If there’s a theme among President-elect Donald Trump’s health Cabinet picks, it’s this: The vast majority were critics of how the Biden administration handled COVID-19.
The pandemic upended Americans’ perspective on public health and health care delivery, both throughout the United States and among Republican lawmakers. Policy experts say that change is evident in Trump’s selections to lead major U.S. health agencies.
That change is particularly notable in Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has been critical of the federal government’s pandemic response. Trump and Republicans have praised Kennedy for bucking conventional thinking when it comes to public health, even though many of Kennedy’s theories and proposals are not backed by science.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy advocated against vaccinating kids against the coronavirus. He also led the anti-vaccination group Children’s Health Defense beginning in 2018.
As Trump’s presumptive HHS secretary nominee, Kennedy worked with the Trump team to pick the leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health.
Former Rep. Dave Weldon, Trump’s selection to head the CDC, is also a vaccine skeptic. Mehmet Oz, known more commonly as “Dr. Oz,” Trump’s choice to head CMS, promoted use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. FDA commissioner pick Marty Makary promoted herd immunity to stop the virus, as did Trump’s choice to lead the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya.
Taken as a whole, the picks reflect a deep skepticism toward the recommendations of the very agencies these men have been tapped to lead. Trust in public health institutions plummeted in the wake of the pandemic, particularly among Republicans, according to polling, and virus prevention measures like wearing a face mask on an airplane or getting a routine vaccination have morphed into political actions in many parts of the United States.
“There was a lot of misinformation, uncertain information,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said of the COVID-19 pandemic response. “In the end, when you looked at what the benefits were, the benefits were not as large as promised and some people were penalized. So I’m sure that’s reflected in [Trump’s] Cabinet choices.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., applauded Trump’s choice of Kennedy and Oz, saying Trump “should have a good opportunity to maybe get somebody in there who will shake it up a little.”
But as Republicans cheer these changes to the public health sector, Democrats and medical institutions are concerned about health misinformation and how that could impact the American health care system, which spends roughly $4.5 trillion per year and accounts for 17.3 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.
On the campaign trail, Trump won voters by promising to buck the system. But public health experts warn that moving too far from the medical establishment and rejecting scientific data could have disastrous consequences.
“If [Trump’s health nominees] move too far out of the mainstream of what we know is correct from a science and evidence perspective, they’re going to have a very tough time getting things done,” said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.
A look at other key Trump health picks and their records on COVID-19:
Mehmet Oz, CMS
Oz has long been criticized for his controversial views on public health. The pandemic was no exception.
The Daytime Emmy award winner served as an informal adviser during the first Trump administration, promoting the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 early in the pandemic. He reportedly tried to persuade the president’s advisers to accelerate approval of the drug for use against COVID-19, even though at the time it had not been tested against the virus. Later, the FDA and infectious disease doctors found the antimalarial would not treat the virus.
Oz also urged Trump administration officials to back a study he offered to fund at Columbia University Medical Center about the impacts of the antimalarial on COVID-19 patients, according to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
In April 2020, Oz said on Fox News that reopening schools would be worth it, even if it led to increased deaths. He later retracted the statement.
Marty Makary, FDA
Like Kennedy, Makary has publicly questioned the broad use of COVID-19 vaccines and vaccine mandates. But unlike Kennedy and many others in Trump’s health Cabinet, Makary was an early advocate of masking to prevent the spread of the virus and restricting air travel.
The Johns Hopkins surgeon and author publicly opposed COVID-19 booster shots and promoted natural immunity over vaccinations. He went as far as arguing that the federal government censored pandemic data on natural immunity in an attempt to get more people vaccinated.
But Makary also promoted early vaccination strategies to protect those most at risk for severe disease, such as getting single doses of vaccines to as many people as possible before allowing people to go back for a second dose of the shot. In late 2020, he criticized the FDA for not moving fast enough to approve mRNA vaccines.
Jay Bhattacharya, NIH
A Stanford physician and professor, Bhattacharya made a name for himself as a skeptic who opposed COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He also promoted herd immunity, the concept that low-risk people should live their lives normally and build up resistance to COVID-19 through infection while only high-risk individuals took precautions.
In October 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored the controversial “Great Barrington Declaration,” an open letter advocating against virus prevention measures with the hopes of quickly obtaining herd immunity.
Both the World Health Organization and leading academic and public health organizations condemned the letter, with the American Public Health Association and other health organizations signing a letter calling it a “wrong-headed proposal masquerading as science” and arguing that the declaration would lead to preventable deaths.
Dave Weldon, CDC
Weldon, a physician who represented Florida in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 through 2009, has routinely questioned the links between vaccines and autism throughout his career. He does not specialize in infectious diseases and has never formally worked in public health, having spent his career as a military doctor, internist and politician.
In 2007, Weldon introduced a bill that would remove vaccine safety research from the CDC’s domain and house it in a separate HHS agency. Although the bill didn’t advance, some privately worry it’s indicative of the way he’d strip down the public health agency.
Former acting CDC Director Richard Besser said he’s concerned about Weldon’s lack of public health credentials and suspects he was nominated to the post largely because his vaccine skepticism aligns with Kennedy’s views.
“What we’re seeing with a number of these nominations is a continuation of that politicization [of public health], where you know people coming in who are saying public health is the problem, not the solution,” Besser said.
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