RFK Jr. Is Already Planning Out His Takeover of Health Agencies: Report
Should Donald Trump win November’s election, vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may be granted more power and control over health and food policy than the possibly future-president’s Cabinet secretaries.
According to a Thursday report from The Washington Post, Kennedy has been meeting with Trump’s transition team to discuss what future he may have in a second Trump administration. Sources who spoke to the Post say that Kennedy has been floated for a role as a White House czar — a position that would put him directly in collaboration with Trump and above the president’s Cabinet.
Trump’s plans for Kennedy to take over the nation’s health agencies has been a bit of an issue given that it may be difficult for the conspiracy theorist to survive the required Senate confirmation vote needed to ratify an appointment to an executive branch agency. He could sidestep this by taking an oversight role in the White House, though
Sources also told the Post that Kennedy is already drawing up early plans should he be inducted into Trump’s White House. “The president has asked me to clean up corruption and conflicts at the agencies and to end the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy told the Post on Wednesday. “He wants measurable results in two years and to return those agencies to their long traditions of gold-standard evidence-based science and medicine.”
Kennedy has reportedly been preparing 30/60/9-day plans for the time period after Trump’s potential inauguration, while preparing lists of potential health personnel. These include sibling health care grifters Casey and Calley Means, former Trump Covid-19 adviser Marty Makary, and former Trump CDC Director Robert Redfield. ??
Earlier this week, Kennedy bragged that what “President Trump has promised me is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others … and then also the USDA.” During a rally on Thursday, Trump told the audience that in addition to vast control over public health agencies, Kennedy would work on “women’s health” as well.
On Sunday, Trump told supporters at a rally in Madison Square Garden that he would let Kennedy “go wild” on health, food, and medicines.
Kennedy — an environmental lawyer by trade — has little in the way of medical and public health qualifications. His appeal to Republicans is largely centered around his vaccine conspiracies. He is one of the most prominent mouthpieces for false claims that vaccines cause autism spectrum disorders, and has suggested that vaccine research is responsible for the creation of diseases like AIDS, the Spanish Flu, and Lyme disease.
On Wednesday, Trump Transition Co-Chair Howard Lutnick made clear that Kennedy’s beliefs about vaccinations were one of the primary drivers of any role he may have in a Trump government.
“I spent two-and-a-half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy Jr.,” Lutnick told CNN. “What he explained was [that] when he was born we had three vaccines, and autism was one in 10,000. Now a baby is born with 76 vaccines because — in 1986 — they waived product liability for vaccines. And here’s the best one, they started paying the people at the NIH, right? They pay them a piece of the money for the vaccine companies.”
Lutnick insisted that Kennedy wanted to personally review “the data” on vaccines to prove that they were actually safe. “He says, ‘If you give me the data — all I want is the data — I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe and that if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off of the market.’”
Kennedy’s plans go far beyond vaccines, though. Last week he wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the “FDA’s war on public health is about to end.”
“This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma,” he added. “If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you: 1. Preserve your records, and 2. Pack your bags.”
Very few of the items listed in Kennedy’s rant are being “suppressed.” Rather, Kennedy and a growing faction of the right believe that criticism of efforts to portray pseudoscientific health trends as established science equates to a form of censorship and repression. “I don’t think he understands the American health system,” former Obama health care adviser Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel told the Post. “We’ve seen those people muck about, not very successfully.”
On Friday Vice Presdient Kamala Harris weighed in on potentially unprecedented influence that might be granted to Kennedy. “Trump has indicated that the person who would be in charge of health care for the American people is RFK Jr., who has routinely promoted junk science and crazy conspiracy theories,” she told reporters in Madison, Wisconsin. “He once expressed support for a national abortion ban. That is the exact last person in America who should be setting health care policy for America’s families and children.”
More from Rolling Stone
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.