As thousands of Americans were still dying weekly from the COVID-19 pandemic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, made a formal request to the Food and Drug Administration in May 2021 demanding that officials halt all Covid vaccines, according to a new report.
And with Kennedy set to lead the country’s premier public health agency in the new Trump administration, health experts are sounding the alarm.
In his petition, filed on behalf of his nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy founded and ran, he asked officials to pull authorization for the shots and forgo approval of any future Covid vaccines, The New York Times reported Friday.
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It came as vaccines were in high demand “and considered life-saving,” according to the Times. Agency officials denied the request within months, the publication said.
“The idea that in early 2021 that you could be saying that people over the age of 65 don’t need Covid vaccines — that’s just nuts,” Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, told the Times.
The request raised few eyebrows when it was filed – Kennedy is well-known for his wide-ranging conspiracy theories, especially surrounding COVID-19, AIDS and fluoride in U.S. public water systems – but public health experts just learning about its filing were stunned.
John Moore, a professor of immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College, told the Times that Kennedy’s ask of the FDA was “an appalling error of judgment,” while an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health, Gregg Gonsalves, compared Kennedy's leading the federal health agency he was nominated for to “putting a flat earther in charge of NASA.”
FDA commissioner Dr. Robert Califf told the Times that Kennedy’s effort regarding the vaccines was a “massive error.”
Despite Kennedy’s public filing and comments, the Trump nominee and those close to him have insisted that he is not an anti-vaxxer. If confirmed to his post, Kennedy “would assume oversight of $8 billion in funding for the Vaccines for Children program and would have the authority to appoint new members to a panel that makes influential vaccine recommendations to states,” the Times noted.