The New York Post editorial board slammed President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, calling the secretary-designate “nuts on a lot of fronts.”
The Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is reliably conservative and endorsed Trump for president this year. But Trump’s selection of the anti-vaccine activist Kennedy to lead HHS, the tabloid’s editorial board argued, would violate the first rule of medicine, “do no harm.”
Recalling a 2023 meeting with Kennedy, the Post’s editorial board called his views “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines.”
Kennedy is well known for touting debunked claims that vaccines cause autism and questioning other issues widely seen as settled by the scientific community. The sprawling vision laid out by his Make America Healthy Again movement includes bans on pesticides and genetically modified organisms, curbing additives and chemicals in foods and a decoupling of corporate influence from regulation.
Kennedy’s appointment to run the federal agency tasked with drug approvals, food safety and disease surveillance amounts to a promise kept by Trump, who during the presidential campaign said he would allow Kennedy to “go wild” on health policy. “He wants to do some things, and we’re going to let him go to it,” Trump said in his Election Night victory speech. “Go have a good time, Bobby.”
But allowing Kennedy to run HHS, the Post said, will put Trump in the position of answering for positions that many see as fringe or conspiratorial.
“Donald Trump won on promises to fix the economy, the border and soaring global disorder; his team needs to focus on delivering change on those fronts — not spend energy either having to defend crackpot theories or trying to control RFK Jr.’s mouth,” the editorial board wrote.
This is not the first appointment that the Post’s board has criticized. When Trump nominated former Rep. Matt Gaetz to be his Attorney general, the editorial board called it “not a good look,” putting the paper at odds with Trump despite praising his victory last week.