“I’m going to let him go wild on health,” former President Donald Trump promised Sunday at his rally at Madison Square Garden. “I’m going to get him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on the medicines.”
Trump was talking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the former political rival who Trump has increasingly been promising will take a health role in his administration if he’s elected to a second term.
Trump’s plans have been met with alarm in the public health community, not so much for the specific policy proposals Kennedy has communicated as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” platform as much as for the key issue he’s been leaving out: vaccines.
“I think we’re seeing an effort at rebranding himself in the weeks before the election, but it shouldn’t be taken seriously,” said Dr. Jason Schwartz, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health.
Kennedy, who founded the nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, which promotes anti-vaccine material such as the recent documentary “Vaxed III: Authorized to Kill,” has more recently been focused on chronic disease, not mentioning his signature issue in a September opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal or in an appearance Tuesday on “Fox and Friends.”
Instead, Kennedy has advocated for regulating chemicals in food – including an idea to swap tallow fat in for seed oils to make McDonald’s french fries healthier – and limiting access to soda and processed foods through school lunches and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“He knows that [vaccines are] a lightning rod issue and that it doesn’t help him,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
But, Osterholm warned, “I can’t imagine anyone who would be more damaging to vaccines and the use of vaccines than RFK.”
Focus on chronic disease
In a livestreamed event with supporters Monday, Kennedy said Trump had promised to give him “control” of several public health agencies, including the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Agriculture.
A spokesperson for Kennedy didn’t directly respond to a question about whether he expected to take a role as an agency head in a Trump administration but said the former president had asked him “to rid the federal health agencies of conflicts and corruption and return them to the tradition of gold standard evidence-based science.”
“He has also asked him to address the chronic disease epidemic, which is affecting more than 50% of Americans and is having a devastating impact on the nation’s health, economy and global security,” said the spokesperson, Stefanie Spear.
Kennedy has recently put the spotlight on obesity and diabetes as well as kidney disease, autoimmune conditions, cancer and addiction. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that he wants to reform the US Food and Drug Administration’s system of funding via user fees from the pharmaceutical industry, cap drug prices to where they are in Europe and review direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising guidelines on TV.
He also said he’d prohibit members of the US Department of Agriculture’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee from making money from food or pharmaceutical companies, keep National Institutes of Health funding from going to researchers with conflicts of interest and review standards for pesticides and chemicals.
“Americans are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system isn’t addressing effectively,” Kennedy wrote.
In a recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Trump held up a chart comparing life expectancy and health expenditures around the world, with the US an obvious negative outlier on both metrics.
“I’m going to send this to RFK Jr.,” Trump told Rogan, who responded, “I love the fact that you guys teamed up.”
Adams said that Kennedy could “spread misinformation and take us back to the dark ages in regards to vaccine-preventable diseases” but that he hoped he would focus instead on “promoting overall well-being.”
And, Trump allies point out, it’s hard to argue the US health-care system couldn’t be improved.
“Anything RFK can do to draw attention to that should be appreciated and welcomed by anybody who wants Americans to be healthy,” Grogan continued. “Regardless of political party.”
‘Strange bedfellows’
Kennedy’s messaging, at least on food policy, is resonating with some health experts in that field.
“They are calling for fixing the food system, doing something to coordinate and address diet-related chronic diseases, stopping corporate power, eliminating conflicts of interest between industry and government, getting toxic chemicals out of the food supply, and doing everything possible to refocus the food environment and dietary advice on health,” food policy researcher Marion Nestle wrote on her Food Politics blog.
She was referring to a roundtable discussion on nutrition and policy led by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, which involved Kennedy and others who Nestle described as “mainly influencers.”
“These are things I’ve been writing about here for years,” Nestle said on her blog. “It’s hard to argue with any of this and I won’t.”
Still, she noted, “politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows.”
On the medicine side of things, Kennedy’s omission of vaccines from his latest policy discussions isn’t assuaging public health experts’ fears. Schwartz noted that anti-vaccine advocates often allege — without credible evidence — links between vaccines and increases in chronic disease rates, suggesting that a focus on vaccines is just below the surface of Kennedy’s current messaging.
Kennedy has also issued warnings that he plans to gut federal agencies, like the FDA and NIH.
“FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” he posted Friday on X, formerly known as Twitter, railing against “aggressive suppression” of a laundry list of things including psychedelics, raw milk, ivermectin, vitamins, sunshine, exercise “and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”
“If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records,” Kennedy continued, “and 2. Pack your bags.”
That warning followed comments Kennedy has made about ending NIH research into infectious diseases, putting doctors in the field on edge.
“Infectious diseases are very much a part of our present and will be very much a part of our future, and he wants to stop studying them?” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an infectious diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
‘A science denialist’
Offit said Kennedy has continued to make misleading or false statements about the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine — including some that were linked to a deadly measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019 — even as evidence shows they’re untrue. When it comes to vaccines, Offit said, “he’s a science denialist.”
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Schwartz called Kennedy’s more recent pivot away from discussing vaccines an “eleventh hour attempt to sanitize his reputation and rebrand himself as a reasonable champion of chronic disease prevention – presumably to land a position in a potential Trump administration,” something he said “just isn’t credible.”
Osterholm, who noted that he’d served in a health policy role in every presidential administration since Ronald Reagan’s and thinks of himself as a “nonpartisan public health soldier,” said he felt compelled to weigh in publicly where he hadn’t before, concerned about potential Trump policies and what he referred to as Kennedy’s “pseudoscience.”
“Everything that we see and know about what a Trump administration would look like would devastate public health in this country,” he said. “Devastate it.”