Vice-President Kamala Harris slammed Donald Trump’s plan to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr, one of the country’s most prominent anti-vaxxers, in charge of setting health policy for the country if he returns to the White House.
“He [Trump] has indicated that the person who would be in charge of health care for the American people is someone who has routinely promoted junk science and crazy conspiracy theories, who once expressed support for a national abortion ban,” Harris told reporters in Madison,Wisconsin Friday. “And who is the exact last person in America who should be setting health care policy for America’s families and children.”
At a campaign stop in Dearborn, Michigan earlier on Friday, Trump said RFK Jr will “have a big role in healthcare” in a potential second administration.
“He knows it better than anybody,” Trump added. “He’s got some views that I happen to agree with very strongly. And I have for a long time.”
RFK Jr is one of the leading proponents of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and has urged parents not to vaccinate their child. He has spread misinformation about vaccines by claiming they cause autism despite decades of studies debunking that claim.
On Monday, RFK Jr said Trump told him he’d oversee a vast public health portfolio in a potential second term, like the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“The key that I think I’m – you know, that President Trump has promised me is – is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and then also the USDA, which is – which, you know, is key to making America healthy,” Kennedy said.
“Because we’ve got to get off of seed oils, and we’ve got to get off of pesticide intensive agriculture,” he added.
At a rally in Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Trump said he would let RFK Jr “go wild” in dealing with issues related to food, medicine and health.
But, health experts are concerned about the harmful impacts RFK Jr could have on public health, citing his role in one of the worst measles outbreaks in recent memory.
Back in 2018, two infants in American Samoa died after nurses accidentally prepared the Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine with expired muscle relaxant instead of water.
Several anti-vax groups, including RFK Jr and the nonprofit he leads, the Children’s Health Defense, visited Samoa to promote misinformation about vaccines during that time. As a result, the country experienced a precipitous decrease in coverage of the MMR vaccine.
A Measles outbreak in the small pacific nation in 2019 killed 83 Samoans, many of them children, in just three and a half months and sickened nearly 6,000 others.
