Pharmaceutical executives and public health experts have warned that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s influence over Donald Trump could have a “chilling” impact on US vaccine research and provision.
Kennedy, a vaccine sceptic, is expected to hold formidable sway in Trump’s second administration, including installing doubters of Covid-19 jabs in top federal roles and launching a sweeping review of regulation.
“We need to have somebody who is going to be grounded by science and evidence and not somebody who rejects it,” said John Maraganore, a former chief executive of $35bn Boston-based biotech Alnylam.
Kelly Moore, chief executive of vaccine advocacy group Immunize.org, said Kennedy’s influence over vaccine policy would be “certainly regrettable”.
Kennedy, a former Democrat who ditched his own independent presidential run and backed Trump in August, said on Wednesday that the president-elect had asked him to “clean up the corruption” in government health agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kennedy, nephew of the late president John F Kennedy, wrote on X that his ambition was to “Make America Healthy Again by ending the chronic disease epidemic”. He has also said he would install monitors in the White House with real-time data on obesity and depression rates in the US.
But his influence over health policy “would be awful on a lot of levels”, said one senior health executive.
Moore said Kennedy’s influence in the new administration would bring a “chilling effect about what CDC is allowed to talk about publicly”. She added: “What I worry about also is any impact on access to vaccination — any changes to policies that allow people to have affordable access to vaccinations would be bad.”
Trump secured a resounding victory in the US election this week and his transition team is already moving to find people to fill top jobs in his administration.
Several physicians and researchers who gained fame for opposing Covid restrictions during the pandemic — including Florida’s surgeon-general Joseph Ladapo, Johns Hopkins professor Marty Makary and Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya — have been floated as possible leaders of the FDA, CDC and other health agencies.
Health officials from Trump’s previous administration, including Paul Mango and Eric Hargan, are also in the mix.
Bhattacharya, who opposed some vaccine rollouts, told the Financial Times that he would be open to serving under Trump, possibly as head of the National Institutes of Health, but had not been contacted by the president-elect’s transition team.
“I think there’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few people: there should not be another Tony Fauci, there should be term limits on institute directors,” he said, referring to the former infectious disease chief. Bhattacharya this year appeared on stage with Kennedy at one of his campaign events.
Kennedy previously accused Fauci of organising “a historic coup d’état against western democracy”. Fauci declined to comment.
It is not yet clear whether Trump will appoint Kennedy to an official role in his administration, which could require assent from the Senate. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kennedy supporters have welcomed the possibility that he could influence the incoming administration — even at the expense of big pharmaceutical companies.
“What President Trump and Bobby Kennedy are describing is a golden age of American medicine, where we are finally going to reverse the chronic disease epidemic that has been the scourge of the country and will bankrupt our country,” said Calley Means, a healthcare entrepreneur and influencer.
“There’s not one entity in American healthcare that’s asking why every rate of every chronic disease is going up,” he said.
Means declined to comment on whether he had been approached to take a formal role in the administration, but said he was praying for “real reform appointments”.
“There’s trillions of dollars at stake and it’s not conspiratorial to suggest there’s major forces at work to not have Bobby’s agenda that he outlined during the campaign,” he said.
Speaking on Tucker Carlson’s podcast in August, Kennedy said it benefited drugmakers to keep children sick. “There’s nothing more profitable in our society today than a sick child,” he said. On Wednesday, Kennedy told NBC News that he “won’t take away anybody’s vaccines”.
Kennedy also recently attacked Ozempic weight loss drugmaker Novo Nordisk on Fox News, saying the company was “counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs”.
But as Trump and Kennedy hash out the next administration’s healthcare agenda from Mar-a-Lago, some people familiar with the former Trump administration have already started questioning how long the collaboration will last.
“RFK is going to blow up,” said one person. “He’s marching around saying what he wants the administration to do before Trump’s had a chance to take a breath. Eventually Trump will sour on him.”
