Independent Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives a keynote speech during the Bitcoin 2024 conference at Music City Center July 26, 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee.
Jon Cherry | Getty Images President-elect Donald Trum p said Thursday that he will nominate vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Health and Human Services Department .
If the Senate approves Kennedy, the former independent presidential candidate will lead a sprawling department responsible for the huge Medicare and Medicaid health coverage programs, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. HHS's decisions on spending and policies have major effects on the U.S.
health-care system and related businesses. Kennedy, 70, is the son of Robert F. Kennedy, the late U.
S. attorney general and Democratic senator from New York who was assassinated in 1968 by a gunman in Los Angeles as he ran for president. He is the nephew of former President John Kennedy who was assassinated in 1963.
Trump said in October that if elected he would let Kennedy "go wild on health." "I am thrilled to announce Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
as The United States Secretary of Health and Human Services," Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social site Thursday. "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 co.