Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces the future of his campaign in Phoenix, Arizona, USA on August 23, 2024.
Thomas Machovich | Reuters
President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday he would nominate vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Serves as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
If Senate confirms former independent John F. Kennedy presidential candidate Will lead a massive department responsible for the massive Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kennedy, 70, is the son of the late U.S. Attorney General and New York Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated by a gunman in Los Angeles in 1968 while running for president. He is the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963.
Trump said in October that he would make Kennedy “healthily crazy” if he were elected.
Trump said he wants Kennedy to “clean up corruption” in federal health agencies, return those agencies to science-based policies and “make America healthy again,” Kennedy told NBC News in a recent interview. “Entire departments, like the FDA’s nutrition division, have to go,” Kennedy said.
stock price vaccine manufacturer Earlier reports indicated that Trump would appoint Kennedy to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy said last year that the CDC had played an important role in combating the coronavirus, which was designed to “attack white people and black people” and was unlikely to harm “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.”
He has previously promoted the theory that autism is linked to childhood vaccines, but that link has been proven false.
Kennedy angered many of his siblings when he endorsed Trump in August after abandoning his long-term presidential candidacy.
Trump’s selection of Kennedy comes a day after the Republican president-elect named Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general.
Gaetz’s election was immediately controversial, in large part because the Justice Department, where he will serve as attorney general, had previously investigated him for allegedly trafficking a 17-year-old girl.
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