Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now on a short list being floated by some Trump allies to serve as the next head of the Department of Health and Human Services, multiple people close to the president-elect's campaign say.
Hopes among Kennedy's backers that he could be nominated to lead the department have risen in recent days, after Republicans cemented their majority in the Senate . Kennedy's odds of clearing a Senate led by Democrats would have been low, given his long record of what the party called "anti-science, fringe public health stances" that outraged Trump's opponents and a broad array of health experts during the campaign. That includes a comment that "there's no vaccine that is safe and effective" and his chairmanship of the group Children's Health Defense, which has claimed that the "parallel between rising disease rates and the increasing number of childhood vaccines is hard to ignore.
" Doctors argue statements like these mislead about the safety of immunizations and threaten to erode hard-fought improvements in U.S. vaccination rates against preventable diseases.
Kennedy himself has been noncommittal when asked publicly about the possibility he could be picked to head the sprawling HHS umbrella of agencies, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Food and Drug Administration. Ahead of the election, Kennedy told Fox News he was "confident that if I wanted to do HHS se.
