Senate confirms vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of US health services
Republicans brush off concerns about fringe views to back Trump pick, who will now oversee a vast federal complex with hands in food safety, biomedical research and more
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate on Thursday confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as President Donald Trump’s health secretary, putting the prominent vaccine skeptic in control of $1.7 trillion in federal spending, vaccine recommendations, and food safety as well as health insurance programs for roughly half the country.
Nearly all Republicans fell in line behind Trump despite hesitancy over Kennedy’s views on vaccines, voting 52-48 to elevate the scion of one of America’s most storied political — and Democratic — families to secretary of the Health and Human Services Department. Democrats unanimously opposed Kennedy.
Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, who had polio as a child, was the only “no” vote among Republicans, mirroring his stands against Trump’s picks for the Pentagon chief and director of national intelligence.
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world,” McConnell said in a statement afterward. “I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
The rest of the GOP, however, has embraced Kennedy’s vision with a directive for the public health agencies to focus on chronic diseases such as obesity.
“We’ve got to get into the business of making America healthy again,” said Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, adding that Kennedy will bring a “fresh perspective” to the office.
Kennedy, 71, whose name and family tragedies have put him in the national spotlight since he was a child, has earned a formidable following with his populist and sometimes extreme views on food, chemicals and vaccines.
His audience only grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Kennedy devoted much of his time to a nonprofit that sued vaccine makers and harnessed social media campaigns to erode trust in vaccines as well as the government agencies that promote them.
With Trump’s backing, Kennedy insisted he was “uniquely positioned” to revive trust in those public health agencies, which include the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes for Health.
Shortly before the election, Trump had assured Kennedy that he would let the longtime vaccine skeptic “go wild on health.” In addition to his anti-vaccine views, Kennedy has also floated removing fluoride, which has dental health benefits, from drinking water.
Kennedy’s views on health, in addition to lying far outside the mainstream scientific consensus, have also overlapped with antisemitic rhetoric in the past. In 2023, he baselessly claimed that COVID had been “ethnically targeted” to avoid “Ashkenazic Jews and Chinese.”
During an anti-vaccine rally a year earlier, he declared, “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland, you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did” — a remark he later apologized for. He also has a history of using the word “holocaust” to refer to vaccine policies.
Through it all, Kennedy has steadfastly denied all charges of antisemitism, including in an appearance before Congress. He is ardently pro-Israel and recently defended Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late leader of the Chabad Hasidic movement, from attacks leveled by far-right commentator Candace Owens.
Last week, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said he hoped Kennedy “goes wild” in reining in healthcare costs and improving Americans’ health. But before agreeing to support Kennedy, potential holdout Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a doctor who leads the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, required assurances that Kennedy would not make changes to existing vaccine recommendations.
During Senate hearings, Democrats tried to prod Kennedy to deny a long-discredited theory that vaccines cause autism. Some lawmakers also raised alarms about Kennedy financially benefiting from changing vaccine guidelines or weakening federal lawsuit protections against vaccine makers.
Kennedy made more than $850,000 last year from an arrangement referring clients to a law firm that has sued the makers of Gardasil, a human papillomavirus vaccine that protects against cervical cancer. He promised to reroute fees collected from the arrangement to his son if confirmed as health secretary.
Kennedy will take over the agency amid a massive federal government shakeup, led by billionaire Elon Musk, that has shut off — even if temporarily — billions of taxpayer dollars in public health funding and left thousands of federal workers unsure about their jobs.
Kennedy, too, has called for staffing overhauls at the NIH, FDA and CDC. Last year, he promised to fire 600 employees at the NIH, the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research.
On Friday, the NIH announced it would cap billions of dollars in medical research given to universities being used to develop treatments for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.
JTA contributed to this report.
