Robert Kennedy Jr. put one ambition aside to make room for another.
Kennedy plans to end his independent presidential campaign this week and endorse former President Donald Trump, according to two sources. Kennedy has been on the campaign trail for several weeks increased his interest In the future, when Trump is in the position of the Cabinet of Ministers in the White House clearly denies would accept.
On Tuesday, Kennedy’s running mate Nicole Shanahan told an interviewer that the campaign was discussing “joining forces” with Trump. He suggested that Kennedy would do “an incredible job.” as secretary of health and human services. After Trump told CNN he would “probably” appoint Kennedy to some role.
“I didn’t know if he was thinking about getting out, but if he was thinking about getting out, I would certainly be open to that,” Trump said.
(Trump’s vice presidential running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, said Wednesday that there was no pro quo agreement offering Kennedy a Cabinet position in exchange for his approval and any discussion of his future role would be separate.)
Neither Kennedy nor his campaign responded to requests for comment on what he would do if former HHS Secretary Alex Azar were nominated and confirmed by the Senate to serve. described as at the head of a department who possessed “shocking power with the stroke of a pen.” A budget of more than 1.5 trillion dollars.
By historical comparisons, Kennedy, a famous anti-vaccine advocate and conspiracy theorist, would be an odd choice for HHS secretary. Previous appointees have had diverse backgrounds in medicine, government, law and public health. The current secretary, Xavier Becerra, served as California’s attorney general.
Kennedy, also an attorney, practiced environmental law and founded Children’s Health Defense, now the best-funded anti-vaccine organization in the country. During the pandemic, he became a supplier wild conspiracy theoriesoften targeting public health officials in the agencies he now tries to lead. Kennedy criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, over the death toll from Covid, saying: Fauci should be prosecuted if he committed a crime. He also said that the Prosecutor General should force editors of medical journals to publish retracted studies.
HHS controls 13 agenciesincluding the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health. On the campaign trail, in podcasts and in news interviews, Kennedy described his desire to dismantle those offices and rebuild them with like-minded outsiders.
Agencies have become “sock puppets” for the industries they regulate, Kennedy said This was reported by NBC News in an interview last year, he outlined his plans for public health if elected president. Faced with another pandemic, Kennedy said he would not prioritize vaccine research, production or distribution.
“The priority should be finding treatments that work and building people’s immune systems,” he said. he adds falsely “Vaccines probably caused more deaths than they prevented.” He mentioned ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as treatments – which he said worked against Covid, although he said he hadn’t done multiple studies.
Kennedy’s campaign was supported and led by the anti-vaccination movement he helped build. In November he prominent activists in Children’s Health Advocacy, which he chaired until taking a leave of absence to run for president as he stepped up his campaign. Accepting the award at the group’s annual conference, he said the National Institutes of Health would stop studying infectious diseases like Covid and measles and focus on studying chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity. Kennedy believes that environmental toxins, a category in which he places childhood vaccines, are the primary threat to public health, rather than infectious disease.
“I will say to the NIH scientists, God bless you all,” Kennedy said. “Thank you for the public service. We will take a break from the infectious disease for about eight years.”
Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a longtime target of the anti-vaccine movement, Dr. Paul Offit said Kennedy ruled over HHS – a department. is assigned with controlling health policy, providing and regulating care, sponsoring medical research and training, and communicating with the public during emergencies would be disastrous.
“He will certainly try to produce studies that prove his point, thereby further undermining America’s confidence in vaccines, and he will certainly try to overturn all mandates,” Offit said. “He said he didn’t want to study infectious diseases. It will eliminate research around real problems and focus on what it thinks the problems are, regardless of what the good data shows.
“It doesn’t matter if the data shows he’s wrong; he’s still going to be convinced he’s right,” Offit continued, referring to Kennedy’s focus on proving the harms of vaccines that have been repeatedly proven safe. “It’s not going to improve human health in any way.”
In an interview Kennedy gave to NBC News last year, he sharply criticized the FDA, NIH and CDC, saying he would unleash “a corporate takeover of these agencies that makes them predatory against the American public.” He said he would hire responsible officials and appoint people who would “turn them back into treatment and public health authorities.”
He declined to name names but surrounded himself with those on the fringes of public health. He praised “Brave dissidents,” including a discredited vaccine scientist Robert Maloneand Dr. It was Pierre Cory certificate was revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine this month for promoting and selling bogus treatments for Covid. Kennedy wrote that doctors like Corey “help clear the smoke of corporate profiteering so that we can see clearly the causes and solutions to the chronic disease epidemic.”
Last year, candidate Kennedy told a group of anti-vaccine doctors and influencers health policy roundtable he will surround himself with “opponents”.
“Have faith and see what we do,” he said. “I think you’ll be pleased.”