Trump picks Robert F Kennedy as Secretary for Health: What are his past views on public health and what he brings to the table

Vaccine safety: Children’s Health Defence — a non-profit founded by Kennedy — asks if vaccines are safe and effective, why are more kids living with chronic conditions, why prevalence of autism is on the rise, and whether vaccinated children are at a higher risk of asthma.

“No one wants to expose their children to questionable substances – especially those already widely known to be toxic. However, vaccines contain numerous concerning ingredients, including aluminum, mercury, aborted fetal cell lines, antibiotics, monkey kidney cells, formaldehyde and more,” the organisation says on its website.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) calls immunisation a “global health success story” protecting people against more than 20 life-threatening diseases. Immunisation prevents 3.5 to 5 million deaths every year from diseases like diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, influenza and measles, WHO says.

Robert F Kennedy Jr. arrives before President-elect Donald Trump speaks during an America First Policy Institute gala at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Thursday. (Photo: AP)

Chelation for autism: Kennedy is a proponent of chelation (a medical procedure that uses a chemical solution to remove heavy metals and other toxins from the body) to treat mercury toxicity, which he says enter foetuses not only through water supply and consumption of fish, but also from dental amalgams and thimerosal-containing vaccines.

“Currently no clinical trial evidence suggests that pharmaceutical chelation is an effective intervention for Autism Spectrum Disorder,” says a 2015 Cochrane Review, which could only find one study that systematically studied this but still had methodological limitations.

Fluoride in water: Kennedy wants to remove fluoride from public water. However, fluoridation prevents tooth decay and was listed as one of the ‘Ten Great Public Health Achievements of the US in 1900-1999.’ A 2019 report by the WHO talks about the dual problem of inadequate and excess fluoride intake. While inadequate intake can lead to more dental caries, excess intake can lead to fluorosis (a condition that can cause discolouration of teeth or extra bone growth). However, when the report talks about excess consumption, it talks about intake through ground-water that naturally contains high concentration of fluoride. The solution, it says, is providing fluoridated drinking water with optimal concentrations.

Raw milk and seed oils: Kennedy is also a proponent of raw milk — naming it alongside psychedelics, chelating compound, and drugs wrongly believed to be effective against Covid-19, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, as things aggressively suppressed by the US Food and Drug Administration.

While the proponents of raw milk claim that it tastes better and has more nutritional benefits, milk is pasteurised essentially to kill pathogens that can cause disease in humans. Warning against consumption of raw milk has been stepped up in the US in view of an ongoing H5N1 outbreak, which can be transmitted to humans from infected cows.

Kennedy also criticised the switch to seed oils from oils like beef tallow in school lunches. While repeatedly heating seed oils at high temperatures is bad, animal fats contain more saturated fat known to be bad for heart health.