The president-elect of the United States, Donald Trump, appointed yesterday Thursday Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his next secretary at the head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) despite his positions against vaccines and having given rise to misinformation related to the origin of AIDS.
The next tenant of the White House has lamented that “for too long Americans have been crushed by the food industrial complex and pharmaceutical companies,” which he has accused of participating in “the deception, disinformation and misinformation” of the society.
Thus, Trump has asserted that, with Kennedy Jr. at the helm, the HHS will serve to ““Help ensure that everyone is protected from the harmful chemicals, contaminants, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming health crisis.” of the United States.
“Mr. Kennedy will restore these agencies to the traditions of leading scientific research and the beacons of transparency, to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America great and healthy again,” Trump stressed in his remarks. social networks.
For his part, Kennedy has promised to be an “honest public servant” if he is confirmed as head of HHS: “Together we will end corruption, the revolving door between the industry and the Government, and we will return to our health agencies their rich tradition of evidence-based and reference science.”
“I will give Americans transparency and access to all the data so they can make informed decisions for themselves and their families. My commitment to the American people is to be an honest public servant. Let’s go there,” has stated through his profile on the social network X.
Donald Trump.
REUTERS/Brian Snyder/File Photo
He also thanked Trump for his “leadership and courage” and has said he is “committed to promoting” the vision of the former president “to make America healthy again”, making a simile with the slogan MAGA (Make America Great Again).
“I look forward to working with the more than 80,000 HHS employees to free agencies from the suffocating cloud of corporate control so they can continue their mission of returning Americans to the healthiest people on Earth,” he said.
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More about Donald Trump
Kennedy Jr., son of US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, He was a member of the Democratic Party until 2023, when he left the party and began his career as an independent politician, even presenting his candidacy for the White House.
However, he ended up withdrawing his candidacy and asking to vote for Trump, thus giving a radical turn to his political positions that have led a large part of his family to distance themselves from him, also due to his defense of all types of false conjectures about the vaccines, even going so far as to relate them to Nazi Germany.
Kennedy Jr. went so far as to call vaccines “a crime against humanity” and assured that he would collaborate with Trump to eliminate fluoride from the water systems of the United States, which would be a setback for 80 years of consensus on public health, according to the Bloomberg agency.
These positions are likely to expose him to an exhaustive investiture session in the Senate, where it is foreseeable that the Democrats will test their convictions. If he assumes the Department, he would have public health, medicines, food and nutrition of the country under his control.
HHS was on the front lines of the response to the coronavirus pandemic, the first impacts of which came even with Trump in the White House. In fact, the magnate’s management was harshly criticized, and he was even accused of downplaying the health emergency.
On the other hand, Trump has made public other new appointments, among which his attorney Todd Blanche, who represented him in several criminal cases, for the position of deputy attorney generalwho is tasked with managing the daily functions of the department while advising the attorney general on the office’s priorities.
Blanche, who spent several years as a federal prosecutor before entering private practice a decade ago, defended Trump in the case over the falsification of documents to conceal the payment of $130,000 to former porn actress ‘Storny Daniels’ so that he would not spoke about an alleged extramarital relationship, for which he was convicted at the beginning of the year.
He also worked on the defense of the now president-elect in the classified documents case, which was dismissed this summer, and was involved in the federal case for the Republican’s role in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.