Robert F Kennedy Jr was confirmed on Thursday as the new US Health and Human Services Secretary.
He was one of many controversial picks for President Donald Trump's cabinet and he faced heavy scrutiny during committee hearings before he was confirmed in a 52-48 vote along partisan lines.
Who is RFK?
Mr Kennedy is the son of Robert Kennedy, a former senator, presidential candidate and member of the powerful Kennedy family, who was assassinated in 1968. He is also the nephew of former president John F Kennedy, assassinated in 1963.
After graduating from Harvard University, Mr Kennedy studied at the London School of Economics and received a law degree from the University of Virginia Law School.
An environmental lawyer, Mr Kennedy is the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a clean water advocacy group. He headed Children’s Health Defence, which bills itself as a mass-member organisation that focuses on addressing childhood chronic disease and toxic exposures, but which is better known for being staunchly anti-vaccine.
After stepping down from his own presidential run in August last year, Mr Kennedy endorsed Mr Trump.
Even before being nominated for Health and Human Services Secretary, Mr Kennedy vowed to work with Mr Trump to “Make America Healthy Again”.
Views on health care
In announcing his nomination, Mr Trump said on Truth Social that Mr Kennedy would help to fight back against “the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation and disinformation when it comes to Public Health”.
Mr Kennedy has said he is not anti-vaccine and claims he has never told the public to avoid vaccination, but he has repeatedly made his opposition to vaccines clear, saying on a podcast “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and has urged people to resist guidelines from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention on when children should be vaccinated.
Even before Mr Trump was elected, Mr Kennedy said he would recommend water agencies stop adding fluoride to drinking water. Fluoride strengthens teeth and is viewed as one of the biggest public health successes of the past century.
He made a variety of other claims not backed by prevailing science, such as questioning whether HIV causes Aids and suggesting antidepressants lead to school shootings.
Mr Kennedy has promised to take a serious look at those who work for the US Health and Human Services and its agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The new secretary is especially focused on stopping to the “revolving door” of employees who have previous history working for pharmaceutical companies or leave government service to work in that industry, his campaign communications manager told the Associated Press.
Mr Kennedy has also said the public health establishment is too focused on infectious diseases and that he wants to redirect resources towards problems he characterises as the chronic disease epidemic, such as obesity, diabetes, autism and mental illness.
He also wants to eliminate liability protections for drug companies and has suggested barring drug makers from advertising on TV. He has also proposed eliminating fees that drug makers pay the Food and Drug Administration to review their products, allowing the agency to hire extra scientists to speed up their work.
In a recent post on X, Mr Kennedy vowed to end the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of a host of unsubstantiated therapies, including psychedelics and stem cells, as well as discredited Covid-era drugs such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
