President-elect Trump’s decision to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a controversial vaccine skeptic and purveyor of misinformation, to head the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services has alarmed academics.

If the U.S. Senate confirms Kennedy, it will oversee many federal agencies, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health – the largest federal source of research funding for universities, which received more than $30 billion from HHS in 2022.

“Beyond the edge. Down the rabbit hole. Absolutely crazy,” Jeffrey Flier, professor and former dean of Harvard Medical School, posted on X in response to Kennedy’s nomination. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible until now. Completely independent of politics, this must be considered unacceptable in 2024.”

Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, posted on

“Our health care system is far from perfect,” wrote Jha, who also served as President Biden’s COVID-19 response coordinator at the White House. “But it sparked a lot of progress that benefited the American people. This nomination, if confirmed, puts all of that at risk.

Of the many agencies Kennedy will oversee, he may first turn his attention to the NIH, given his public comments about his plan to downsize the agency on his first day in office.

At an event in Arizona just days before Trump chose him to lead the department, Kennedy said that on Jan. 21, 600 people “are going to walk into the NIH offices and 600 people are going to leave.” Reported by NPR. (Nearly 20,000 people work at the NIH.)

In addition to layoffs, Kennedy said he wants to shift the NIH’s focus from infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, to chronic illnesses like obesity. Last November, according to NBC NewsKennedy told an anti-vaccine group: “I’m going to say to the scientists at NIH, ‘God bless you all.’ Thank you for the public service. We’re going to give infectious diseases a break for about eight years.

NBC News also reported that Kennedy, who spread the discredited claim that vaccines cause autism, said he wanted to force medical journals to publish retracted studies.

“It’s just a jumble of grievances, some of which could benefit from broad ideological support from a more populist agenda,” including elements that are not “well-grounded in research, such as his opposition to vaccines,” said David Guston, professor and founder. director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. “This provides an opportunity for potentially strange coalitions to form around a variety of reforms, some that might be research-based (and) others that might not be.”

Even if the Senate confirms Kennedy, he and other department heads “only have so much latitude to make changes,” Guston said, emphasizing that what really matters is how they communicate with the audience.

“A potentially more damaging situation is RFK’s rhetoric and focus that could allow for the emergence of a more robust anti-vaccine movement, even among the most accepted childhood vaccines,” he said. “This is going to be problematic for the public, because they follow things not through peer-reviewed literature, but through how they are represented on X or other social media. “

Inside higher education Kennedy was unable to reach Kennedy for comment Friday.

After Trump announced him as his choice to lead HHS, Kennedy said on end the epidemic of chronic diseases. I look forward to working with more than 80,000 HHS employees to free agencies from the stifling cloud of corporate capture so they can continue their mission to make Americans once again the healthiest people of the planet.

Kennedy also wrote that he would work to “return our health agencies to their rich tradition of evidence-based science,” promising to provide Americans with “transparency and access to all data so that they can make informed choices for themselves and their families. »

Trump echoed Kennedy’s sentiments on Truth Social, his own social media network, saying: “Mr. Kennedy will restore these agencies to the traditions of gold standard scientific research and the beacons of transparency, to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America great and healthy again! »

The president-elect has already said he will let Kennedy run amok on health care.

Jim Olds, professor of neuroscience and public policy at George Mason University, who led the Biological Sciences Directorate of the U.S. National Science Foundation from 2014 to 2018 and previously worked in the Intra- muros of the NIH, said: Inside higher education that Kennedy public skepticism toward water fluoridation and vaccines worry him.

“I hope that if RFK Jr. is confirmed,” Olds said, “his unusual views on vaccines will not be the primary driver of what (HHS) primarily does.”

Although Kennedy’s public criticism of the department was aimed at the NIH, Medicare and Medicaid services account for the majority of the HHS budget. He is also unlikely to influence NIH funding since final decisions must go through congressional appropriations committees, which during Trump’s first term largely ignored the president’s calls to drastically cut funding for the NIH. research.

And just as the academic community’s deepest fears about the first Trump administration’s calls to cut funding for science have not come to fruition, Olds said he “feels very confident” in the leadership of the NIH . Between that and the powerful patient advocacy groups that support the NIH, he predicted that the agency would likely not experience the level of disaster that some are predicting about Kennedy’s nomination.

However, he does not rule out the possibility that Republicans will make reforms to the agency. Earlier this year Republican lawmakers called for a restructuring of the NIH in response to its alleged authorization of dangerous experiments during the pandemic.

With Republicans controlling Congress and the White House, Olds said such proposals could “carry weight.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some changes,” he said. “But change never hurt the NIH. It has been around for a long time and has undergone continuous evolution.