RFK Jr. as Trump’s health secretary? Here’s what he wants to do

For one dream, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is putting aside another in the horizon. 
 
Two people who are familiar with Kennedy’s political strategy says that Kennedy has intended to conclude the independent presidential campaign and support Trump. Kennedy’s campaign has tried for weeks to signal his possible interest in a Cabinet post in a future Trump administration even as his campaign has publicly claimed he was turning down such offers. 
 
On Tuesday, Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, told an interviewer the campaign was considering whether to ‘partner with Trump&’ and added that Kennedy would ‘do an incredible job’ as Secretary of Heath and Human Services. Trump later said in an interview with CNN that he “probably would” hire Kennedy to some position. 
 
“I did not know he was thinking about getting out, but if he is thinking about getting out, I, of course, would be open to it,” Trump said. 
 
(Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, Trump’s vice presidential nominee said Wednesday that there was no quid pro quo discussions on offering Kennedy a Cabinet post in exchange for the latter’s endorsement and that any further discussion on Kennedy’s position would be at a different time. ) 
 
Neither Kennedy nor his campaign provided any comment on just what he would do if he were nominated and approved by the Senate to serve in a position former HHS Secretary Alex Azar described as ‘having a shocking amount of power by the stroke of a pen,’ at the head of an agency with more than $1. 5 trillion budget. 
 
More historically, such a famous anti-vaccine campaigner and conspiracy theorist as Kennedy would not seem a typical choice to head the HHS. Past candidates for the position have had experience in medicine, government, law and the field of public health. At present, the current secretary, Xavier Becerra, was the attorney general of California. 
 
Kennedy was also an attorney and in the last years of his life worked as an environmental lawyer and start [ed] the Children’s Health Defense which is currently the best-funded anti-vaccine organization in the United States. He emerged as the chief spreader of various conspiracy theories during the pandemic, most of which were targeted at the public health officers in the agencies he now wants to be appointed to. Kennedy has blamed the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci for Covid death and said that he should be prosecuted if have done a crime. He has also said that the attorney general should compel the editors of medical journals to reproduce withdrawn research. 
 
HHS is composed of 13 operating divisions which include the Food and Drug Administration, the Centre for Disease Control and prevention and the National Institute of Health. During the campaign, in his podcasts, and in news interviews, Kennedy has reported that he would like to eliminate such offices and replace them with similar marginal personalities. 
 
Such agencies have turned into “sock puppets” of the industries they are supposed to regulate, Kennedy said in the interview to NBC News last year when he outlined his public health agenda if he were to become the president. If there were another pandemic, Kennedy responded, he would not focus the resources of our country on vaccinology research, vaccine manufacture or vaccine distribution. 
 
‘The priority in combating a virus should be developing the treatments that can cure and strengthening people’s immune systems,’ he said, and then continued a list of conspiracy theories stating that ‘these vaccines have probably killed more people than were saved from the coronavirus. ‘ He named ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as the treatments — that he claims were effective against Covid despite numerous studies showing the contrary. 
 
Kennedy’s campaign has received and been conducted by the anti-vaccine movement which he initiated. In November, he attributed increased support to activists at Children’s Health Defense, an organization that he led until taking a sabbatical to campaign. Speaking at the group’s annual conference where he received an award, he vowed to cease NIH from conducting research the infectious diseases such as Covid and measles instead, direct the institute on research chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity. Kennedy, for instance, regards environmental poisons whereby he categorizes childhood vaccines, as constituting the biggest menace to health, not infections. 
 
Kennedy once said, for instance, “I am going to say to NIH scientists, God bless you all. ” “Thanks for the public service, folks We are going to let infectious disease take a sabbatical for approximately eight years. ” 
 
Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a man with a long string of death threats by the anti-vaccine movement, said this about a Kennedy control over HHS – a department concerned with policy and administration of health issues, provision and financing of care, medical research and training, and public communication during emergencies. 
 
“No doubt, he will attempt to conduct studies that support his beliefs and thus continue to undermine the population’s confidence in vaccinations and quite likely, get rid of all the requirements,” Offit added. He tells me he cannot choose the stream in infectious diseases, he does not wish to learn about such diseases. He would get rid of such studies around real problems and orient them to what he supposes the problems are, irrespective of good data. 
 
For example, no matter how hard Kennedy tries to find negative information about vaccines that may be available in the data, Offit continued, he will remain sure that he is right. “In no way would this advance human health. ” 
 
During an NBC News interview last year, Kennedy has fiercely attacked the FDA, the NIH and CDC and vowed to ‘rip the corrupt corporate entrenchment of these agencies which made them hostile to the American people. ’ He promised to dismiss the current heads of the agencies and substitute them for ‘healing and health-enhancing officials’. 
 
He did not reveal their identities, yet he has people on the periphery of public health all around him. He has thanked “brave dissidents” such as a scientist banned from practicing medicine in Australia because of the vaccine he devised and Dr. Pierre Kory, who lost his license this month to the American Board of Internal Medicine for spouting and profiting from fake cures for Covid. Kennedy posted that like many other doctors Kory “helps to cut through the fog of corporate greed so we are able to clearly understand the root of chronic disease and what to do about it. 
 
Last year, candidate Kennedy invited a group of anti-vaccine doctors and influencers to a health policy roundtable and assured them, he will surround himself with dissidents. 
 
He tired me up saying ‘Have faith and watch what we do’. “I highly recommend it,” said Calhoun, though she occasionally whispered to him and wanted him to do something.