WASHINGTON — One of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s longtime dreams seems to be coming true: He’s on a potentially winning president’s team, and he’s pretty sure he’ll get a top-ranking job out of it.
But his ascension in Trump’s orbit has triggered alarm from leaders in the industry and even from some former GOP health officials who fear that Kennedy’s history of vaccine skepticism could delegitimize Trump’s genuine health care goals — or eclipse his previous health care wins, like a record-breaking vaccine effort. His remark that he is “going to be deeply involved in helping to choose the people who can run FDA and NIH and CDC’’ also has stirred nervous speculation.
That behind-the-scenes debate broke into public view at the STAT Summit this week, when former Trump White House official Joe Grogan immediately brought Kennedy’s name into a conversation about Trump’s health policy goals.
“The RFK announcement has kind of scrambled some of the traditional thinking [about] a lot of the people that have been building health care plans and the way that they were approaching the issue,” Grogan, who now works for USC Schaeffer and chairs the right-leaning health policy think tank Paragon Health Institute, told STAT.
Grogan made it clear he still backs Kennedy’s broader calls for public health reform.
But in interviews with STAT, others in the industry expressed deep concern.
“It scares the bejesus out of me because he is really, I would say, one of the big leaders in an anti-science philosophy that we see in this country — which is really concerning, deeply concerning,” said John Maraganore, biotech investor and former CEO of Alnylam. “I can’t imagine a more inappropriate person involved in health matters in a new administration if Trump is elected. I would hope the checks and balances in our system would keep that from happening.”
Jeremy Levin, the CEO of Ovid and former CEO of Teva, which at the time made one in six medicines given in America, said, “The basis for all good medicine is genuine fact, and the basis of those facts is science-based. And RFK has demonstrated that he is demonstrably not interested in understanding those facts, and in doing so anybody who has any influence on government policy and health care, whether it be a Trump or Harris administration, represents a serious danger to health care overall.’’
He added, “That type of failure to understand the importance of vaccines, or the importance of core medical facts demonstrating the value of medicines, represents an absolute threat to public health.”
Kennedy reworked his vaccine theories during his since-suspended presidential campaign, casting his previous comments into broader concern about a rise in childhood chronic illnesses and their potential drivers, including unhealthy foods, environmental factors and, he says, the pharmaceutical industry. That “Make America Healthy Again” messaging has found momentum with many Republicans, including Trump.
“Look, I would be lying if I said some of the rhetoric in some quarters didn’t make me a little bit nervous,” Grogan said at the STAT Summit. “But the flip side of that is: What, are we crazy? We don’t think that some companies do some things from time to time that are sleazy? That does happen.”
That’s the tightrope many former Trump officials and longtime Republicans find themselves walking. While eight such officials told STAT that they back discussions about chronic illnesses, and transparency in public health agencies, support splinters when Kennedy’s name enters the discussion. Though many share their deep concerns about Kennedy, several declined to speak publicly for fear of offending Trump or his lieutenants.
“The messenger matters,” one former Trump official told STAT. Tackling chronic health issues, particularly by reassessing food policy, “is not an unheard-of concept,” the official said, “but with RFK being the tip of the spear, it makes it very difficult to build the kind of consensus around it that you would want to actually achieve policy.”
Kennedy’s inclusion on Trump’s transition team comes amid Americans’ eroding trust in vaccines, medicines, and the federal agencies that oversee them. Vaccine confidence is sliding worldwide; officials are concerned that recent outbreaks of measles and mumps will undermine immunizations further.
“To even allude to someone who has been a known, non-science based critic of vaccines, is a disservice to the public, to parents, to the children,” said another GOP former health official.
Health care advocacy groups have also blasted Kennedy as Trump’s choice of a transition adviser, particularly as Election Day nears with Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris deadlocked in the polls.
“He is an anti-science wackadoodle and does not belong in any type of health position in the federal government,” Sue Peschin, CEO of the Alliance for Aging Research, said last week during a roundtable with reporters. “Regardless of who becomes president, anyone who’s interested in putting him in any type of health office, we will vigorously oppose that effort.”
A reality check on RFK
Those close to Trump’s orbit say to focus on the chronic disease messaging, not Kennedy or his previous stances. There is also the question of whether the former president would take Kennedy along in a second administration. Trump said this summer that he would “probably” appoint Kennedy to a role, but has backed away from that position before, such as when Kennedy angled to chair a vaccine commission in the first Trump administration.
“Whenever he’s accused of [anti-vaccine rhetoric] he says, no, it’s more nuanced than that, and maybe it is, but he does not have credibility in the scientific world,” said John C. Goodman, president and CEO of the Goodman Institute for Public Policy Research. “So were he [to be] put in charge of the CDC, a lot of people would worry about that, right? I’m not comfortable with it either.”
Still, Trump is finding new momentum, and new allies, in framing agency reforms as a response to chronic health issues, particularly a rise in children’s illnesses. Kennedy, along with rising stars such as the Calley and Casey Means, have insisted this year that their efforts are a response to a complicated web of industry interests and health institutions’ missteps, colliding with personal freedoms and worsening health.
Kennedy’s MAHA website lays out the priorities that he, “with President Trump’s backing,” would pursue. Those include banning certain food additives, better regulating ultra-processed foods, launching research into links between environmental chemicals and chronic illnesses, and an effort to “reorient federal health agencies toward chronic disease and rid them of Big Pharma’s influence.”
The former president is joining Kennedy for a MAHA-focused town hall on Tuesday.
“‘Make America Healthy Again’ is really resonating with people across the political spectrum,” Grogan told STAT prior to the summit. “America’s commitment to vaccines is not in jeopardy. Vaccines are a tremendous advance. Are there some things around the edges, around transparency, around vaccine schedules, that people need to think about? Maybe.”
Grogan, who worked as a budget adviser and directed domestic health policy in the first Trump presidency, also previously lobbied for Gilead Sciences. Gilead is perhaps known best as the developer of blockbuster HIV and hepatitis C drugs. During Covid-19, the biotechnology company made a treatment for coronavirus infection, remdesivir.
One of the latest to join the fray is Trump CDC Director Robert Redfield, who wrote last month that pharmaceutical companies and “special interest groups” unduly influence the three agencies, and Kennedy is the “right man for the job” of fixing it.
Redfield’s piece appears to be a bid to secure a health care position in a next Trump administration, five former Trump officials (who spanned from RFK detractors to cautious fans) told STAT. The calculation seems clear: Buy into the current messaging, or get left out.
“I’m unwilling to jump into it,” said one former official. “I feel like if you buy any part of their agenda, it’s hard not to buy the whole thing.”
Industry on guard
In contrast to Levin and Maraganore, other prominent figures in biopharma are walking a careful line in the weeks ahead of the election, trying to refocus the discussion around chronic illnesses, and their work on curing them, rather than the edges of Kennedy’s MAHA agenda that target their industry.
“We work with both sides of the aisle and transparently, both sides of the aisle have folks who get what we do in this industry, and both sides of the aisle have opportunities for us to continue to engage,” Bristol Myers Squibb CEO Chris Boerner told STAT at its summit this week.
Other executives have also emphasized their companies’ achievements in medicine and distanced themselves from the election.
“I think that what we can do is continue to use our focus on public health and to make sure that people understand the science that exists behind vaccines, therapeutics, preventance, cures,” Daniel O’Day, CEO of Gilead Sciences, said last week at a reporter roundtable. “I think that’s the most important thing, regardless of who the individual is or what the speaking points of that individual are.”
How we got here
The CDC, and its Covid-19 response, became the center of some conservative ire well before the “Make American Healthy Again” alliance moved into the mainstream. Congressional Republicans targeted the agency, along with the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, for post-pandemic hearings, reforms and possible restructuring.
Longtime government officials such as Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, became lightning rods for political discourse on masking policies, school shutdowns, and vaccine requirements.
The Republican-led House of Representatives has hammered those agencies this year on the Covid-19 response and potential reforms, including a proposed massive restructuring of the NIH that would break apart the institute Fauci ran for nearly four decades and merge agencies to under umbrellas such as body systems research, or immune system and arthritis research. GOP lawmakers are also pushing term limits for science directors; others have proposed banning risky infectious disease research.
Grogan backed several of those initiatives on the STAT Summit stage Wednesday, saying it was time for the NIH and other public health agencies to be held “accountable.” It’s the Covid-19 response, and officials’ actions during it, that drove public distrust today — not sympathy towards Kennedy’s stance, he added.
That echoes other frustrated members of Trump’s Covid-19 response, including Scott Atlas, a radiologist who joined the president’s coronavirus task force during the height of 2020 lockdowns and searches for treatments. Atlas championed the malaria medicine hydroxychloroquine as a potential Covid-19 treatment, which has shown no benefit in medical studies. He’s harshly criticized the coronavirus response since leaving his post in Nov. 2020.
There is “a bigger bottom-line message,” to Kennedy’s arguments, and where he’s finding agreement with Trump, Atlas told STAT. “Do you trust the institutions, the way they’re being run? I think the discussion is healthy. Let’s have the debate.”
“I don’t know what people are afraid of,” Atlas said.
John Wilkerson and Matthew Herper contributed reporting.