President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services — setting up a debate over whether Mr. Kennedy, whose vaccine skepticism and unorthodox views about medicine make public health officials deeply uneasy, can be confirmed.
Mr. Trump is stocking his administration with people whom even some Republicans find alarming, including former Representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host, as defense secretary. In choosing Mr. Kennedy, he is picking someone who is at war with the very public health agencies he would oversee.
Mr. Kennedy has spread false information about vaccines, including that they cause autism — a theory that has long been debunked. He has publicly contradicted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommendation that communities fluoridate their water to guard against tooth decay.
He has embraced raw milk, despite the Food and Drug Administration’s warning that drinking it is risky, particularly amid a current bird flu epidemic among dairy cows. And he has promoted hydroxychloroquine, a drug whose emergency authorization as a Covid-19 treatment was revoked by the Food and Drug Administration after a study of 821 people found it lacked effectiveness.
Whether the Senate, even one controlled by Republicans, will confirm Mr. Kennedy is an open question. In addition to his outside-the-mainstream views about medicine and health, he has been associated with a number of peculiar activities, like dumping a dead bear in Central Park and supposedly decapitating a whale. In interviews, some Republican senators said Mr. Kennedy gave them pause, but none ruled out voting for him.
“I find some of his statements to be alarming, but I’ve never even met with him or sat down with him or heard him speak at length,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, a centrist whose vote would be critical to Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation prospects. “So I don’t want to prejudge based just on press clippings that I have read.” However, she added, “I think it would be a surprising choice.”
But Republicans more closely aligned with Mr. Trump were enthusiastic. “One hundred percent,” Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama and a member of the Senate health committee, said when asked if he would vote to confirm Mr. Kennedy. Mr. Tuberville said he was a fan of Mr. Kennedy because of the work he has done with food and vaccines, adding, “More than anybody that I know of, he’s had an open mind.”
The strange political marriage between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kennedy, who endorsed Mr. Trump after suspending his presidential campaign, has been beneficial for both men. The merger gave Mr. Kennedy a platform he previously lacked — slickly produced rallies and roaring MAGA crowds.
But Mr. Kennedy gave Mr. Trump something as well — a core of new supporters, in particular, disaffected Democrats and “crunchy granola moms” who might not have otherwise voted for a felon with strongman tendencies. Mr. Trump grew impressed with the way Mr. Kennedy, and vowed to let him go “wild on health.”
Some of Mr. Kennedy’s ideas are mainstream and have drawn bipartisan support, including his emphasis on nutrition and reducing Americans’ intake of processed foods. Mr. Kennedy has also lately shifted his rhetoric away from vaccines and toward ending what he calls the “chronic disease epidemic,” a goal that public health experts say is laudable.
“I think there’s interest amongst policymakers on food,” said Dr. Anand Parekh, chief medical officer at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Dr. Parekh said he had been “pleasantly surprised” to see Mr. Kennedy emphasizing nutrition and “veering off his usual vaccine and environmental health narrow lanes.”
But public health experts find Mr. Kennedy alarming; Dr. Richard Besser, the chief executive of the Robert W. Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the C.D.C., said putting Mr. Kennedy in the health secretary’s job “would pose incredible risks to the health of the nation,” because Mr. Kennedy’s assault on the nation’s public health apparatus is only worsening the current crisis of mistrust.
“Robert F. Kennedy is part of the problem and cannot be part of the solution,” Dr. Besser said.
Mr. Kennedy has said little about health care delivery programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, that fall within the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services. Instead, he has taken aim at regulators and public health and research agencies: the F.D.A., the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health.
Days before the election, in a social media post that has received 6.5 million views, Mr. Kennedy threatened to fire F.D.A. employees who have waged a “war on public health.” He listed some of the products that he claimed the agency had subjected to “aggressive suppression,” including ivermectin, raw milk and vitamins. His message to agency officials, he said, was “1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”
Mr. Kennedy has also vowed to shake up the N.I.H., the nation’s premier biomedical research agency, by firing 600 workers, though the vast majority of its employees have civil service protections. When he was running for president, he promised to shift the focus of the N.I.H. away from infectious diseases.
“I’m going to say to N.I.H. scientists, God bless you all,” Mr. Kennedy said then, according to NBC News. “Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.”
The comments terrified public health experts, who know that infectious outbreaks can occur at any time. “Unfortunately, viruses don’t pay attention to the political cycles,” Dr. Mandy Cohen, the C.D.C. director, said in an interview this week.
Dr. Cohen expressed concern about Mr. Kennedy, saying she feared he would use his platform to spread misinformation and sow mistrust.
“Even without changing one regulation or one piece of guidance,” she said, “the sharing of misinformation from a place of power is concerning.”
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