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From ‘brilliant’ to ‘aghast’: Reactions to RFK Jr.’s nomination for HHS secretary run the gamut
From LifeSiteNews
By Dr. Brenda Baletti, The Defender
From “brilliant” to “aghast” – President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nomination on Thursday of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., founder of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) triggered a range of reactions among media outlets, public health officials, and Kennedy’s long-time supporters and detractors.
In a statement posted on Truth Social and X, Trump said Kennedy would restore the public health agencies “to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
Kennedy, who promised to fight corruption and end the revolving door between industry and government, thanked Trump for the nomination on social media. He said he would “free the agencies from the smothering cloud of corporate capture so they can pursue their mission to make Americans once again the healthiest people on Earth.”
Kennedy is a longtime critic of how corporate interests have captured the public health agencies meant to regulate them, and of the outsized and corrupt role that Big Pharma plays in American life.
If confirmed, Kennedy would hold the most powerful governmental position in public health, overseeing 80,000 employees across a department that houses 13 agencies and more than 100 programs. Those agencies include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health and the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services.
CHD CEO Mary Holland told The Defender the organization “could not be more pleased” with the nomination, adding:
Kennedy has been devoted to ending the childhood chronic health epidemic for almost 20 years. He has been effective in communicating the failures of our existing public health establishment.
Based on his extensive litigation history, he is uniquely prepared to reform the regulatory institutions, the research institutions, and public education on health. I look forward to seeing dramatic, measurable improvements in Americans’ health during the Trump administration.
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough told Fox News that Kennedy would be “such a contrast” to previous public health leadership. He said Kennedy would focus on data transparency and accountability. “I think we’re going to see a total overhaul of healthcare administration.”
Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said on X that he was “excited by the news,” particularly about Kennedy’s commitment to fighting chemicals in foods, the power of Big Pharma, and to other health priorities.
“I hope he leans into personal choice on vaccines rather than bans (which I think are terrible, just like mandates) but what I’m most optimistic about is taking on big pharma and the corporate ag oligopoly to improve our health,” he added.
Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told Fox News, “I think Robert is another disruptor. We need a disruptor. I will be glad and I’m looking forward to working with him,” Politico reported.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) called Kennedy a “brilliant, courageous truth-teller” and said he could make the “most significant impact on health.”
Vaccine stocks take a dive on news of announcement
On the flip side, some lawmakers and public health leaders expressed alarm, decrying the nomination.
U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) called the choice “f— insane” on X, Fox News reported. “He’s a vaccine denier and a tin foil hat conspiracy theorist. He will destroy our public health infrastructure and our vaccine distribution systems. This is going to cost lives.”
Dr. Richard E. Besser, CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the CDC, said that having Kennedy head up HHS “would pose incredible risks to the health of the nation,” because Kennedy’s critique of the public health agencies was worsening the mistrust lingering after the coronavirus pandemic, The New York Times reported.
Besser told CNN that some of Kennedy’s ideas about chronic health issues regarding children were good ideas, but other ideas were deeply concerning – particularly Kennedy’s proposal that individuals should decide for themselves whether to take a vaccine.
“The idea that receiving childhood vaccines would be a parental choice scares me,” he said.
READ: Canada’s public health agency still working to adopt WHO pandemic treaty: report
Current CDC Director Mandy Cohen raised concerns that Kennedy would use the position to spread misinformation and foster distrust in public health institutions, particularly with respect to vaccines.
Kennedy has called for an end to immunity for vaccine manufacturers for the injuries caused by their products. He points out that no vaccine on the childhood immunization schedule has undergone proper safety and efficacy testing.
He has been a long-term advocate for the tens of thousands of families seeking compensation for their children’s vaccine-induced autism.
Kennedy also promised that, if confirmed, he would make the V-safe vaccine injury data collected but not made public by the CDC transparent, so scientists have access to the data necessary to analyze vaccine safety
Vaccine and Pharma stocks fell sharply this morning, following yesterday’s announcement about Kennedy, Reuters reported.
Bavarian Nordic, which makes the mpox vaccine, was down 16 percent. Its CEO told Reuters he was concerned that Kennedy could fuel vaccine skepticism.
However, he also said that the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic under Trump’s first term made him confident that the incoming administration would continue to fund biodefense.
The Trump administration launched and oversaw Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership to rapidly develop a COVID-19 vaccine that gave vaccine makers hundreds of billions in profits along with total immunity for any harms caused by those investigational vaccines under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act.
Kennedy will be ‘single greatest threat to profits in America’
Republican advisers have cautioned that Kennedy could face a difficult path to confirmation, The Washington Post reported, citing his “past statements on drugs and vaccines, and his many personal entanglements.” FiercePharma said his confirmation process is likely “to be contentious.”
Physician, professor and Substacker Dr. Vinay Prasad wrote that Trump could use a recess appointment to secure Kennedy’s position, but that he will likely need to be confirmed by the Senate where “He has a several hundred billion dollar industry that will do everything possible to stop him.”
“Many of these companies have lobbied throughout Congress,” Prasad added. “They will use those connections. Unlike other controversial appointees, RFK Jr. will be the single greatest threat to profits in America.”
If his appointment goes through, Prasad said Kennedy will face a difficult road in getting his proposed policies enacted, given the entrenched power of Pharma and the power of the media that opposes him.
Law professor Wendy Parmet, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Health Policy and Law, pointed to the potential clash between Kennedy’s anti-industry position and the big-business leanings of the Republican Party.
“We have an administration that promises to deregulate, to be business-friendly, and then we have RFK Jr., who promises to go after fast food,” Parmet told The Washington Post.
READ: Idaho health district votes to stop offering COVID vaccines at its medical centers
Health and health freedom advocates optimistic Kennedy will bring change
Despite the challenges ahead, health advocates are optimistic that changes they have been seeking for decades will come to pass.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, critics of pandemic policies were condemned and marginalized. Kennedy was censored by the Biden administration and social media companies as part of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen” for airing many of those critiques.
Over the course of the election Kennedy – who ran for president as a Democrat, then announced he was running as an independent before suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump – has repeatedly been called a “conspiracy theorist.” Both Kennedy and CHD are routinely dismissed as “anti-vax” for openly discussing the scientific evidence on the link between vaccines and chronic diseases including autism, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder or ADHD and other neuropsychiatric and autoimmune disorders, in some children.
Rather than investigating the science, mainstream media mostly insists these links have been “debunked,” without providing any evidence for their claim.
Kennedy has also called for the removal of fluoride from public drinking water, citing recent studies and a landmark federal court decision that show it interferes with children’s brain development – a concern that has even been flagged by some mainstream public health commentators.
His supporters hope these issues will now receive serious public attention that will lead to policy change.
Holland said on X that Kennedy’s nomination came 38 years to the day after the Vaccine Injury Act that gave vaccine manufacturers immunity from liability was signed into law.
“Let’s rewrite this one,” she said.
It finally happened. Canada received a federal budget earlier this month, after more than a year without one. It’s far from a budget that’s great. It’s far from what many expected and distant from what the country needs. But it still passed.
With the budget vote drama now behind us, there may be space for some general observations beyond the details of the concerning deficits and debt. What kind of budget did Canada get?
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For a government that built its political identity on social-program expansion and moralized spending, Budget 2025 arrives wearing borrowed clothing. It speaks in the language of productivity, infrastructure, and capital formation, the diction of grown-up economics, yet keeps the full spending reflex of the Trudeau era. The result feels like a cabinet trying to change its fiscal costume without changing the character inside it. Time will tell, to be fair, but it feels like more rhetoric, and we have seen this same rhetoric before lead to nothing. So, I remain skeptical of what they say and how they say it.
The government insists it has found a new path, one where public investment leads private growth. That sounds bold. However, it is more a rebranding than a reform. It is a shift in vocabulary, not in discipline.
A comparison with past eras makes this clear.
Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin did not flirt with restraint; they executed it. Their budgets were cut deeply, restored credibility, and revived Canada’s fiscal health when it was most needed. The Chrétien years were unsentimental. Political capital was spent so financial capital could return. Ottawa shrank so the country could grow. Budget 2025 tries to invoke their spirit but not their actions. Nothing in this plan resembles the structural surgery of the mid 1990s.
Stephen Harper, by contrast, treated balanced budgets as policy and principle. Even during the global financial crisis, his government used stimulus as a bridge, not a way of life. It cut taxes widely and consistently, limited public service growth, and placed the long-term burden on restraint rather than rhetoric. Budget 2025 nods toward Harper’s focus on productivity and capital assets, yet it rejects the tax relief and spending controls that made his budgets coherent.
Then there is Justin Trudeau, the high tide of redistribution, vacuous identity politics, and deficit-as-virtue posturing. Ottawa expanded into an ideological planner for everything, including housing, climate, childcare, inclusion portfolios, and every new identity category. Much of that ideological scaffolding consisted of mere words, weakening the principle of equality under the law and encouraging the government to referee culture rather than administer policy.
Budget 2025 is the first hint of retreat from that style. The identity program fireworks are dimmer, though they have not disappeared. The social policy boosterism is quieter. Perhaps fiscal gravity has begun to whisper in the prime minister’s ear.
However, one cannot confuse tone for transformation.
Spending is still vast. Deficits grew. The new fiscal anchor, balancing only the operating budget, is weaker than the one it replaced. The budget relies on the hopeful assumption that Ottawa’s capital spending will attract private investment on a scale that economists politely describe as ambitious.
The housing file illustrates the contradiction. The budget announces new funding for the construction of purpose-built rentals and a larger federal role in modular and subsidized housing builds. These are presented as productivity measures, yet they continue the Trudeau-era instinct to centralize housing policy rather than fix the levers that matter. Permitting delays, zoning rigidity, municipal approvals, and labour shortages continue to slow actual construction. Ottawa spends, but the foundations still cure at the same pace.
Defence spending tells the same story. Budget 2025 offers incremental funding and some procurement gestures, but it avoids the core problem: Canada’s procurement system is broken. Delays stretch across decades. Projects become obsolete before contracts are signed. The system cannot buy a ship, an aircraft, or an armoured vehicle without cost overruns and missed timelines. Spending more through this machinery will waste time and money. It adds motion, not capability.
Most importantly, the structural problems remain untouched: no regulatory reform for major projects, no tax competitiveness agenda, no strategy for shrinking a federal bureaucracy that has grown faster than the economy it governs. Ottawa presides over a low-productivity country but insists that a new accounting framework will solve what decades of overregulation and policy clutter have created. More bluster.
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From an Alberta vantage, the pivot is welcome but inadequate. The economy that pays for Confederation, energy, mining, agriculture, and transportation receives more rhetorical respect in Budget 2025, yet the same regulatory thicket that blocks pipelines and mines remains intact. The government praises capital formation but still undermines the key sectors that generate it.
Budget 2025 tries to walk like Chrétien and talk like Harper while spending like Trudeau. That is not a transformation; it is a costume change. The country needed a budget that prioritized growth rooted in tangible assets and real productivity. What it got instead is a rhetorical turn without the courage to cut, streamline, or reform.
Canada does not require a new budgeting vocabulary. It requires a government willing to govern in the best interest of the country.
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I view the recent announcements by the Government of Canada as window dressing, and not addressing the fundamental issue which is that projects are drowning in bureaucratic red tape and regulatory overburden. We don’t need them picking winners and losers, a fool’s errand in my opinion, but rather make it easier to do business within Canada and stop the hemorrhaging of Foreign Direct Investment from this country.
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Changes are afoot—reportedly, carve-outs and tweaks to federal regulations that would help attract investment in a new oil pipeline from Alberta. But any private proponent to come out of this deal will presumably be handpicked to advance through the narrow Bill C-5 window, aided by one-off fixes and exemptions.
That approach can only move us so far. It doesn’t address the underlying problem.
Anyone in the investment world will tell you a patchwork of adjustments is nowhere near enough to unlock the large-scale energy investment this country needs. And from that investor’s perspective, the horizon stretches far beyond a single political cycle. Even if this government promises clarity today in the much-anticipated memorandum of understanding (MOU), who knows whether it will be around by the time any major proposal actually moves forward.
With all of the talk of “nation-building” projects, I have often been asked what my thoughts are about what we must see from the federal government.
The energy sector is the file the feds have to get right. It is by far the largest component of Canadian exports, with oil accounting for $147 billion in 2024 (20 percent of all exports), and energy as a whole accounting for $227 billion of exports (30 percent of all exports).
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Furthermore, we are home to some of the largest resource reserves in the world, including oil (third-largest in proven reserves) and natural gas (ninth-largest). Canada needs to wholeheartedly embrace that. Natural resource exceptionalism is exactly what Canada is, and we should be proud of it.
One of the most important factors that drives investment is commodity prices. But that is set by market forces.
Beyond that, I have always said that the two most important things one considers before looking at a project are the rule of law and regulatory certainty.
The Liberal government has been obtuse when it comes to whether it will continue the West Coast tanker ban (Bill C-48) or lift it to make way for a pipeline. But nobody will propose a pipeline without the regulatory and legal certainty that they will not be seriously hindered should they propose to build one.
Meanwhile, the proposed emissions cap is something that sets an incredibly negative tone, a sentiment that is the most influential factor in ensuring funds flow. Finally, the Impact Assessment Act, often referred to as the “no more pipelines bill” (Bill C-69), has started to blur the lines between provincial and federal authority.
All three are supposedly on the table for tweaks or carve-outs. But that may not be enough.
It is interesting that Norway—a country that built its wealth on oil and natural gas—has adopted the mantra that as long as oil is a part of the global economy, it will be the last producer standing. It does so while marrying conventional energy with lower-carbon standards. We should be more like Norway.
Rather than constantly speaking down to the sector, the Canadian government should embrace the wealth that this represents and adopt a similar narrative.
The sector isn’t looking for handouts. Rather, it is looking for certainty, and a government proud of the work that they do and is willing to say so to Canada and the rest of the world. Foreign direct investment outflows have been a huge issue for Canada, and one of the bigger drags on our economy.
Almost all of the major project announcements Prime Minister Mark Carney has made to date have been about existing projects, often decades in the making, which are not really “additive” to the economy and are reflective of the regulatory overburden that industry faces en masse.
I have always said governments are about setting the rules of the game, while it is up to businesses to decide whether they wish to participate or to pick up the ball and look elsewhere.
Capital is mobile and will pursue the best risk-adjusted returns it can find. But the flow of capital from our country proves that Canada is viewed as just too risky for investors.
The government’s job is not to try to pick winners and losers. History has shown that governments are horrible at that. Rather, it should create a risk-appropriate environment with stable and capital-attractive rules in place, and then get out of the way and see where the chips fall.
Link to The Hub article: Large-scale energy investments remain a pipe dream
Formerly the head of institutional equity research at FirstEnergy Capital Corp and ATB Capital Markets. I have been involved in the energy sector in either the sell side or corporately for over 25 years
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