RFK Jr. Could Pose Existential Threat to Big Pharma If He Joins Trump's Cabinet: Here's Why
© AP Photo / Alex Brandon
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is primed for a possible senior job in Trump’s White House, promising to "Make America Healthy Again" by reining in big pharma's enormous influence on US health policy, and by improving food standards. Here's why the pharmaceutical lobby is going to have a hard time accepting that.
“He’s going to have a big role in health care, a very big role. He knows it better than anybody,” Donald Trump said last week when asked about RFK Jr.'s possible future in his administration. "He's got some views that I happen to agree with very strongly and I have for a long time."
Sources told media Saturday that Kennedy has already been asked to make recommendations to the Trump team on appointments to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration.
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies have already prepared for the worst, with some execs reportedly hoping Trump and and RFK Jr. have a falling out before Kennedy can do any damage to their respective bottom lines.
“We need to have somebody who is going to be grounded by science and evidence and not somebody who rejects it,” John Maraganore, former CEO of Boston-based biotech firm Alnylam, told FT in a story published Friday, commenting on Kennedy’s prospects.
Kennedy involvement in Trump’s health policy “would be awful on a lot of levels,” a senior unnamed health exec said. "RFK is going to blow up. He's marching around saying what he wants the administration to do before Trump's had a chance to take a breath. Eventually Trump will sour on him," another suggested.
Kennedy's poor reputation with pharmaceutical companies is understandable, given the attention he's gotten on the campaign trail during his 2024 presidential run, and before that - for his work as an environmental lawyer, Children's Health Defense chairman and author of the 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, which spent twenty weeks on NYT's bestseller list.
Kennedy used the national attention he got over the past three years to promote his favorite causes - vaccine safety and public health. His stinging remarks on these issues, and ability to now have the president-elect's ear, explain why big pharma finds him so dangerous. Here's a selection:
Anti-Vaxxer?
Smeared, throttled and censored by legacy media as an “anti-vaxxer” in virtually every article that mentions him, Kennedy has said repeatedly that he’s “never been anti-vaccine.”
“I fought against mercury in fish for 40 years. Nobody called me anti-fish. I like the idea that we have seatbelts in cars. Nobody calls me anti-automobile. I want vaccines that are safe just like every other medication and that are adequately tested. It doesn’t mean I’m anti-vaccine. It just means that I’m sensible and have common sense,” Kennedy said in a tense PBS interview in 2023.
20 December 2023, 06:21 GMT
'Criminal' Drug Companies
“The pharmaceutical industry is – I don’t want to say because this is going to seem extreme – a criminal enterprise, but if you look at the history, that is an applicable characterization. For example, the four biggest vaccine makers, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer and Glaxo make all of the 72 vaccines that are now effectively mandated for American children. Collectively, those companies have paid $35 billion in criminal penalties and damages in the last decade,” he told Lex Fridman in 2023.
“And the problem is that they’re serial felons," Kennedy said, citing the example of Merck's non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx. "They killed people by falsifying science. And they did it. They lied to the public. They said, ‘this is a headache medication and an arthritis painkiller’. But they didn’t tell people that it also gave you heart attacks…We found when we sued them the memos from their bean counters saying ‘we’re going to kill this many people, but we’re still going to make money,” Kennedy said.
“The way that the system is set up, the way that it’s sold to doctors, the way that nobody ever goes to jail so there’s really no penalty [and] it all becomes part of the cost of doing business,” Kennedy said.
Big Pharma's Role in Hooking Americans on Opioids
The opioid epidemic is a perfect example of big pharma’s corrupting influence, Kennedy believes, recalling the latter’s’ lobbying the FDA to tell doctors oxycodone isn’t addictive, and getting “a whole generation addicted to oxycodone. And when they got caught, and we made it harder to get oxycodone, now all those addicted kids are going to fentanyl and dying."
"This year it killed 106,000. That's twice as many people who were killed during the 20-year Vietnam War. But in one year, twice as many American kids. They knew it was going to happen and they did it to make money. So I don't know what you call that other than saying that's a criminal enterprise,"” Kennedy said.
Kennedy vs. Mutilation of Children
RFK Jr. has stepped out against ‘gender-affirming care’ and hormone therapy for children, referring to the former as “surgical mutilation” and the latter as “castration drugs.”
“Minors cannot drive, vote, join the army, get a tattoo, smoke, or drink, because we know that children do not fully understand the consequences of decisions with life-long ramifications…People with gender dysphoria or who want to change their gender deserve compassion and respect, but these terribly consequential procedures should be deferred till adulthood. We must protect our children,” he tweeted in May.
That’s more bad news for the pharmaceutical industry, which has walked lock-step in support of the trans rights movement, and profited immensely from hormone therapy drugs and surgical procedures from the late 2000s onward.
RFK Jr. on Chronic Disease
Kennedy has also vowed to “end the chronic disease epidemic” facing America, another potential blow to big pharma, this one possibly the most serious.
“There is nothing more profitable in our society today than a sick child,” RFK Jr. told Tucker Carlson in August.
“Because all of these entities are making money on him – the insurance companies, the hospitals, the medical cartel, the pharmaceutical companies have lifetime annuities…They want [them] sick for the rest of their lives…When my uncle was president, 6% of Americans had chronic disease. Today it’s 60%. When my uncle was president, do you know what the annual cost of treating chronic disease was in this country? Zero. There weren’t even any drugs invented for it. Zero. Today it’s about $4.3 trln,” Kennedy said.
RFK Jr.'s Solution? Sweeping Reforms
RFK Jr. has pointed to statistics suggesting that effectively half of the FDA’s budget comes from the pharma companies they’re supposed to be regulating, and said this needs to stop. He's also said that "entire departments" at the federal agency should be "cleared out," and that many of the problems caused by big pharma could be "fixed" with effective regulation, tougher penalties for harmful products, taking a page from the regulatory and health care environments of other countries, and a change in the overall culture of the US health care system.
