More than 75 Nobel Prize winners have signed a letter urging senators not to confirm Robert F Kennedy Jr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, questioning his lack of scientific and medical qualifications and citing his conspiracy theories, among other things.
This comes as Trump recently announced that the controversial Kennedy might investigate the supposed link between vaccines and autism – despite a consensus among the medical establishment debunking any such connection.
The letter of objection marks the first time in recent memory that Nobel laureates have banded together against a Cabinet choice, according to Richard Roberts, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, who helped draft the letter.
The group tries to stay out of politics whenever possible, he told The New York Times, but the confirmation of Kennedy, a staunch critic of mainstream medicine who has been hostile to the scientists and agencies he would oversee, is a threat the Nobel laureates could not ignore.
“These political attacks on science are very damaging,” he said.
The laureates questioned whether Kennedy, whom they described as having “a lack of credentials” in medicine, science or administration, was fit to lead the department responsible for protecting public health and funding biomedical research.
If confirmed, Kennedy’s opposition to well-established public health tools, like vaccines and the fluoridation of drinking water, would pose a risk to the country’s well-being, the letter said.
The laureates also decried his promotion of conspiracy theories.
Kennedy has falsely linked vaccines to autism, rejected established science showing that HIV causes Aids, and suggested, without evidence, that the coronavirus targeted and spared certain ethnic groups.
Agencies on the line
In their letter, the laureates also noted that Kennedy has been a “belligerent critic” of the agencies that would fall under his purview, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy has threatened to fire employees of the FDA, which he said has waged a “war on public health”, and has promised to replace hundreds of NIH employees the day after Trump’s inauguration.
More broadly, he said that vaccine scientists “should be in jail and the key should be thrown away”.
Seventy-seven laureates – in medicine, chemistry, economics and physics – signed the letter. They included Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of microRNA, and Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, who won the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences for research on global inequality.
Autism-vaccine probe
On a possible investigation by Kennedy into the supposed link between vaccines and autism, Trump claimed this was justified by the rise in autism diagnoses among American children over the past 25 years.
“When you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” he said.
“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, it was almost non-existent. It was, you know, one out of 100 000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”
According to the CDC, one out of every 36 children in the US were diagnosed with autism in 2020, compared with one in 150 in 2000.
The Guardian reports that Kennedy has repeatedly peddled discredited theories that the conditions is caused by childhood vaccinations.
“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he said in a 2023 interview in which he called for more vaccine testing. “When you talk about autism, and you look at the amount we have today versus 20 or 25 years ago, it’s pretty scary.”
Scientists have attributed the rise in autism diagnoses to improved screening methods while saying it is caused by a complex mix of factors, including genetics, environment and conditions during pregnancy and birth.
The World Health Organisation has definitely ruled out a connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine or other childhood inoculations.
Research led by the British doctor Andrew Wakefield asserting a link between autism and the MMR jab was later discredited, with The Lancet issuing a full retraction of a paper it had published based on it.
Wakefield was later banned from practicing in Britain after being found by the country’s general medical council to have broken its rules on research and to have acted “dishonestly” and with a “callous disregard” for children’s health.
In 2018, Wakefield had attended an inaugural ball marking the start of Trump’s first presidency the previous year at which he was quoted calling for a shakeup of the US medical establishment, saying it needed a “dramatic change”.
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