Jared Polis praises Trump for choosing anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary

By Jill Colvin and Amanda Seitz, The Associated Press

NEW YORK — President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday he will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, putting a man whose views public Health officials have decried as dangerous in charge of a massive agency that oversees everything from drug, vaccine and food safety to medical research, Medicare and Medicaid.

“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said Thursday in a post on his Truth Social site announcing the appointment. Kennedy, he said, would “end the Chronic Disease epidemic” and “Make America Great and Healthy Again!”

Trump said Kennedy would target drugs, food additives and chemicals.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis praised Kennedy’s selection on social media Thursday. But as one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists in the world, Kennedy’s nomination immediately alarmed some public health officials.

Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told The Associated Press, “I don’t want to go backwards and see children or adults suffer or lose their lives to remind us that vaccines work, and so I am concerned.”

Trump also announced Thursday that he has chosen Doug Collins, a former congressman from Georgia, to run the Department of Veterans Affairs. Collins is a chaplain in the U.S. Air Force Reserve CoMMAnd. The Republican served in Congress from 2013 to 2021, and he helped defend Trump during his first impeachment process.

Kennedy hails from one of the nation’s most storied political families and is the son of the late Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy. He first challenged President Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination last year. He then ran as an independent but abandoned his bid this summer after striking a deal to endorse Trump in exchange for a promise to serve in a health policy role during a second Trump administration.

He and the president-elect have since become good friends. The two campaigned together extensively during the race’s final stretch, and Trump made clear he intended to give Kennedy a major public health role.

“I’m going to let him go wild on health,” Trump said at a rally last month.

During the campaign, Kennedy told NewsNation that Trump had asked him to “reorganize” agencies including the CDC, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.

Kennedy has pushed against processed foods and the use of herbicides like Roundup weed killer. He has long criticized the large commercial farms and animal feeding operations that dominate the industry.

But he is perhaps best known for his criticism of childhood vaccines.

Again and again, Kennedy has made his opposition to vaccines clear. In July, he said in a podcast interview that “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told FOX News that he still believes in the long-ago debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism.

In a 2021 podcast he urged people to “resist” CDC guidelines that advise when kids should receive routine vaccinations.

“I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get them vaccinated,’” Kennedy said.

Repeated scientific studies in the U.S. and abroad have found no link between vaccines and autism. Vaccines have been proven safe and effective in laboratory testing and in real world use in hundreds of millions of people over decades. The World Health Organization credits childhood vaccines with preventing as many as 5 million deaths a year.

Trump during his first term launched Operation Warp Speed, an effort to speed the production and distribution of a vaccine to combat COVID-19. The resulting vaccines were widely credited, including by Trump himself, with saving lives.

Kennedy has also worked to shore up support among young mothers in particular, on a message of ridding the U.S. of unhealthy ingredients in foods, promising to model regulations after those imposed in Europe. His claims that the U.S. obesity epidemic, as well as a rise in chronic diseases like diabetes, are the result of processed and unhealthy foods has resonated on social media among fitness gurus and mom influencers alike.