Friend or foe? Environmental advocates eye Kennedy nomination warily

In the wake of last week’s announcement that President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), some leading environmental and public health advocates say they’ve found themselves in a “weird” position.

On the one hand, Kennedy is a lifelong environmental advocate himself and is pushing a platform called “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA), which sets an agenda strikingly similar to those of many groups on the political left – “prioritizing regenerative agriculture, preserving natural habitats, and eliminating toxins from our food, water and air.”

But on the other, Kennedy’s alignment with Trump – who touts his intention to roll back regulations and undo many hard-fought consumer protections – and Kennedy’s controversial views on certain health-related issues, have left leading environmental health groups unclear on whether he should be seen as friend or foe.

Kennedy has argued for tighter US pesticide regulations and has spoken out against glyphosate, the main ingredient in the popular weedkiller Roundup that has been classified as a probable carcinogen by a major international cancer research group.  He has also been sharply critical of regulators for failing to protect kids from harmful additives in food.

He rails against cozy connections between big business and the regulatory agencies that are supposed to oversee them, and vows to work to eliminate conflicts of interest in the agencies he would oversee, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and others.

“I can get the corruption out of the agencies,” said Kennedy in a recent interview. “It’s what I’ve been doing for 40 years. Once [the regulatory agencies] are not corrupt, once Americans are getting good science and are allowed to make their own choices, they’re going to get a lot healthier.”

Kennedy has a background as an environmental lawyer with a decades-long track record of fighting for green issues – he was once named one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet” for his work restoring the Hudson River, he founded the clean water advocacy group Waterkeeper Alliance, and he previously served as senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

But critics point out that Kennedy has no medical training and has been accused of peddling baseless conspiracy theories and making claims not supported by science.

Notably, Kennedy has been widely criticized for his assertion that vaccines cause autism, his support for certain unorthodox COVID-19 treatments and his endorsement of the raw milk trend, which can cause serious illnesses.

In 2021, Kennedy’s nonprofit organization, Children’s Health Defense, released a film called “Medical Racism: The New Apartheid” that critics accused of using propaganda to make Black Americans suspicious of vaccines just as the COVID-19 vaccine was becoming available.

And yet, when it comes to other public health matters, left-leaning advocates see some of their views reflected in Kennedy’s own opinions.

“In some areas, he seems to have landed on conclusions that can sometimes overlap with our views,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety. He said Kennedy could be a force to crack down on harmful per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in the food system, among other issues.

“It’s kind of difficult,” said Freese. “I think we could potentially work with him where he’s doing things that are pushing back against some of the destructive practices of industrial agriculture.”

Shaking things up?

Despite the criticisms, Kennedy has an enormous global fan base, with close to 5 million followers on X (formerly Twitter), and more than 4 million on the Instagram social media platform. Children’s Health Defense has subscribers around the world.

And while many issues, such as firearm laws and abortion access, are deeply polarizing in American politics and tend to cleanly divide along partisan lines, issues of food safety and health resonate with voters from both the right and the left.

“There is a real sense in which the mainstream, conventional wisdom in these matters is not that different between mainstream Democrats and Republicans,” said Freese. “I get the feeling that there is something of a groundswell of greater concern about toxins in the environment and in food.”

“If [Kennedy] shakes things up, that could be positive,” he added.

However, Freese said his organization has “no sympathy at all for his anti-vaccine views,” expressing concern that these controversial stances have made Kennedy appear “toxic” and unreliable, tainting his stances on other issues.

“There’s nuance in science and it’s not clear that our views will be fairly represented,” said Freese.

Kennedy disputes that he is anti-vaccine.  In a television appearance earlier this year he said: “I’m called that because it’s a way of silencing me. I’ve said for 17 years I’m not anti-vaccine. I just want good science. People should be able to make informed choices. I am against vaccine mandates.”

In another recent interview, he said he would not take vaccines away “if [they] are working for somebody” and “wouldn’t have directly blocked” authorization of the COVID-19 vaccine if he had been in charge of the FDA during the pandemic.

Jim Walsh, policy director at the non-governmental organization Food & Water Watch, also expressed a tentative interest in working with Kennedy on shared issues, such as policies to protect consumers from genetically modified crops that perpetuate the use of toxic herbicides. although he said he isn’t sure “how long a leash” Trump will give Kennedy to pursue his MAHA agenda.

“To the extent Kennedy or anyone in the Trump administration is willing to listen to facts and stand up to corporate interests that are exploiting public health and our climate and our environment, we’ll support those efforts,” said Walsh.

“Based on the first four years of the Trump administration, expect those moments to be few and far between,” he added. “Whether or not the Trump administration or Trump himself will allow Kennedy to put forward policies that will impact the profits of big agricultural interests is really something that I have a hard time seeing happening.”

Marion Nestle, an author and professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, said in a recent blog post that Kennedy’s expressed desire to get rid of ultra-processed foods in schools, fast food and artificial colors, among other issues, are “the kinds of things I’ve been saying and writing about for decades!”

“It’s too early to know how much of this is just talk, but I’m planning to do what I can to oppose measures I view as harmful, but to strongly support the ones I think will be good for public health,” wrote Nestle.

Others see little cause for optimism in Kennedy’s nomination. In a recent statement, Ken Cook, president and co-founder of the Environmental Working Group, called the news “the latest revenge-prank nomination to emerge from the patio of Mar-a-Lago.”

“Far from being funny, the decision to make Bobby Kennedy America’s top health official could well be deadly,” wrote Cook. “President-elect Trump has selected someone guaranteed to seriously erode the credibility of the federal government with the medical and public health communities.”

Last April, before Kennedy ended his bid for president as an independent candidate and cast his support for Trump, a dozen environmental groups signed an open letter saying that Kennedy “is not an environmentalist,” calling him a “dangerous conspiracy theorist and science denier” who makes “empty promises to clean up our environment with superficial proposals.” The groups included the NRDC, where Kennedy previously worked.

On Monday, members of several dozen health care advocacy groups aligned with the Democratic party convened on a call to strategize how they would oppose Kennedy’s nomination for head of HHS. On the call, the group Protect Our Care announced a “Stop RFK War Room” designed to steer Congressmembers across the political spectrum away from Kennedy.

Meanwhile, major snack food companies and related industry groups have also begun meeting to discuss how they will oppose Kennedy and his MAHA agenda, according to a recent investigation.

Last month, the government relations firm Invariant, which advises food companies on how to shape federal policy, warned clients including McDonald’s that MAHA “had gained increasing momentum among conservative figures who have taken a more vocal interest in the way food is produced and regulated,” according to the investigation.

(Featured image via mahanow.org.)