Throughout the 2024 election cycle, no candidate has been more of a laughingstock than Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who entered the presidential race as a third-party alternative to President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. While he initially polled as high as 15% nationally, the strongest performance from a third-party candidate in decades, many skeletons began to emerge from his closet. From having a parasitic worm die in his brain to leaving a dead bear cub in Central Park, stories spread throughout the media that turned him into a complete joke. While this may be the final impression he leaves on many voters, following his exit from the race last week, his endorsement of former President Trump has opened the frightening possibility of Kennedy. serving as America’s next Health and Human Services secretary. Given his history of spreading anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and suggesting that HIV isn’t the cause of AIDS, the harm that he could do in this position is something that every voter must consider when filling out their ballot.
Kennedy’s support of Trump is a far cry from how he began his presidential campaign. He first entered the race as a Democrat in a long-shot attempt to challenge Biden for the party’s nomination. Despite the notoriety that the Kennedy name has among Democratic voters, he failed to gain traction and dropped out. While he continued his campaign as an independent candidate, Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris was the final nail in the coffin. Kennedy’s poll numbers subsequently dropped to 5%, and Republicans began to pressure him to drop out since his support was primarily pulling from Trump. This is when Kennedy’s campaign began to take a right-wing turn. Trump began privately coaxing him to drop out and join his campaign, and in a leaked call he even seemed to play into his vaccine conspiracies. Trump’s strategy paid off, and Kennedy has now joined Trump’s campaign as part of his presidential transition team. Given that Kennedy broke his original promise to be independent of both parties, it’s clear that his campaign was nothing but a play for power.
If Trump wins this November’s election, Kennedy will have a significant influence over the second Trump administration’s policies. Given his active interest in serving as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, voters need to be made aware of the danger that Kennedy poses to our public health. Before he ran for president, Kennedy founded an organization called the Children’s Health Defense, which has grown to be the most well-funded anti-vaccine organization in the United States. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they launched a widespread misinformation campaign that spread false claims about the COVID-19 vaccine to millions of Americans. In fact, Kennedy was found to be part of the “disinformation dozen,” a group of 12 people who were responsible for the majority of vaccine misinformation on social media. While the Children’s Health Defense more than quintupled its revenue through the pandemic, the misinformation they spread contributed to over 300,000 COVID-19-caused deaths that could have been prevented if the victims had received the vaccine.
Kennedy's harmful influence stretches outside of the United States too. After visiting Samoa in order to perpetuate fears of the measles vaccine, 83 people died of an outbreak due to a decrease in vaccination rates. To this day, he still claims that it was the vaccine and not the disease itself that led to these unnecessary deaths. If Kennedy has already managed to induce this much harm just as an anti-vaccine influencer, imagine what he could be capable of if given a legitimate role in government. In fact, he’s already laid out his plans for a possible health secretary stint, where he would have control of 13 important health agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. He has expressed a desire to flood these agencies with like-minded individuals, who would have complete control over our nationwide health policies. He would likely also work to hinder new vaccine research and eliminate vaccine mandates, which could lead to thousands of preventable deaths.
There is one key conclusion that should be drawn from this dangerous, newfound Trump-Kennedy alliance: The presidential election is not just about the candidates that are on the ballot. A vote for the former president now has far greater implications than just putting him back in the Oval Office. It would greenlight Kennedy and the rest of Trump’s allies to wield unprecedented levels of power within the Executive Branch regardless of which party wins control of Congress. This wouldn’t just be limited to Kennedy’s dangerous public health overhauls. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that contains several of Trump’s former advisers, outlined their plan for Trump’s presidency in Project 2025, which proposes taking control of the entire federal bureaucracy and replacing industry experts with political appointees, as well as dismantling or even completely eliminating important agencies such as the FBI and Department of Education. With all this in mind, casting your vote in November could not be more important. Even if you like what Trump has to say when put in front of a camera, consider the implications of what his allies are planning behind the smokescreen of his campaign.
