Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Billion-Dollar Hit to Big Pharma

The contentious choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of the Health and Human Services is already being felt in the markets.Credit…Carlos Barria/Reuters

A billion-dollar hit to Big Pharma

That didn’t take long. Shares in big vaccine producers, including Pfizer and Moderna, tumbled soon after Donald Trump named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

Picking Kennedy, long a polarizing figure in the worlds of public health and food policy, underscored the president-elect’s desire to disrupt Washington with highly unconventional cabinet picks. Whether Kennedy — or Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth or Tulsi Gabbard, for that matter — can get Senate confirmation is another question.

The choice suggests that Trump wants to drastically overhaul U.S. public health policy. Kennedy’s divisive views — including skepticism about vaccines, pesticides and water fluoridation — are well known. (As is his sowing of misinformation.) But he has now been picked to lead a huge department with 80,000 employees, whose regulations affect America’s food and medicine choices.

Kennedy provided crucial political support for Trump during the campaign, so it seemed likely that he would get significant influence. Trump is seeking to give him real power to, in the president-elect’s words, help “ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives.”

How far will Kennedy go? In his own comments, he said he wanted to “clean up corruption, stop the revolving door between industry and government, and return our health agencies to their rich tradition of gold-standard, evidence-based science.” He has already suggested he would fire agency employees.

Though he’s perhaps best known for his vaccine skepticism, Kennedy last week told NPR that “we’re not going to take vaccines away from anybody.”