By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump is standing by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary who is upending the U.S. healthcare system, despite congressional pressure, public health concerns and the political risks of changing vaccine policies nationwide.
Since becoming the top U.S. health official, Kennedy has slashed funding for vaccine research, limited access for COVID-19 shots and ousted the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which makes U.S. vaccine recommendations.
The consequences of those changes for Americans and their wellness are vast, public health professionals warn. They also carry possible political peril: If an outbreak of an infectious disease occurs after vaccination rates go down, Trump could be blamed.
But the president so far has been steadfast in his support for Kennedy, according to sources familiar with their relationship, underscoring Trump’s willingness to take a proverbial sledgehammer to the U.S. healthcare system, just as he has to academia, the law, the media and other institutions throughout U.S. society.
“He’s a, a very good person … and he means very well, and he’s got some little different ideas,” Trump told reporters on Thursday at the White House after lawmakers grilled Kennedy at a hearing earlier in the day. “If you look at what’s going on in the world with health, and look at this country also with regard to health, I like the fact that he’s different.”
Trump and Kennedy speak regularly, though not as often as the president does with some other cabinet officials, a White House official said. They don’t share the same passion, the official added, but Trump has the secretary’s back.
“He doesn’t feel as strongly as Bobby on some of these key issues,” the official said. “He trusts his judgment.”
Trump rewarded Kennedy with the Health and Human Services job after drawing support from the Kennedy-inspired Make America Healthy Again movement in the 2024 election. Kennedy, who hails from one of the country’s most famous political dynasties, briefly ran for president as a Democrat and an independent before dropping out to endorse Trump.
In December, Trump played down the potential for the longtime vaccine critic to make extreme change.
“I think he’s going to be much less radical than you would think,” the then-president-elect told reporters at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida estate. “I think he’s got a very open mind, or I wouldn’t have put him there.”
IT’S COMPLICATED
Trump’s own views on vaccines are complicated. Though he can claim credit for speeding up development of the life-saving COVID-19 vaccines during his first term, he has been reluctant to embrace them, given the antipathy of his political base toward vaccines and the broader response to the pandemic.
Florida leaders announced a plan on Wednesday to end all state vaccine mandates, including for students to attend schools. Trump seemed to question that, gently, on Friday.
“Look, you have some vaccines that are so amazing. The polio vaccine, I happen to think is amazing,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “You have to be very careful when you say that some people don’t have to be vaccinated … It’s a very tough position.”
While Democrats have become more trusting of vaccines in recent years, Republicans appear less so, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling.
Some 75% of Democrats in May said they considered vaccines for diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella to be “very safe” for children, up from 64% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in May 2020. The share of Republicans saying the same fell to 41% in May of this year from 57% five years earlier.
Trump is attuned to that political dynamic and has reacted accordingly, said Marc Short, who helped lead the administration’s pandemic response plan during Trump’s first term as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff.
He noted there were risks for Kennedy, though, if things went badly. “If there’s something that the president views as embarrassing to him, he has a unique capacity to kind of cut bait and go a different direction,” Short said.
The president recently posted on social media that vaccine companies should prove their products saved millions of lives.
That data exists, though there are skeptics. A Yale study showed that from December 2020 to November 2022, COVID-19 vaccines prevented “more than 18.5 million additional hospitalizations and 3.2 million additional deaths” in the United States.
NOT ENOUGH CREDIT
Reflecting Trump’s ambivalence on the issue, the White House official said the president does not feel he gets enough credit for Operation Warp Speed, the program his prior administration spearheaded to spur vaccine development.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers sharply criticized Kennedy during a tumultuous hearing on Thursday that highlighted bipartisan discomfort with the health secretary’s leadership.
Kennedy’s suggestion that Trump receive a Nobel Prize for his efforts went over well with the president, according to the White House official, while Republican support for Operation Warp Speed muted the sting of their criticism of Kennedy.
Strong voter support for vaccines appeared to be on the mind of at least one Republican senator on Thursday.
The office of John Barrasso, a physician, confirmed he was citing data at the hearing from Trump’s polling firm, Fabrizio-Ward, showing 89% of all voters and 81% of Trump voters agreeing that vaccine recommendations should come from trained physicians, scientists and public health experts.
Trump’s Republican allies and members of the administration, including Vice President JD Vance, took to social media to criticize lawmakers who had grilled the health secretary.
“You’re full of shit and everyone knows it,” Vance said on X.
Some public health officials suggest the political alliance Trump has formed with Kennedy – and the leeway the president is giving him – is leading to dire consequences.
“They made a marriage of convenience and now it’s a marriage that’s going to have unprecedented and disastrous results for public health, healthcare and biomedical research,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, who complimented Trump’s Operation Warp Speed as a “tremendous” victory.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; additional reporting by Jason Lange, Trevor Hunnicutt, David Morgan and Jarrett RenshawEditing by Colleen Jenkins and Alistair Bell)
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