Mother Jones – At an event late last week in Arizona, anti-vaccine activist and Donald Trump transition team member Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he’d fire and replace 600 people from the National Institutes of Health on day one of a second Trump term.
The NIH is one of the public health agencies Kennedy loathes the most—and despite still lacking any defined role in a new administration, he’s clearly relishing the opportunity to promise retribution against them.
Kennedy made eyebrow-raising claims while fawning over Trump.
In comments that were first reported by ABC News, Kennedy declared,
“We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on January 20, so that on January 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave.”
Kennedy, a long-standing opponent of vaccines, has consistently been critical of the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control, and other federal agencies that are part of the basic infrastructure of public health.
His The Real Anthony Fauci attacked Fauci, a former NIH director, at book length, albeit with what one physician reviewer called “many errors and gross misrepresentations.”
The remarks offering some concrete details about Kennedy’s Trump-aligned and so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda came during an onstage interview at an entrepreneurship event in Scottsdale, which included discussions of Kennedy’s workout routine and his relationship with the once and future president.
Calley Means, a self-described health care reform activist who played a role in Kennedy’s independent presidential run sat alongside him for part of the interview.
He framed the MAHA movement as “kicking the special interests and the Deep State” out of government, calling the NIH “an orgy of corruption” …
