Trump names vaccine sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr as health secretary

Donald Trump on Thursday (Nov 14) tapped anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy as his secretary of health in the latest provocative nomination from the incoming Republican president.
“We want you to come up with things and ideas and what you’ve been talking about for a long time and I think you’re going to do some unbelievable things,” Trump told Kennedy Jr during an event at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday evening.
Moving quickly since his election last week, Trump has embarked on a campaign of political shock and awe as he rolls out an administration designed to upend – and in some cases literally dismantle – the US government.
Several of Trump’s choices for top jobs – including a TV news anchor at the helm of the Pentagon and an ally embroiled in sexual misconduct allegations for attorney general – have unnerved the Washington establishment.
Trump also announced Thursday that his personal attorneys Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, who defended him at trial this year over hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, would serve as deputy attorneys general.
Kennedy, a scion of the famous political family who is popularly known as RFK Jr, is a longtime environmental campaigner who abandoned a fringe bid for the presidency to endorse Trump against Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
Trump had said previously he wanted Kennedy to “go wild” in changing health care and the two campaigned together promising to “Make America Healthy Again”.
If approved by the Senate, which Trump’s Republican Party controls, 70-year-old Kennedy will take over the Health and Human Services Department, a mammoth institution with a budget of close to US$2 trillion.
In a statement explaining his choice, Trump echoed many of Kennedy’s talking points, saying “Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation”.
The nomination could meet opposition, given Kennedy’s history of promoting medical conspiracy theories – including the disproven claim that childhood vaccines cause autism – and saying that the COVID-19 vaccine was deadly.
He is also burdened by a string of colourful and even bizarre stories from his personal life.
These include his statement that a parasitic worm once entered his “brain and ate a portion of it and then died”.
An admission this year that he was behind the long-unsolved mystery of a dead bear dumped in New York’s Central Park a decade ago raised eyebrows.
Trump has yet to select treasury and commerce chiefs, or an education secretary, whose department he wants to abolish.
During the event in Mar-a-Lago on Thursday evening, he said that wealthy North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum would be appointed secretary of the interior, putting him in charge of national parks which could be opened to more oil exploration.
“We’re going to slash energy costs,” Trump told the event organised by the America First Policy Institute, where he was introduced by libertarian Argentinian President Javier Milei and Hollywood A-lister Sylvester Stallone.
Rocky star Stallone told the audience, which included ever-present Tesla CEO Elon Musk, that Trump was a “mythical character”.
Trump joked that he couldn’t get Musk out of his Mar-a-Lago resort.
“He likes this place, I can’t get him out of here,” he said. “I like having him here as well. He’s done a fantastic job, an incredible mind.”
Trump’s first recruitments – including secretary of state pick Marco Rubio, a traditional conservative on foreign policy – were seen as relatively mainstream choices.
But then he caused concern even among some in the Republican Party as he appeared to put preference for personal loyalty above expertise or suitability.
A major shock was naming Matt Gaetz – a firebrand Republican far-right figure in Congress who was drawn into a years-long criminal probe into sex trafficking – as future attorney general.
Gaetz denies wrongdoing and has never faced charges but was still being investigated by the House Ethics Committee.
That decision followed Trump’s nomination of former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard – who met Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad and echoes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s talking points – to take charge of the nation’s most sensitive secrets as director of national intelligence.
Trump recruited Pete Hegseth – a combat veteran who has no experience running large organizations but is a host on Trump’s favorite Fox News network – as defence secretary.
Trump and his aides have vowed that much of his second term will be about clearing the deck of federal officials who acted as a restraining influence on his populist, right-wing agenda during his first term.
Gaetz’s appointment would hand Trump, whose election likely means being freed from a string of serious criminal investigations, the advantage of a fierce partisan at the top of the Justice Department.
He intends to place a third personal attorney at the department by nominating John Sauer as solicitor general, which represents the US government at the Supreme Court.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to go after a variety of political opponents.