Trump rewarded Kennedy with the Health and Human Services job after drawing support from the Kennedy-inspired Make America Healthy Again movement in the 2024 election. Kennedy, who hails from one of the country’s most famous political dynasties, briefly ran for president as a Democrat and an independent before dropping out to endorse Trump.
In December, Trump played down the potential for the longtime vaccine critic to make extreme change.
“I think he’s going to be much less radical than you would think,” the then-president-elect told reporters at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida estate. “I think he’s got a very open mind, or I wouldn’t have put him there.”
IT’S COMPLICATED
Trump’s own views on vaccines are complicated. Although he can claim credit for speeding up development of the life-saving COVID-19 vaccines during his first term, he has been reluctant to embrace them, given the antipathy of his political base toward vaccines and the broader response to the pandemic.
Florida leaders announced a plan on Wednesday to end all state vaccine mandates, including for students to attend schools. Trump seemed to question that, gently, on Friday.
“Look, you have some vaccines that are so amazing. The polio vaccine, I happen to think is amazing,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “You have to be very careful when you say that some people don’t have to be vaccinated … It’s a very tough position.”
While Democrats have become more trusting of vaccines in recent years, Republicans appear less so, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling.
Some 75 per cent of Democrats in May said they considered vaccines for diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella to be “very safe” for children, up from 64 per cent in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in May 2020. The share of Republicans saying the same fell to 41 per cent in May of this year from 57 per cent five years earlier.
Trump is attuned to that political dynamic and has reacted accordingly, said Marc Short, who helped lead the administration’s pandemic response plan during Trump’s first term as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff.
He noted there were risks for Kennedy, though, if things went badly. “If there’s something that the president views as embarrassing to him, he has a unique capacity to kind of cut bait and go a different direction,” Short said.
The president recently posted on social media that vaccine companies should prove their products saved millions of lives.
That data exists, though there are sceptics. A Yale study showed that from December 2020 to November 2022, COVID-19 vaccines prevented “more than 18.5 million additional hospitalisations and 3.2 million additional deaths” in the United States.
