect Donald Trump has made a profound mistake.
That is not because I believe the status quo must be defended.
Those who point out that America is startlingly unhealthy, with outcomes worse than many other developed countries, are right. Look no further than the sorry state of U.S. life expectancy. We have problems—perhaps most of all when it comes to the health of our children—and those problems require solutions.
But the problem with RFK Jr. is not that he wants to change things. It’s that he is uniquely ill-suited to deliver the change that is needed.
Why? RFK Jr. was nominated precisely because of his stated positions on a wide range of health and scientific matters: vaccines, AIDS, the reputed harms of electromagnetic radiation from Wi-Fi and cell phones, and many other topics. So these views are central to assessing his suitability for the role.
The scientific process requires skepticism about prevailing consensus. Some Kennedy supporters see his skepticism on a wide variety of scientific and medical issues, including policies during the Covid epidemic, as a positive that will enable him to disrupt the medical and research establishment. And as pointed out in The Free Press, some of his stated positions are held by other nations. They also may well be correct, and are certainly valid topics of debate.
But the task that we face is not constructing a scorecard of his positions, tabulating them as correct vs. incorrect, plausible vs. crazy. Our task is to evaluate his qualifications as a potential leader of HHS. I argue that by repeatedly making claims about important issues that are known to be false or that are devoid of evidence, RFK Jr. has disqualified himself from this position.
I will focus on two examples, though I could cite more.
First, vaccines.
For decades, RFK Jr. has been a vocal advocate of the anti-vaccine movement. He was founder and chair of Children’s Health Defense, an organization that campaigns against childhood vaccinations whose beneficial effects on children’s health are firmly established.
Most remarkable among his repeated claims is that childhood vaccination against measles, mumps, and rubella has caused the increase in autism. Just last year he said on Fox News: “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.” This is long after the 1998 paper that advanced the idea was retracted as fraudulent in 2010. The author of the paper has been stripped of his medical license. Kennedy’s willful ignorance of this evidence should disqualify him from leadership in the health and research ecosystem. He has promoted a fear of vaccines that has—and will—lead to the return of diseases like measles and polio.
Recent statements that he “isn’t anti-vaccine,” and won’t “take vaccines away from anybody,” and only wants to ensure “vaccine safety” do not erase his long history of irresponsibly mistaken claims.
I agree that establishing the efficacy and safety of vaccines, and all therapeutics, is of utmost importance. Data-driven debates about individual vaccines are necessary, including rigorous analysis of data quality as well as transparency about the possible role financial and political interests play in influencing key decisions. Kennedy’s questions about the risks vs. benefits of mandated use of Covid vaccines in young people is squarely within acceptable bounds of scientific discourse. But that doesn’t neutralize the accumulated portfolio of his gross mistakes on the topic of vaccines.
Second, HIV and AIDS.
RFK Jr. repeatedly challenged the now well-established fact that AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, a discovery that led to a Nobel Prize and highly effective treatments that save millions of lives.
In his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, Kennedy repeated his concerns about this discovery, saying he takes “no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS. Then, in a 2023 interview with New York magazine, he said that research into the causal connection between HIV and AIDS was “phony” and “crooked.” This is scientific ignorance, not the healthy skepticism that some supporters allege. No one who asserts such nonsense should be at the helm of Health and Human Services.
Perhaps to shift attention from his discredited views on vaccines and HIV, RFK Jr. has recently been outspoken about another serious issue: the threats to health caused by “chronic disease.” For branding purposes, he uses the seemingly unobjectionable phrase: “Make America Healthy Again.” Of course, there was no golden era of health from which we have departed and must return, but it’s easy to see the appeal of the message.
The prevalence of obesity, autism, and other disorders has indeed been rising, and many scientists have been hard at work on these difficult issues. We should be open-minded about their root causes. An HHS or National Institutes of Health director committed to stimulating new research approaches would be welcome.
But there are no easy routes to discovering causes of difficult health challenges or designing safe and effective strategies to prevent or treat them. RFK Jr. displays no evident awareness of the realities of scientific discovery and therapeutic development.
The 2024 election has destabilized the status quo and will enable many policy changes, some of which may be salutary and others harmful. In the domain of health and medical science there is opportunity for the kind of disruption that will improve the ecosystem. But with the selection of RFK Jr., the second Trump administration risks squandering a chance to enhance the trajectory of new discoveries.
For the sake of the health of the American people, his appointment to HHS must be vigorously opposed.
Jeffrey S. Flier, MD, is a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and Higginson Professor of Medicine and Physiology at Harvard Medical School, where he was dean from 2007 to 2016. Follow him on X @JFlier.
And for another view, read Vinay Prasad’s piece, “A Simple Litmus Test for RFK Jr.’s Ideas.”
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