Trump picks Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Department of Health and Human Services
"We're gonna let him go wild for a little while," Trump said in October.
President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday he has picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, he announced in a social media post.
Trump said that Kennedy will "restore" the agencies under HHS "to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!"
HHS oversees major health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, among others.
The job requires Senate confirmation.
Kennedy, who suspended his independent presidential campaign in August and endorsed Trump, said ahead of Election Day that Trump had "promised" him "control of the public health agencies."
Kennedy has broadly advised Trump and the transition team on health related-appointments, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News. Kennedy had also been spotted at Mar-a-Lago multiple times and had been engaging in presentations that included candidates for specific Cabinet and health related jobs, sources said.
Kennedy has been an anti-vaccine activist and founded the Children's Health Defense, a prominent anti-vaccine nonprofit that has campaigned against immunizations and other public health measures like water fluoridation. Medical experts expressed concerns about a rise in medical misinformation through Kennedy's candidacy. Notably, Kennedy has falsely claimed that childhood vaccines cause autism, despite the retraction of the study that originally suggested this link, and numerous subsequent high-quality studies disproving this theory.
Earlier this month, Kennedy claimed in an NPR interview that he has "never been anti-vaccine."
“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have a choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information. So, I’m going to make sure scientific safety studies and ethics are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them," Kennedy told NPR.
Kennedy has said publicly that he wants to reduce government overreach, which he often frames as an issue of medical freedom.
On the campaign trail, Trump touted Kennedy's role in helping him "straighten out our health," but joked that he's worried about his strong stance on the environment, Trump saying he wants to keep drilling.
Trump first floated the idea of Kennedy leading his administration's health efforts during the Al Smith Dinner last month. He said Kennedy will "make us a healthier place."
"We're gonna let him go wild for a little while, then I'm gonna have to maybe rein him back, because he's got some pretty wild ideas, but most of them are really good," Trump said at the dinner. "I think he's a he's a good man, and he believes, he believes the environment, the healthy people. He wants healthy people, he wants healthy food. And he's going to do it. He's going to have a big chance to do it, because we do need that."
Trump and Kennedy haven't always gotten along with both hurling insults throughout their campaigns.
When Kennedy first signaled plans to jump into the 2024 race, Trump said he felt confident that Kennedy would take votes away from President Joe Biden, labeling him a far-left liberal.
"Kennedy is a Radical Left Democrat, and always will be!!! It's great for MAGA, but the Communists will make it very hard for him to get on the Ballot," Trump posted on his social media platform in March.
Kennedy fired back in an April post on X, criticizing the former president and saying that Trump's rant against him "is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims" and challenged Trump to a debate.
ABC News' Sarah Beth Hensley contributed to this report.