Public health experts are concerned that, if confirmed, Donald Trump’s choice for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) – Robert F Kennedy Jr – could upend access to pharmaceutical drugs in favor of more experimental treatments.
Kennedy, who the president-elect picked earlier this month, has repeatedly expressed distrust for pharmaceuticals, and criticized the FDA for its “aggressive suppression of psychedelics”. On his podcast, he called the US “the sickest country in the world”, blaming its healthcare system for devoting billions to “the pills and the potions and the powders rather than on actually getting people healthy, building their immune systems”.
Kennedy is a surprising choice for a number of reasons. He’s an attorney who lacks government public health experience and has criticized Trump harshly during his own independent presidential campaign.
But, like Trump’s other cabinet picks, Kennedy has expressed a conspiratorial mistrust for the agency he has been tapped to run. Matt Gaetz, who had been tapped to become attorney general before withdrawing himself from consideration on Thursday, believes the January 6 insurrection was a government sham intended to cover a stolen election while Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s national intelligence pick, has parroted Russian propaganda about US intelligence.
Kennedy has likewise promoted conspiracy theories about the healthcare system he would oversee, including the debunked theory that…
