Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading figure in the incoming Trump administration, has found a seemingly unlikely ally in progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
When President-elect Donald Trump selected Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services during his second term, the move upset the Washington establishment, which has characterized the HHS nominee as a dangerous anti-vaxxer.
However, while Kennedy has detractors on both sides of the aisle, he has also garnered an array of bipartisan support, with Sanders most recently extending a welcome to the man who will likely become the next leader of the country’s most powerful health agency.
“When Kennedy talks about an unhealthy society, he’s right. The amount of chronic illness that we have is just extraordinary,” Sanders said during a recent interview with Business Insider.
When Kennedy launched a campaign for the presidency as a Democrat last year, concerns around the chronic disease epidemic became one of the pillars of his movement. Those concerns gained traction with the electorate even as Kennedy left the Democratic Party to become an independent presidential candidate and then dropped out of the race altogether to endorse Trump and build a “Make America Healthy Again” campaign for the Republican leader.
Kennedy argued that deep conflict of interests rooted within the country’s top federal health agencies have created a system of vast corruption, allowing the government and large pharmaceutical corporations to make lucrative profits by setting subpar health standards, contributing to a chronic disease epidemic and subsequently selling patients medications “for their entire life.”
Sanders said during the interview he agreed with Kennedy’s concerns over the rise of obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.
“Our kids are not healthy enough. In the long run, you want a healthy society as an end in itself,” he said. “We want our people to have long lives, productive lives, happy lives … And if the industry is giving our kids food that’s making them overweight, leading to diabetes and other illnesses, clearly that’s an issue that we’ve got to deal with.”
Kennedy has pledged to clear out “entire categories” of health departments at bureaucracies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He said they have set policies on areas such as ultra-processed food, harmful food dyes, and toxic chemicals that have hurt people’s health.
“We have 1,000 ingredients in our foods that are illegal in Italy and other countries in Europe. And the reason for that is corruption in the food industry and agriculture. Big agricultural producers control the FDA, so they’re not worried about public health,” he said during a Fox & Friends appearance this month.
Sanders is an independent senator, though he typically caucuses with Democrats, many of whom have expressed unambiguous opposition to the HHS nominee. The populist Vermont lawmaker’s support for Kennedy follows contrarian positions he has often taken in the upper chamber.
While he backed Vice President Kamala Harris against Trump in her bid for the White House, Sanders blasted Democrats after she lost for alienating working-class voters.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders said.
Sanders has also come out in support of Elon Musk’s work to eliminate federal waste and reduce wasteful spending through Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency.
Sanders isn’t the only Democrat backing Kennedy.
Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) responded to Kennedy’s nomination to head the HHS by celebrating his promise to eliminate the nutrition department at the FDA, among other things.
“The entire nutrition regime is dominated by big corporate ag rather than human health, and they do more harm than good,” Polis said.
Both Sanders and Polis have also criticized Kennedy’s views on vaccines.
The HHS nominee has expressed deep skepticism about modern vaccines, arguing that they are not sufficiently tested and could cause vaccine injuries.
Kennedy has pushed for vaccine safety studies while clarifying, “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,” Kennedy said during a recent NBC interview.
Sanders said he still thinks “a lot” of Kennedy’s theories are “kind of crazy and driven by conspiracy theory.”
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However, he added, “Some of what he’s saying is not crazy.”
“Anybody with a brain in his or her head wants to deal with this issue, to get to the cause of the problem. I think processed food and the kind of sugar and salt that we have in products that our kids and adults are ingesting is an important part of addressing that crisis,” Sanders concluded.