RFK Jr has vowed to “make America healthy again” by tackling the country’s obesity crisis, removing fluoride from public drinking water and curtailing the influence of regulators, who he claims are too close to the food and drug industries.
The president-elect has said he will let RFK Jr tackle the “industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation”.
But the move has alarmed public health officials and academics due to concern over RFK Jr’s anti-vaccine activism and embrace of numerous debunked conspiracy theories.
In July, RFK Jr said in a podcast interview that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” and told Fox News that he still believes in the debunked idea that vaccines can cause autism.
Vaccines have been proven safe and effective in laboratory testing and in real-world use in hundreds of millions of people over decades.
Beate Kampmann, Professor of …