Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has held scathing criticism for federal health agencies over the years, one of which he will now lead. 

His nomination to head the Department of Health and Human Services by President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday could bring sweeping changes to the way Washington, D.C., targets health issues. 

Kennedy recently gained attention for pledging to remove fluoride from all public water systems, saying that the chemical “is an industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease,” in a recent post to X. 

Here are a few more items the former presidential candidate has promised to tackle as part of his sprawling “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. 

End chronic disease and root out “conflicts of interests” 

Kennedy believes ultraprocessed foods with potentially harmful food dyes and toxic chemicals consumed in foods and medicines used by millions of people across the country are fueling declining life expectancy rates and rising autism and obesity levels, among other problems. 

He believes these problems, or what he has described as the “chronic disease epidemic,” are largely driven by conflicts of interests he says exist between government agencies in charge of health policy and the pharmaceutical industry.  

“A sick child is the best thing for the pharmaceutical industry. When American children, or adults, get sick with a chronic condition, they are put on medications for their entire life,” Kennedy said when he endorsed Trump in August. 

Kennedy has promised to end the conflict of interests he sees in Washington, arguing that critical health agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration have jumped in bed with big corporations as both entities look to make monetary gains. 

“Eighty percent of NIH grants go to people who have conflicts of interest. These agencies, the FDA, the USDA, the CDC, all of them are controlled by huge for-profit corporations. 75% of the FDA’s funding doesn’t come from taxpayers. It comes from pharma. And pharma executives and consultants and lobbyists cycle in and out of these agencies,” he continued before saying, “With President Trump’s backing, I am going to change that.”

In a bid to do that, Kennedy has pledged to clear out “entire categories” of health departments at the bureaucracies such as the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“They’re not protecting our kids,” he said of the FDA’s nutrition department during an NBC News interview earlier this month. 

Tackle vaccine safety

Under the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, vaccine manufacturers are immune from any financial liabilities, meaning people cannot sue the companies in question for harm that results from inoculation. Kennedy has expressed worries that the law put “perverse incentives” in place for pharmaceutical companies to create and distribute vaccines without significant ramifications for potentially adverse side effects. 

“You cannot, no matter how negligent that company is, no matter how reckless they are, no matter how grievous your [vaccine] injury, you can’t sue them. … Here’s a product you’ll never have to, no matter what happens, no matter how sloppy you are, no matter how reckless, no matter how toxic the ingredient, you’ll never have to pay anybody any downstream liability,” he said during an interview in July. 

Kennedy proceeded to argue that rolling back the protections could create safer vaccines. 

“You know and I know that if you tell a company that we can sue you if you do something wrong, they’re gonna be more careful about it,” he said. 

Kennedy also wants to conduct vaccine safety studies and investigate federal data on vaccine efficacy as he believes that vaccines should be tested “like other medicines.”

He argued during a House hearing in July 2023 that 72 vaccines “that are now essentially mandated” across the country did not have “prelicensing safety trials.” 

Kennedy said that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was formerly the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, contradicted the claim, leading Kennedy to sue the Department of Health and Human Services. 

“After a year of litigation, they sent us a letter, which … acknowledges that they are not able to locate a single pre-licensing safety trial, placebo-controlled, for any of the vaccines that are now mandated for children. These are zero-liability vaccines,” Kennedy said. 

During another interview with NBC earlier this month, Kennedy said, “If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away. People ought to have a choice, and that choice ought to be informed by the best information. So I’m going to make sure the scientific safety studies and efficacies are out there, and people can make individual assessments about whether that product is going to be good for them.”

Target pharmaceutical advertising

Kennedy wants to ban pharmaceutical companies from advertising drugs on television. He renewed the call during an Arizona rally with Trump earlier this month, saying the ban was needed in order to “correct the chronic disease epidemic.”  

“There are only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical advertising on the airwaves. One of them is New Zealand, and the other is us, and we have the highest disease rate, and we buy more drugs, and they’re more expensive than anywhere in the world,” he said. 

The move would hold massive implications for pharmaceutical companies, which pour billions of dollars every year into promoting prescription drugs on television.

Kennedy has also criticized pharmaceutical companies and Congress over their push for Ozempic, a prescription weight loss drug used to treat diabetes. 

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Noting that Congress has considered legislation called the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act of 2023, which would require insurance companies to cover the cost of Ozempic, Kennedy said, “Most of these [congressional] members have taken money from the manufacturer of that product.”

Instead of paying for people to be on weight loss drugs, Kennedy suggested during a recent roundtable in Washington that the government “purchase regeneratively raised organic agriculture, organic food for every American three meals a day and gym membership for every obese American,” that would come at “half the price of Ozempic.”