As news broke that Donald Trump was nominating Robert Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, CNN’s Jake Tapper gave blunt assessment of what’s ahead: “Well, America, I hope you like measles.” Kennedy, who waged a third party presidential bid before endorsing Trump, has spent the better part of his recent career on a crusade against childhood vaccines, which have been an essential component of public health since World War II.
Many studies have continued to show that autism is not linked to vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Kennedy would oversee the CDC, among other agencies. “This is somebody, Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., who has been pushing quackery, who has been pushing lies, who has been pushing conspiracy theories,” Tapper said to CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta at another point on The Lead .
“It’s not often that the entire medical and public health community is going to be in lockstep on something, but they are pretty close on this in terms of their significant concerns, horror even,” Gupta said. “As someone said to me today, ‘I can’t think of any individual who can be more damaging to public health than RFK.” Gupta said that there were “these kernels of agreement” that Kennedy had with the medical establishment on some of his other signature issues, like food supply.
“Then there is these other things ...
they are not alternative views, they are false views,” Gupta said, noting that the vaccine-autism link w.