Little over a week after his resounding election victory, president-elect Donald Trump has made several controversial choices for government roles. It seems as though Elon Musk will, after all, head up his vaunted Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Tulsi Gabbard will be put forward as Director of National Intelligence, despite having posted in support of Kremlin conspiracy theories. And Trump has nominated the firebrand Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, to be attorney general. All announcements that have provoked wailing and gnashing of teeth.
None has caused as much consternation, however, as the possibility of Robert F. Kennedy Jr – RFK Jr, as he is known – being thrust into the White House. RFK Jr’s exact job has yet to be decided, but during the campaign Trump said that he would be in “control of the health agencies.” In the US these include the department for Health and Human Services (HHS), the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the US Department of Agriculture.
“Robert F Kennedy cares more about human beings and health and the environment than anybody,” Trump told the crowd during his rally at Madison Square Garden in New York in October. “I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food, I’m going to let him go wild on medicines.”
Posting in the past week, Kennedy said the “FDA’s war on public health is about to end,” add he would stop the “aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies l, chelating compounds, invermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”
These statements sounded the alarm in health agencies across America and the wider world. Few health ministers are urged to “go wild”, let alone one with a track record of peddling anti-scientific and conspiracy theories. Kennedy, 70, has variously said he believes JFK’s death was part of a CIA conspiracy, that Republicans stole the 2004 election, and that 5G phone networks are being used for mass surveillance.
After the election, he announced on social media that one of his first acts would be to stop the practice of adding fluoride to drinking water to reduce tooth decay. Above all, he is arguably the most prominent vaccine sceptic in America.
“RFK Jr, in my view, is the world’s most well funded and influential anti-vaxxer and science sceptic,” says Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health at Georgetown University. “If he had CDC Director or secretary for health and human services, which is what he covets, or even in the White House, it would be very destructive for public health.
“He’s an environmental and public health campaigner who has no fidelity to science, and somebody who rails against public health and science itself.”
One man with first-hand experience of RFK Jr’s approach to vaccine science is Prof Paul Offit, an internationally renowned virology specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who was instrumental in the development of the rotavirus vaccine.
“He called me about 20 years ago and said parents had come to him, concerned about mercury-containing preservatives in their vaccines,” Offit says. “He asked in a kind of plaintive, help-me-out kind of way. There had already been five studies showing that the mercury in vaccines wasn’t harmful in these levels. I took him through the studies. I thought he seemed receptive and appreciative. I went home to my wife that night and said I had a really nice conversation with RFK Jr on the phone. Then he published an article, ‘Deadly Immunity’ in Rolling Stone where he sandbagged me and said I was in the pocket of ‘big industry’. He would use me in his stump speeches. He would say I lied to him.”
The article appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in July 2005 and on the Salon website. In 2011, after years of criticism about the accuracy of the article, Salon retracted it.
Critics fear that in a position of power, Kennedy may end up damaging public health.
“If you have the agencies being run by Trump loyalists and if you see them influenced by anti-science career professionals like RFK Jr, you’re going to have very distorted scientific information. The White House can have enormous influence on these services. The second thing is that he has plans for cutting the funding of these agencies, particularly the CDC, which would make public health in America weaker. I think he will do enormous damage in the White House.”
Gostin hopes that Kennedy will be limited by the checks and balances built into the system. “His most extreme policies like banning vaccines or banning the fluoridation of water, the president has no power to do that in the United States,” he says. “Public health is almost exclusively a state and local function.” Then there is the Supreme Court, which despite being conservative has typically upheld science-based decision making.”
Kennedy is not wrong on everything, Gostin adds. “It’s not that all his ideas are bad,” he says. “His idea about focussing on chronic disease, obesity and the role of the food industry is spot on. But I don’t trust him.” In addition to his pronouncements on vaccines, Kennedy has pledged to Make America Healthy Again, and railed against additives in food, particularly dyes. On a podcast earlier this week, he complained about the food on Trump’s plane. “Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes onto that airplane is like just poison,” he said of the in-flight offering. “You have a choice between—you don’t have the choice, you’re either given KFC or Big Macs. That’s when you’re lucky and then the rest of the stuff I consider kind of inedible.”
Even if Kennedy does not have power to do everything he would like in office, his example is making a negative difference, says Offit. “He can do what he’s doing, which is to use his name, which is the most famous Democratic name in the country, the Kennedys, and use it to create a platform to scare people.”
Kennedy was approached for comment. When challenged on vaccines before, his team have maintained that: “Proper safety studies have never been conducted on vaccines: long-term, all-cause mortality studies comparing fully-vaccinated children to never-vaccinated children.”
One confusing factor in all this is that Kennedy’s politics are far from clear. He was born in 1954, the third of eleven children of Robert F Kennedy, JFK’s brother, and is the most prominent living member of the most famous Democratic family in America. For years he was an environmental lawyer, fighting for clean water in the US and against nuclear power.
Alongside this work came a colourful personal life. He is a keen falconer and kayaker. He has six children and has been married three times, most recently to the actress Cheryl Hines, who played Larry David’s wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm. He once testified that a parasitic worm had eaten part of his brain. A genetic condition has given him a distinctive vocal rasp.
To many Democrats he is seen as a voice of the Right, but Republicans have also regarded him with suspicion. He initially sought to become the Democratic nominee to become president, before dropping out to stand as an independent candidate. In April, amid Republicans’ fears that support for Kennedy would eat into the Republican vote, Trump accused him of being a “Democrat plant”. Kennedy responded: “When frightened men take to social media they risk descending into vitriol, which makes them sound unhinged. President Trump’s rant against me is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims that should best be resolved in the American tradition of presidential debate.”
When he announced he was switching to the Trump campaign six months ago, Liz Barratt-Brown, an environmental campaigner who worked with RFK for years, posted that she was “betrayed” by his switch. “The RFK, Jr. I knew as a colleague is not the same person I see today,” she said. “We feel betrayed by him and what he is espousing. He is using his environmental credentials to sell a dark and conspiratorial brand of politics. It’s heartbreaking. If he loves the planet the way he did as my former colleague, he cannot open the door to another Trump administration.”
In his initial announcement speech, Kennedy anticipated some negative stories in the press, saying that he had “so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I could run for king of the world”.
He was buoyed by the family name, despite the opposition of other members of the clan. Last autumn, all four of his siblings released a statement saying his run was “perilous” for the country. But his supporters praised him for challenging the government’s Covid-19 response, for having cleaned up the Hudson River, for wanting to ‘seal’ the US-Mexico border and for being a proud ‘oddball’.
At one stage he was polling at around 15 per cent in presidential preference polls, peaking around the time of Joe Biden’s disastrous first debate.
His reputation for scandal continued, too. In July he was accused of sexual misconduct by a former babysitter. He reportedly texted her after the allegations were published in Vanity Fair, saying: “I have no memory of this incident but I apologize sincerely for anything I ever did that made you feel uncomfortable or anything I did or said that offended you or hurt your feelings.”
A New Yorker profile in August revealed an extraordinary story from 2014. Kennedy had been driving to a falconry outing in upstate New York when he found a dead black bear cub by the side of the road. He put it in his car and showed it to his friends, posing for pictures with his hand inside the bear’s mouth. The next day he drove the bear to Manhattan and dropped it off in Central Park.
Seeking to pre-empt the publication of the New Yorker article, Kennedy recorded a video in which he spoke about the upcoming piece. “It’s going to be a bad story,” he said.
Depending on what he is allowed to do in the White House, it may not be the final bad story he is involved in.
“It’s going to be a wild ride,” says Offit.