Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man virtually synonymous with anti-vaccine views, in charge of public health decisions in Washington? Donald Trump’s campaign has begun offering a role for a single, big-name presidential candidate should Trump win, saying, as Trump put it, that Kennedy could “run away” with public health agencies .

It’s a scary thought for many health experts, vaccines being one of the main public health tools in combating infectious diseases. In the last 50 years, conformable for the World Health Organization (WHO), vaccines have saved 154 million lives. Kennedy says that under Trump, he will be tasked with addressing what he calls an epidemic of chronic diseases like diabetes; his record suggests he sees vaccines as a primary culprit. “The vaccine industry and the cartel have done a tremendous job of disabling all the institutions in a democratic society that are meant to protect young children from greedy corporations,” Kennedy says in a video on his nonprofit Children’s Health Defense website. “They have turned the regulatory agencies, FDA, HHS and CDC into sock puppets.”

Numerous studies found that vaccines approved by the US government are safe.

It’s unclear exactly what position Kennedy would take if Trump returns to the White House, but some experts worry it will put Kennedy close to the vaccine policymaking machinery of the federal health agencies, two of the more important being the advisory committees of F.Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where the Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Biological Products (VRBPAC) makes recommendations regarding the approval of vaccines and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommends vaccines for use, determinations that states rely on to establish their own school vaccination requirements.

Kennedy previously characterized the committees as fraught with conflicts of interest and close ties to the pharmaceutical industry. A Kennedy video on Advocating for Children’s Health, titled The Vaccine Safety Project includes a lengthy critique of the FDA and CDC committees. The CDC committee involves pharmaceutical company insiders who create billions of dollars in profits for vaccine makers without rigorous scientific backing, Kennedy claims in the video. As evidence, he relies on what he says is a 2000 US House committee report citing conflicts of interest among members of the two federal health committees.

Kennedy echoed these themes in a recent town hall, where he said that It end alleged corruption and conflicts of interest in health agencies and return them to “golden, empirically based, evidence-based science” and “end this country’s chronic disease epidemic.”

Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, served on the CDC advisory committee in the early 2000s; now sits on the FDA committee that deals with vaccine approval recommendations. Offit vehemently disagrees with Kennedy’s assessment that vaccination policy is made by conflicted people and without adherence to rigorous science. At the FDA, he says, members fill out “long forms” for every meeting to show they have no connection to the companies under discussion.

And as for the scientific rigor of vaccine research, Offit says, “(Kennedy) continues to say that the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine causes autism, even though there are 18 studies that have been done over the last two decades in seven countries in three continents, involving thousands and thousands of children, probably costing hundreds of millions of dollars, to show that you’re not more likely to get autism if you’ve been vaccinated or not,” Offit says, “But still, he says, the vaccine ( measles, mumps and rubella) cause autism.”

Kennedy, Offit says, believes in conspiracy theories linking the pharmaceutical industry, the government and the medical establishment. “It will look behind the curtain and show this massive international conspiracy to basically harm public health in the interest of money – which doesn’t exist. The conspiracy he thinks is around doesn’t exist.”

The Trump campaign has been coy about the specifics of a potential Kennedy role. “The only thing President Trump and his campaign team are focused on is winning on November 5th. Everything after that is after that, and President Trump has made it clear that Bobby Kennedy will play an important role,” Jason Miller, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said in a statement to Bulletin.

Kennedy, who campaigned for Trump, said he was promised “control of public health agencies.” Campaigning in the swing state of Nevada on Thursday, Trump said Kennedy would work at “women’s health and health”. People familiar with planning for a potential Kennedy role said he would be in charge of a “government project” that gives Kennedy resources from all agencies dealing with chronic childhood diseases. conformable TO NBC News.

Meanwhile, a leader of the team preparing for a potential Trump presidency said Kennedy would not get a top agency job. Howard Lutnick, a campaign transition official, said CNN that what Kennedy wants is vaccine data with which to evaluate vaccine safety.

Dorit Reiss, who researches vaccine law and policy at the University of California, San Francisco College of Law, worries that Kennedy has the ability to shape how government data is presented. She fears that she will use access to the data to create erroneous and biased reports about vaccines that will come with the stamp of the federal government. “He believes what he wants to believe and doesn’t care about data,” she says.

Reiss believes Kennedy would face obstacles if put in a position to influence the federal vaccine policy machinery. States rely on the CDC advisory committee as the basis for their own vaccine policies because they believe it provides expert advice. In theory, an empowered Kennedy might be able to influence who sits on that committee, but if that leads to a less credible committee, states will simply ignore its recommendations. Fill the panel with people like discredited former British doctor Andrew Wakefield, who produced a now-retracted study that linked vaccines to autism, and it won’t have the prestige it currently enjoys, Reiss says.

But the committee has few direct levers to use vaccines, Reiss says. Also, the CDC advisory committee make recommendationsthat, if approved by the CDC director, determines which vaccines insurers participating in the act’s marketplace must cover, Reiss says. The committee also makes recommendations about which vaccines should be provided under a CDC program provide the recommended vaccines children with low incomes.

In an era in which the republican ssupport for school vaccination requirements slip, when Florida’s top health official decided to avoid standard procedures for containing a measles outbreak at a school and let parents decide whether to send unvaccinated children to school and when anti-vaccine activists are making inroads in the statehouses, Reiss sees a real risk of Trump elevating Kennedy.

“Trump has tremendous influence over his base, whether he’s elected or not,” she says, “If he puts (Kennedy) as a legitimate source, that will increase (Kennedy’s) influence,” Reiss says. “And that’s never good. Because it promotes misinformation. He says things that are not true. He is an extremist. And what he’s doing is not helping children’s health.”Slug URL