(Bloomberg) -- The world is trying to figure out how much Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can do to limit vaccine use. It turns out, quite a lot.
If confirmed by the Senate to become Secretary of Health and Human Services in the next Trump administration, Kennedy will influence leadership and staff choices at agencies that develop, approve, recommend, distribute and stockpile vaccines. Accounting for about a quarter of the federal budget, HHS has pervasive reach into the lives and health of all Americans.
“We’ll begin to see more in terms of just personnel, the old adage that personnel is policy,” said Jason Schwartz, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, referring to key appointments at the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “I am certain that we’ll see appointees at FDA and CDC who share some of the priorities and mindsets of the potential secretary.”
Vaccine skepticism has already lead to outbreaks of measles and whooping cough, preventable diseases that once killed thousands of Americans each year. The selection of Kennedy has the potential to further erode public trust in shots, said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
‘Major Challenge’
An environmental lawyer, Kennedy doesn’t have training in science or medicine. During the pandemic, he drew widespread condemnation for calling vaccines against Covid-19 a “crime against humanity” and comparing their use to the Nazi Holocaust. Studies have shown the shots saved millions of lives worldwide.
By “continuing to promote the lies that he does about vaccines, he creates a major challenge in terms of confidence,” said Osterholm, who also advised the Biden administration on Covid and the George W. Bush administration on biosecurity. Kennedy “merely has to cast doubt on the vaccines to create a major problem.”
Shares of vaccine makers including Moderna Inc., Pfizer Inc., BioNTech SE and Novavax Inc. declined late Thursday after Trump announced the nomination and continued falling Friday.
Kennedy’s appointment could have important implications for recommended vaccines and the funding of programs that distribute them, Schwartz said. CDC’s vaccine recommendations lead to coverage requirements for private insurance plans and the Vaccines for Children program that allow individuals to obtain them without paying out of pocket, Schwartz said.
“I fully expect to see new advisers appointed to that advisory committee,” he said, with a “new approach to the kinds of recommendations that CDC has put forward for decades.”
‘Watch Your Back’
In several post-election interviews, Kennedy said he won’t “take vaccines away,” and would let Americans decide the issue. While states set vaccine requirements for school children, the CDC issues vaccine recommendations that states often rely on to make those decisions.
“Parents have always had comfort in knowing that when they send their child to school and they’re vaccinated, their child isn’t going to get measles or whooping cough from the child next to them,” said Richard Besser, a former acting CDC director who’s now CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “If the federal government recommends to states this be left to parental choice, there will be outbreaks.”
On the campaign trail earlier this year, Trump said, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate,” to great applause.
Kennedy has also threatened to terminate hundreds of health workers at the National Institutes of Health and clear out entire offices within the FDA.
“These are unprecedented, menacing comments around public health and science,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “If top leaders are saying, ‘Watch your back,’ who wants to go into that environment?”
(Updates with additional context comment from second paragraph.)
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