Dr. Ashish Jha, former White House COVID-19 response coordinator under President Joe Biden and current dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, issued a clear warning about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s potential impact on public health policy.
“The problem is: This is a man who doesn’t fundamentally believe in modern medicine. I think there’s no other way to say it,” Jha said on Wednesday on GBH’s Boston Public Radio. “The problem is he is willfully ignoring the evidence.”
Kennedy, who has been nominated to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has long been a controversial figure due to his history of anti-vaccine rhetoric and conspiracy theories . Senators voted Wednesday along party lines to end debate on Kennedy’s nomination, setting up a confirmation vote Thursday.
Jha fears Kennedy’s potential power over vaccine programs and warned that he should not be underestimated.
“He’s not one guy,” he said. “The truth is, he is putting his people into key positions across the agency. He is going to have enormous power to dismantle the vaccine enterprise of our country.”
He emphasized that Kennedy’s actions would impact everybody, “including kids in Massachusetts.”
Jha said that Kennedy could potentially control the Vaccines for Children Program , which provides immunizations to nearly half of American children. “He can dismantle it,” Jha said.
He cautioned that such actions could lead to numerous outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles.
Children are not fully vaccinated against measles until they are around 4 or 5 years old, as the vaccine requires multiple doses .
“So if you have a 2-year-old who’s gotten their shot so far [and] encounters another kid who has measles, your 2-year-old can get measles,” he explained. “When a large chunk of the community doesn’t have vaccinations, all of us are going to be affected.
“We all live in one community,” he said. “We’re all going to suffer from that.”
He expressed hope that more moderate Republicans would push back against Kennedy’s influence.
“A lot of what I’m doing is encouraging my friends who are Republicans, who I think are reasonable and thoughtful, to go into the administration and fight the good fight because they need to be in there,” he said.
Jha also urged major medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association, to take a stand against Kennedy’s rhetoric.
“My hope is we’re going to start seeing a little bit of backbone, a little bit of courage from these major organizations,” he said. “We need to give them the courage and then when they do it, we need to back them.”
