US President-elect Donald Trump has picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his next secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
According to CNN, sources said Kennedy accepted the offer Thursday, November 14 . Taking to X, Trump announced the job offer .
The move is a notable one given that only days before the election, Trump’s transition co-chair Howard Lutnick told CNN that Kennedy was “not getting a job for HHS.”
“He would not be in charge of HHS?” he was asked on “The Source with Kaitlan Collins.”
“No,” Lutnick said, “of course not.”
Kennedy has been one of the nation’s most prominent anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists for years and has frequently spread false conspiracy theories about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
He launched his own presidential bid last year – first as a Democratic challenger to President Joe Biden, then as an independent focused largely on reversing “the chronic disease epidemic.”
He proposed numerous policies aimed to overhaul food safety and environmental guidelines, promote holistic medicines and restructure public funding for vaccine research.
In the final days of Kennedy’s campaign, he discussed the possibility of him endorsing Trump in exchange for a role in his administration. Kennedy suspended his campaign in August and endorsed Trump that same day.
In October, Trump teased Kennedy would oversee a public health portfolio while speaking at a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, telling the audience he would let Kennedy “go wild on health,” “go wild on the food” and “go wild on medicines” if reelected.
Since Election Day, Kennedy has pledged to take major steps to reshape the nation’s public health guidelines. Last week, Kennedy he would “immediately” begin studying vaccine safety and efficacy but promised to not “take vaccines away from anybody.” He also committed to formally recommending states and municipalities remove fluoride from public water.
In an interview with NPR News following the election, Kennedy laid out his areas of focus in Trump’s administration.
“President Trump has given me three instructions,” Kennedy said. “He wants the corruption and the conflicts out of the regulatory agencies. He wants to return the agencies to the gold standard, empirically-based, evidence-based, science and medicine that they were once famous for. And he wants to end the chronic disease epidemic with measurable impacts on a diminishment of chronic disease within two years.”
