U.S. President Donald Trump’s pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “is an extraordinarily bad choice for the health of the American people,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, warned Thursday.
“I was worried we could go low but not this low,” Dr. Carlos del Rio, executive associate dean of the Emory School of Medicine & Grady Health System, wrote of the pick.
Although Trump signalled in the runup to the election that he planned to let the vaccine skeptic “go wild” on health, food and medicine, Kennedy’s official selection for the nation’s top health post sent shockwaves through the public health world, concerned about his potential effects on vaccination rates, research on infectious diseases and misrepresentation of established science.
“For too …