Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly wants to be the secretary of health and human services or hold a similarly powerful health position in a Trump White House. Mr. Kennedy claims he’s been promised influence over the two issues he is most eager to address: federal agency corruption and chronic disease. “I’m going to be deeply involved in helping to choose the people who can run F.D.A. and N.I.H. and C.D.C.,” he told Tucker Carlson on a recent panel.
Mr. Kennedy has no meaningful claim to health expertise beyond an impressive geriatric six-pack and a do-your-own-research mantra. Nonetheless, he has gone from a fringe voice to the national leader of a rising “health freedom” movement powered by conspiracist thinking, resentment against the public health establishment and anti-vaccine fervor.
The Covid-19 pandemic was a divisive crisis for Americans. I worry that appointing Mr. Kennedy to a top health job would entrench the maddening, counterproductive, personality-driven dynamics that have dominated the politics of health and medicine for the first half of this decade, especially since Covid.
For the kind of person who chafed against mask and vaccine mandates and was susceptible to misinformation, the Covid-19 pandemic was a radicalizing event. Arguments for bodily autonomy, skepticism about corporate influence in health care and anxiety about the toxic effects of environmental contaminants have traditionally been the purview of health activists on the left. (Mr. Kennedy was until fairly recently a liberal Democrat with some idiosyncratic preoccupations.) During the first years of the pandemic, however, these themes were taken up against the public health establishment in service of a right-aligned agenda.
This realignment has politicized beliefs that were not traditionally tied to party identification: While the share of Democrats who supported school vaccination mandates held steady from 2019 to 2023, the share of Republicans who believed the same declined by 22 percentage points. In another survey, 69 percent of Republicans said they felt that the country had given too little priority to respecting people’s individual choices during the pandemic, compared with 28 percent of Democrats.
If Kamala Harris’s campaign mantra has become “We’re not going back,” a Kennedy appointment to a senior public health position would signify “We’re never getting out of here.” The fervor on the right about health and science inflames a similar tendency toward rigidity and dogma on the left; for each anti-vaccine post on X, a smug sign proclaiming “In this house, we believe science is real” blooms in someone’s yard. Mr. Kennedy’s promotion to power would make it all but impossible to learn from this difficult period.
Now branded as “Make America healthy again,” Mr. Kennedy’s “health freedom” movement is preoccupied with instances in which the government is supposedly colluding with industry to make people sick. The prevalence of chronic disease, America’s declining life expectancy, vaccine mandates — these are all, in Mr. Kennedy’s view, not just public health conundrums but also elite conspiracies. (Notably, the most salient health freedom concern of this election, the right to abortion, is not a critical part of the MAHA platform.)
Recently, Mr. Kennedy became a vocal proponent of the benefits of raw milk, or milk that hasn’t been pasteurized to protect from pathogens. Pasteurization, like vaccination, is one of the great, foundational public health interventions mandated to prevent the spread of infectious disease. Mr. Kennedy, who drinks his milk only raw, said in July that access to it would become a policy priority for his administration, promising to reverse rules that allow “big corporations to pour toxic chemicals into our soil” but don’t allow farmers to sell unpasteurized dairy products.
Mr. Kennedy says he would also cease funding for infectious-disease research and brags that he would round up the editors of the top medicine journals and accuse them of publishing “fake science” at the behest of industry.
Mistrust of government didn’t start with Mr. Kennedy, nor did vaccine hesitancy or a belief that purer diets make cleaner bodies. These are pervasive sentiments among Americans. Some of the questions that he raises about the relationship between regulators and industry or about how various harmful substances are allowed in our soil, air and food aren’t far-fetched. Just this month, The New England Journal of Medicine published an argument criticizing the F.D.A.’s lax oversight of food additives. Similarly, while pasteurization as policy is sound, there are individual situations in which it may feel both safe and desirable to consume raw milk and cheese — buying dairy from a known farm, say, or during trips abroad to a country where unpasteurized cheese is sold.
A functional public health ecosystem contends with these challenges and holds itself accountable. But accountability and nuance are not what Mr. Kennedy promises his followers. His speeches and interviews describe the public health establishment as an unholy alliance between the deep state and corporate marauders but lack ideas for how to address chronic disease, for example. Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. transportation secretary, has astutely called Mr. Kennedy’s approach to politics “post-policy”: His platform is himself, and he’s positioned himself as the only guy brave enough to speak truth to power.
This pugnaciousness affects the whole discourse. When noted right-wing personalities crusade on behalf of raw milk, health officials are compelled to issue defensive advisories, such as “Do not consume any raw milk or raw milk products,” which can seem overly rigid, given the relatively low number of severe illnesses and deaths from raw dairy. When Mr. Kennedy’s followers send Dr. Anthony Fauci death threats, Dr. Fauci’s defenders suggest he should be up for sainthood in response. A cottage industry of semi-scientists and influencers on both the right and the left criticize the public health establishment and jockey for relevance by keeping up a kind of hysteria about the pandemic’s long tail.
This is all a shame. Public health guidance is most effective when it is persuasive rather than prescriptive. Much of the official guidance through the Covid pandemic turned out, in not-too-much-later hindsight, to be flawed. Some of those mistakes — initial recommendations against wearing masks and dismissing the likelihood that the virus was airborne, for example — were born out of leaders’ impulses to come across as certain and clear in a time of great uncertainty and confusion.
It would be ideal if the next generation of leaders could strike a different balance. In the face of misleading data and bad-faith attacks, however, it is difficult to respond with good-faith flexibility. The irony is that Mr. Kennedy’s fanaticism is, in fact, quite flexible. He has, after all, signed onto the campaign of a former president whose greatest accomplishment was Operation Warp Speed, which brought us a Covid vaccine within a year. Donald Trump doesn’t love talking about that achievement anymore, and Mr. Kennedy is willing to look past it. Instead, both are determined to play to their bases while skillfully inspiring their opponents to caricature themselves in response.
The future will surely bring both predictable and unforeseen public health crises that will require cool, experienced, nonpartisan leadership. Should Mr. Kennedy be appointed to an influential post in the federal government, he is unlikely to use his power to turn down the temperature. We should learn from what the pandemic revealed about our culture’s deep divisions. If Mr. Kennedy is in the administration, I fear we never will.
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