Americans’ public health is going to be in the hands of a vaccine critic. That will be from 2025 onwards, because Donald Trump on Thursday appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his next secretary to head the Department of Health and Human Services.. The president-elect has chosen the black sheep of the Kennedy clan despite the fact that it has echoed many conspiracy theories.
Kennedy is the nephew of John Fitzgerald Kennedythe US president assassinated in Dallas, and son of Senator Robert Kennedy, who was also assassinated. If we have seen him in the last few months, it is because he was presented as an independent presidential candidate for the 2024 elections.. A few months before the voting he cancelled his campaign and gave his support to Trump, who is now paying him back with a “ministry”.
Initially Kennedy Jr. had run in the Democratic primary, but his history of conspiracies and controversies ended up separating him from his family, which did support the Democratic nomination from the very beginning, at that time headed by Joe Biden. The still president received the endorsement of more than a dozen members of the Kennedy family, still with some weight within the Democratic Party. But Robert crossed the aisle.
More than 40 years as an environmental lawyer
With a reputation for rebelliousness, in his youth he had problems with the law and for years he consumed cocaine and heroin. At the age of 29 he was arrested for possession of heroin. But that of the drugs was little, almost a classic among the boys of good family at that time.
He came out of that and had a long career (over 40 years) as an environmental lawyer, litigating in defense of environmental rights of individuals and groups against large companies. In 1999 he founded the Waterkeeper Alliance, a global network of environmental organizations working to protect water bodies around the world.
Through his law firm, Kennedy & Madonna LLP, he took on major environmental pollution cases. And he was good. He managed to extract $396 million from DuPont. for pollution in West Virginia. That earned him a Lawyer of the Year nomination in 2007. Ten years later, he managed to get Monsanto to pay 670 million in damages. because a plant of this multinational food company damaged the health of citizens of Ohio and West Virginia.
Vaccines and the displeasure of the Kennedy clan.
But the separation of Robert F.’s son from the rest of the the Kennedy family arrived in 2020 in the pandemic, when began spreading conspiracies about covid and vaccinations. As early as 2007, he had founded the organization Children’s Health Defense, an entity dedicated to denouncing what he considers harmful practices of the pharmaceutical industry in the production of vaccines. She tells the BBCthat this NGO is considered by the scientific community as a dangerous source of misinformation about vaccines.
Kennedy has published several books, describing alleged negative effects of vaccines and conflicts of interest in the U.S. health care system. One of the phrases he has repeated for years is that there is a connection between autism and vaccines.. A claim that has no scientific basis.
Three members of his family, his sister Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, his brother Joseph P. Kennedy II, and his niece Maeve Kennedy McKean, vigorously denounced his anti-vaccine views in an op-ed in the journal Politicoarguing that he was “part of a campaign of disinformation that is having heartbreaking and deadly consequences.”
In 2022, Kennedy Jr. invoked Nazi Germany in an anti-vaccine speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. “There is an argument that (covid-19) targets ethnicities. Covid-19 disproportionately targets certain races (…) it’s targeted to target Caucasians and blacks. The most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese.“, the lawyer went so far as to say. The year before, Instagram deleted his account “for repeatedly sharing discredited claims about the coronavirus.”
A flamboyant presidential candidate
The anti-vaccine advocate had caused the family to become disenchanted. But that turned to outrage one day when they were watching a soccer game on TV. A TV ad for the presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came on. copied from his uncle’s 1960 presidential campaign.
He can’t hide it, he comes from one of the most historic political sagas in the US, but in his campaign speeches for the nomination he tried to separate himself. They were already at loggerheads and, besides, he was interested in showing another image to win the vote. And so he said that he was fighting for the interests of the middle class.
But always in his own way. During the campaign he told several outlandish stories. Like the one that in 2014 he dumped a dead bear cub run over by a car in the middle of New York’s Central Park.
The Kennedys are still in politics
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The myth may be dead, but there is still a long list of Kennedy family members in politics. His sister Kathleen was lieutenant governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003. His brother Joseph was a congressman from Massachusetts from 1987 to 1999. And most recently his brother Chris Kennedy was a failed candidate for governor of Illinois in 2018. The last Kennedy to hold elected office was his nephew, Joe Kennedy III, who lost the Democratic primary for Senate in 2020. Caroline Kennedy, daughter of former President Kennedy, is currently the U.S. ambassador to Australia.
Minister of Health
In announcing his next health secretary, Trump pledged that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will stand up for the interests of citizens against the “food industrial complex and the pharmaceutical companies. who have engaged in deception and misinformation.” He assured that his goal will be to “end the epidemic of chronic disease and make America great and healthy again.”
Kennedy Jr. welcomed the nomination with a message on the social network X in which he promised to “clean up corruption and end the revolving doors between industry and government,” with the goal of “making Americans the healthiest people in the world again.” It remains to be seen if one of his proposals when he was a candidate, reduce health care spending, is maintained when he takes office.
What about vaccines? Despite all that has been said, Kennedy has denied being against vaccines. Last week he said that, should Trump appoint him as head of public health, he was not going to “take vaccines away from anyone.”