Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivers the keynote address at the Bitcoin 2024 conference at Music City Center in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 26, 2024.
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President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday he will nominate vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of state. Department of Health and Human Services.
If the Senate confirms Kennedy, the former independent presidential candidate will lead a vast department responsible for the massive Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
HHS’s decision on sped has a major impact on the U.S. health care system.
Kennedy, 70, is the son of the late U.S. Attorney General and New York Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated by a gunman in Los Angeles in 1968 while running for president. He is the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963.
Trump said in October that if elected, he would make Kennedy “crazy on health issues.”
“I am pleased to announce Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services,” Trump wrote on his “Truth Social” website on Thursday.
“For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and pharmaceutical companies that engage in deception, misinformation and disinformation when it comes to public health,” Trump wrote.
“The safety and health of all Americans is the most important role of any government, and the Department of Health and Human Services will play an important role in helping ensure everyone is protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, drugs and food additives. These chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and food additives contribute to the overwhelming health crisis this country faces.
Trump said he wants Kennedy to “clean up corruption” in federal health agencies, return those agencies to science-based policies and “make America healthy again,” Kennedy told NBC News in a recent interview. “Entire departments, like the FDA’s nutrition division, have to go,” Kennedy said.
Earlier on Thursday, shares of the vaccine maker fell on reports that Trump would appoint Kennedy to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Kennedy said last year that the CDC had played an important role in combating the coronavirus, which was designed to “attack white people and black people” and was unlikely to harm “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.”
He has previously promoted the theory that autism is linked to childhood vaccines, but that link has been proven false.
Kennedy angered many of his siblings when he endorsed Trump in August after abandoning his long-term presidential candidacy.
Trump’s selection of Kennedy comes a day after the Republican president-elect named Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general.
Gaetz’s election was immediately controversial, in large part because the Justice Department, where he will serve as attorney general, had previously investigated him for allegedly trafficking a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz’s resignation from Congress, effective Thursday, removes him from the House Ethics Committee’s jurisdiction, but some Republican senators have called on the committee to release a report on its investigation of the former congressman.
Kennedy last week It is said He was advised to fire 600 NIH staff members and replace them.
his “Make America Healthy“The website has been soliciting suggestions from the public for Trump to fill more than 4,000 appointed positions in the federal government.
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