5 Of The Wildest Ideas Floated By RFK Jr.

President-elect Donald Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday. If confirmed, the agency that oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health would be run by a vaccine-skeptic who has repeatedly pledged to overhaul the nation’s health standards.

Here are some of Kennedy’s sweeping ideas for the country during Trump’s second term:

Kennedy has pledged the upcoming Trump administration would advise “all U.S. water systems” to remove fluoride from public water, claiming the mineral “is an industrial waste” linked to “arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”

That is not true at levels recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency that were lowered in 2015. The National Institutes of Health outlines some health risks of excessive exposure to fluoride at higher levels, which can lead to rare side effects. The NIH said that some evidence showed excessive exposure led to lower IQ in children but cited experts as saying the evidence was “weak and methodologically flawed.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there is no convincing evidence linking adverse health effects to fluoride intake at recommended amounts.

Fluoride is a naturally occurring mineral that has been added to much of the nation’s drinking water for decades and has been proven to dramatically reduce tooth decay. A 2017 study also found the fluoridation program saves Americans more than $6 billion in dental costs.

Fluoridation has proven so successful that the CDC lists it as one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century, alongside vaccination and the recognition of tobacco as a health hazard.

While Trump has expressed support for Kennedy’s stance, the president does not have the ability to ban fluoride in all public drinking water, which is under local, not federal, purview.

Kennedy is one of the nation’s leading skeptics of vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories and junk science while claiming “no vaccine” is safe and effective. He is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense and has peddled debunked claims that inoculations cause autism. Kennedy has also linked federal vaccination programs to the Holocaust.

All of those statements have been rejected by career health officials, who point to vaccines’ efficacy to eradicate smallpox, prevent millions of deaths from transmissible disease like measles and see the rates of polio fall 99% since 1988, according to the World Health Organization.

Trump himself couldn’t singlehandedly ban a vaccine, although he could exert pressure on federal agencies that approve them. And installing Kennedy as the head of the agency that oversees the CDC and the NIH has worried health advocates.

Kennedy has insisted he has not specifically called for an end to vaccination, and he has pledged not to ban them. But his longstanding claims that federal officials have muddled safety data has troubled health officials.

Mandy Cohen, the director of the CDC, told The Washington Post she was deeply concerned by his selection.

“I don’t want to go backwards and see children or adults suffer or lose their lives to remind us that vaccines work,” she told the paper.

Kennedy has made broad pledges to remove processed foods from school lunches and limit the use of food dyes. He recently went on MSNBC to lambast colorful breakfast cereals, asking: “Why do we have Froot Loops in this country that have 18 or 19 ingredients and you go to Canada and it’s got two or three?”

That’s not correct: Froot Loops in Canada have a similar number of ingredients to those sold in the U.S. But Canada has limited the use of certain food dyes. Regardless, the FDA says the artificial food dyes it’s approved are safe based on a “totality of scientific evidence.”

He also attacked Trump’s own diet, saying the “stuff that he eats is really, like, bad.”

“Campaign food is always bad, but the food that goes onto that airplane is, like, just poison,” Kennedy said during a recent interview. “You have a choice between — you don’t have the choice, you’re either given KFC or Big Macs. That’s, like, when you’re lucky, and then the rest of the stuff I consider kind of inedible.”

Kennedy recently told a reporter he believes entire departments of the Food and Drug Administration “have to go.” He specifically called out the nutrition department at the agency, claiming experts there were not “doing their job” and “not protecting our kids.”

He went on and said he would root out unidentified corruption in federal agencies: “Once they’re not corrupt, once Americans are getting good signs and they’re allowed to make their own choices, they’re going to get a lot healthier.”

Kennedy has also espoused the benefits of raw milk against government advice. The FDA warns the product, which is not pasteurized, has often been linked to outbreaks of illness.

He said last month other items in his sights include the “aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”

In the waning days of his campaign, Trump said he would endow Kennedy with the ability to “go wild” on health as part of his vision to Make America Great, and Healthy, Again. That included a broad pledge to be in charge of “women’s health.”

The size of his potential role at HHS will put many other facets of everyday life under his purview, with many questions about how he will act as Republicans continue to target access to abortion, health care for transgender youth and the Affordable Care Act.

“We have a generational opportunity to bring together the greatest minds in science, medicine, industry, and government to put an end to the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy wrote Thursday. “I will provide Americans with transparency and access to all the data so they can make informed choices for themselves and their families.”