WASHINGTON – The Senate is expected to vote Thursday on the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent lawyer and vocal vaccine critic, as the nation’s health secretary, controlling $1.7 trillion in spending for vaccines, food safety and health insurance programs for roughly half the country.
Despite several Republicans expressing deep skepticism about his views on vaccines, Kennedy is expected to win confirmation, absent any last-minute changes.
Kennedy, 71, whose famous name and family tragedies have put him in the national spotlight since he was a child, has earned a formidable following with his populist — and sometimes extreme — views on food, chemicals and vaccines.
His audience only grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Kennedy devoted much of his time to a nonprofit that sued vaccine makers and harnessed social media campaigns to erode trust in vaccines as well as the government agencies that promote them.
With the backing of Republican President Donald Trump, Kennedy believes he is “uniquely positioned” to revive trust in those public health agencies, which include the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes for Health.
Republican senators have largely embraced Kennedy’s vision, reciting his newly hatched slogan to “Make America Healthy Again” in speeches.
Last week, North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis said he hopes Kennedy “goes wild” on reigning in health care costs and improving Americans’ health. But one holdout — GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana doctor — required assurances that Kennedy would not make changes to existing vaccine recommendations before agreeing to back him.
Democrats have remained skeptical, unsuccessfully prodding Kennedy during hearings to deny a long discredited theory that vaccines cause autism. And some have raised alarms about Kennedy financially benefiting from changing vaccine guidelines or weakening federal lawsuit protections against vaccine makers.
Kennedy made more than $850,000 last year from an arrangement referring clients to a law firm that has sued the makers of Gardasil, a human papillomavirus vaccine that protects against cervical cancer. While serving as health secretary, he has promised to reroute fees collected from the arrangement to his son.
Kennedy is expected to take over the agency in the midst of a massive federal government shakeup, led by billionaire Elon Musk, that has shut off — even if temporarily — billions of taxpayer dollars in public health funding and left thousands of federal workers unsure about their jobs.
On Friday, the NIH announced it would cap billions of dollars in medical research given to universities and cancer being used to develop treatments for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Kennedy, too, has called for a staffing overhaul at the NIH, FDA and CDC. Last year, he vowed to fire 600 employees at the NIH, the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research.
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