Robert F. Kennedy Jr.s Billion-Dollar Hit to Big Pharma

ImageA billion-dollar hit to Big PharmaThat didn’t take long.Shares in big vaccine producers, including Pfizer and Moderna, tumbled soon after Donald Trump named Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.as his choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.Picking Kennedy, long a polarizing figure in the worlds of public health and food policy, underscored the president-elect’s desire to disrupt Washington with highly unconventional cabinet picks.

Whether Kennedy — or Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard, for that matter — can get Senate confirmation is another question.The choice suggests that Trump wants to drastically overhaul U.S.public health policy.

Kennedy’s divisive views — including skepticism about vaccines, pesticides and water fluoridation — are well known.(As is his sowing of misinformation.) But he has now been picked to lead a huge department with 80,000 employees, whose regulations affect America’s food and medicine choices.Kennedy provided crucial political support for Trump during the campaign, so it seemed likely that he would get significant influence.

Trump is seeking to give him real power to, in the president-elect’s words, help “ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives.”How far will Kennedy go? In his own comments, he said he wanted to “clean up corruption, stop the revolving door between industry and government, and return our health agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science.” He has already suggested he would fire agency employees.Though he’s perhaps best known for his vaccine skepticism, Kennedy last week told NPR that “we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.” We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Tim...