Viewpoint: Vaccine opponent and conspiracy theorist RFK Jr. poised to remake US health policy in his twisted vision

The vaccine skeptic and conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr. is “going to help make America healthy again”, Trump told supporters, before adding: “We’re going to let him go to it.”

Dr. Howard Markel, a historian of medicine at the University of Michigan who has studied pandemics, said he was struck by widespread anger and called the election’s theme “the ghost of pandemic future”.

“Did you ever think,” Markel said he remarked to colleagues, “when you were doing all this hard work and staying up all night that not like 1% or 10%, but like 50% of the country would be saying you destroyed their life and kept them inside, out of harm’s way, during the pandemic?”

“We forget what this country was like 50 years ago – how many children died every year from polio, pertussis, measles,” said [Dr Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota]. “We’re going to see the return of diseases we have controlled for decades and with that many additional severe illnesses in hospitals and deaths – and that’s just from the rhetoric, not even withdrawing vaccines.”

Kennedy has already recommended another vaccine skeptic and the current Florida surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, as secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), a massive federal agency that houses 13 divisions and 10 subagencies, including the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest publicly funded biomedical and behavioral research agency in the world. Ladapo urged Floridians not to get the Covid-19 vaccine and allowed unvaccinated children to go to school amid a measles outbreak in the state.

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