President-elect Trump tried to downplay concerns about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday, telling reporters that his nominee for Health and Human Services secretary won’t be “radical.”
“I think he’s going to be much less radical than you would think,” Trump said during a wide-ranging news conference at Mar-a-Lago. “He’s going to have an open mind, or I wouldn’t have put him there.”
Trump’s comments came as Kennedy kicked off a week of meetings with GOP senators to shore up support for his nomination. Some GOP senators have expressed concerns over Kennedy’s history of vaccine skepticism and wanted to hear directly from the former Democrat about what he believes.
Opposition to Kennedy centers mostly on his policy stances, many of which run counter to traditional GOP orthodoxy. He has a long history of questioning vaccines and has promoted the debunked idea that vaccines cause autism.
Kennedy argues the rise of chronic diseases in America can be traced to ultraprocessed foods, environmental toxins and chemical additives. He wants to ban fluoridated water and increase access to raw milk.
Kennedy has argued he is not anti-vaccine but thinks that childhood shots aren’t safe and that the government hasn’t done enough studies to prove otherwise.
But at the same time, Trump on Monday seemed open to some of Kennedy’s most controversial views.
During the press conference, Trump hinted that his administration would investigate the debunked link between vaccines and autism.
It’s a position Trump has flirted with for years, but it’s recently come to the forefront as the president-elect has allied with Kennedy.
“If you look at autism, so 30 years ago we had I heard numbers like 1 in 200,000, 1 in 100,000. Now I’m hearing numbers like 1 in 100. So something’s wrong. There’s something wrong. And we’re going to find out about it,” Trump said.
Trump also sought to reassure the drug industry that Kennedy wouldn’t upset the market, despite his previous comments railing against the industry. Trump noted he told industry executives as much when they traveled to a dinner he hosted at Mar-a-Lago recently.
First as an independent candidate for president and then as a surrogate for Trump, Kennedy has said federal health regulators are “sock puppets” held captive by industry special interests.
Trump said he told the executives he wants to work with the industry on stopping the “middlemen” in the prescription drug supply chain — known as pharmacy benefit managers.
“We spent more time talking about that than anything else,” Trump said. “We’re going to knock out the middleman. I don’t know who these middlemen are, but they’re rich as hell.”
