President-elect Trump’s announcement that he plans to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services unleashed both applause and alarm on Thursday. If the Senate approves the nomination, RFK Jr. is poised to reshape public health agencies and could usher in a new era for vaccines and medicines.
RFK Jr. said Thursday that he looks “forward to working with the more than 80,000 employees at HHS to free the agencies from the smothering cloud of corporate capture so they can pursue their mission to make Americans once again the healthiest people on Earth.”
He plans to do that through a combination of agency restructuring, staff departures, and a potential litany of new demands around vaccine data, drug approvals and research, according to remarks he made during both his and Trump’s presidential campaigns. A number of those plans would take legislative support and could face lawsuits. But RFK Jr. could wield significant and immediate authority over how health agencies are staffed and how they communicate with the public about their work.
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