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Donald Trump picks Robert Kennedy Jr to run US health department

Published

1 year ago

November 15, 2024

Donald Trump picks Robert Kennedy Jr to run US health department

Donald Trump has nominated vaccine sceptic and former Democrat Robert F Kennedy Jr as head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the latest in a series of controversial picks for top cabinet jobs.

The appointment will put Kennedy, who sowed doubts about Covid-19 vaccines and has been critical of the pharmaceutical industry, in charge of a department with a $1.8tn budget with wide-ranging influence over drug regulation and public health.

The move hit the stock market, as investors digested the prospect of tougher political outlook in the world’s biggest pharmaceutical market. US-listed vaccine makers including Moderna and BioNTech both closed down over 5 per cent on Thursday. On Friday European pharma groups fell, with GSK and Sanofi losing more than 3 per cent.

Trump said in a statement on Thursday that he was “thrilled” to nominate Kennedy to the role. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” the president-elect said.

Donald Trump welcomes Kennedy on stage during a campaign rally in Glendale, Arizona, in August © Olivier Touron/AFP/Getty Images

Trump has roiled Washington in recent days with a series of controversial cabinet nominations, raising questions about how many will make it through the Senate approval process. On Wednesday, he tapped loyalists Matt Gaetz as attorney-general and Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence.

Trump said that as head of HHS, with oversight of agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Protection, Kennedy would “restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”

During the final weeks of his presidential election campaign Trump had said he would “let [Kennedy] go wild on health, go wild on the food . . . go wild on medicines”. Drugmakers had expressed concern about the possibility of Kennedy being given a formal role in the administration.

Thanking Trump for his nomination, Kennedy wrote on X: “I look forward to working with the more than 80,000 employees at HHS to free the agencies from the smothering cloud of corporate capture so they can pursue their mission to make Americans once again the healthiest people on Earth.”

The Consumer Brands Association, whose members include Nestlé and PepsiCo, noted that the agencies within HHS “operate under a science and risk-based mandate and it is critical that framework remains under the new administration”.

Kennedy, the son of the late attorney-general Robert Kennedy, beat a number of other candidates for the job, including former housing secretary and neurosurgeon Ben Carson and ex-Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, according to a person close to discussions.

Robert F. Kennedy Carrying Son Robert Kennedy Jr. — A young Kennedy being carried by his father © Bettmann Archive

The nomination repays Kennedy for dropping his own campaign for the presidency and backing Trump instead, helping to deliver votes for the former president, the person said.

Kennedy’s nomination as the country’s top health official is likely to spark alarm among public health experts and pharmaceutical groups. He has described the Covid-19 jab as “the deadliest vaccine ever made” and last year said the virus was “ethnically targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

Democrat Senator Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate finance committee, said after the announcement that Kennedy’s “outlandish views on basic scientific facts are disturbing and should worry all parents who expect schools and other public spaces to be safe for their children”.

Bill Cassidy, the top Republican on the Senate health committee, praised the pick, and said Kennedy “championed issues like healthy foods and the need for greater transparency in our public health infrastructure”.

Kennedy has said he would reorient government resources to tackle chronic disease instead of spending money on prescription drugs, as well as floating the idea of removing fluoride from the water system and to take on food companies over the additives in food.

In an interview with NBC News last week, Kennedy insisted that “if vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have choice.” But he added that he would remove “entire departments” of the FDA.

Kennedy’s appointment sets the stage for some of his allies to be appointed to other health agencies, such as the FDA, CDC and the National Institutes of Health. Healthcare influencers and entrepreneur siblings Calley and Casey Means, who are advising Kennedy, as well as Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, who opposed the widescale rollout of Covid-19 vaccines, have been jockeying for positions, according to a person close to discussions.

Health officials from Trump’s former administration, including Joe Grogan, Eric Hargan and Paul Mango, are also in the running for roles.

Trump also said on Thursday that he would name North Dakota governor Doug Burgum as secretary of the interior, giving the billionaire businessman a powerful role in the incoming administration’s efforts to boost domestic energy production.

Additional reporting by Gregory Meyer

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Top Drug Regulator Is Fired From the F.D.A.

Published

6 hours ago

May 16, 2026

Press Room

Top Drug Regulator Is Fired From the F.D.A.

Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.

She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.

Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.

But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”

“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”

As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.

She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.

The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.

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Supreme Court is death knell for Virginia’s Democratic-friendly congressional maps

Published

8 hours ago

May 16, 2026

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Supreme Court is death knell for Virginia’s Democratic-friendly congressional maps

The U.S. Supreme Court

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.

The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.

Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”

Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.

Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.

The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.

And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.

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Explosion at Lumber Mill in Searsmont, Maine, Draws Large Emergency Response

Published

18 hours ago

May 15, 2026

Press Room

Explosion at Lumber Mill in Searsmont, Maine, Draws Large Emergency Response

An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.

The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.

Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”

“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.

Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.

The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”

Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.

Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.

“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.

Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.

“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.