A former secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services on Sunday declared that President-elect Donald Trump made a “very dangerous” move by picking conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr to fill her old role.
“I think we’re talking about magnitudes of danger beyond erroneously making legal decisions. This is life or death,” said Kathleen Sebelius in an interview with MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart.
Sebelius, who oversaw the Affordable Care Act’s implementation while serving as HHS head under Barack Obama, said the department affects Americans “from birth to their grave” and is “intimately” tied to every state in the nation.
She added that Kennedy’s history of pushing false claims about vaccines is “totally disqualifying for anyone” who seeks the HHS post.
“That — in and of itself, from the bully pulpit of HHS — could end up killing people, could end up harming children,” she said of the pick by Trump, who vowed to let Kennedy “go wild” on health policy.
“My grandson is too young to get a lot of vaccinations yet and having him exposed to unvaccinated people with polio and measles is a terrifying thought, having eradicated those diseases as a major health initiative.”
She continued, “Jonathan, I think this is absolutely terrifying and people should understand how serious it is.”
Other health experts from across the globe have also sounded the alarm on Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism, pointing to his 2019 visit to Samoa being connected to a deadly measles outbreak that killed 83 people (mostly children) on the Pacific island nation.
Sebelius, in a separate interview with CNN’s John Berman on Thursday, warned that Kennedy “may well undo decades of public health work” if he winds up becoming the department’s secretary.
“He has no organisational management experience, and HHS is one of the largest domestic organisations,” said Sebelius of a department that has over 83,000 employees and a nearly $2 trillion budget.
She later told Berman that’s she’s “most frightened” about Kennedy not coming in with a “query” or suggesting that the department look at “two different points of view” on vaccines.
“He’s made a determination with no scientific background and, as far as I can determine, no evidence that actually supports his views and he’s very willing to assert them as if they are fact,” she said.