‘Give Them Some Space’: WHO Director General On Trump Nomination Of RFK Jr As US Health Secretary

WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebryesus urged a ‘wait and see’ attitude Tuesday in his first public comments on US President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr as Secretary of Health and Human Services – despite a flurry of fresh criticism by 77 Nobel Laureates over the controversial appointment.

“It’s a transition time for the new US government, give them some space so that they can prepare for the transition. and I hope and believe that they will do their best,” said Tedros, at an end-year briefing with the Geneva UN Press Association (ACANU), that also reflected on the successes and setbacks seen by WHO over the past year – as well as the challenges ahead. 

“The United States has been a good model of partnership, and has been partnering for many years,” Tedros said – shrugging off the bitter criticism levelled by Trump at WHO during the COVID pandemic, when he also tried to pull the US out of the global health agency. 

The WHO Director General also expressed hopes that the new US administration would still back a WHO pandemic accord, which he said could be completed by member states in their next session in February 2025 and approved at the next World Health Assembly, in May.

This despite sharp criticism by conservative pundits in the US and elsewhere about how an accord might impinge on US ‘sovereignty’ – something Tedros and other senior WHO legal officials have rejected over and again. 

More immediately, there are mounting concerns that WHO member states negotiating a deal won’t manage to agree on the last thorny issues that have eluded consensus so far – notably a  formula for more equitable distribution of vaccines and medicines between richer and poorer nations. See related story:

No Pandemic Agreement This Year – And Doubt About Feasibility of May 2025 Deadline

“I still believe that there is very broad support for the pandemic agreement.  I hope that they [WHO member states] will finalize it by the set date,” Tedros told reporters, referring to the May 2025 target date set by the World Health Assembly for approval of a draft agreement.  “I hope they will honour that commitment they already have. And as I said earlier, we are still vulnerable. 

“I believe that the US leaders understand that the US cannot be safe unless the rest of the world is safe,” he added, with regards to the global threat that local outbreaks of deadly pathogens can pose. 

He cited repeated outbreaks of Ebola, and more recently mpox, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as contemporary examples of remote settings where WHO and its partners have acted to head off the spread of deadly disease threats with a combination of new diagnostics, surveillance and vaccination of at-risk groups. 

Vaccine skepticism causes uproar over Kennedy’s nomination

Tedros spoke on the same day that the 9 December letter by 77 Nobel Laureates in medicine, chemistry, physics and economics was first published by the New York Times, calling on US Senators to reject Kennedy’s nomination as HHS Secretary.  

“In addition to his lack of credentials or relevant experience in medicine, science , public health, or administration, Mr. Kennedy has been an opponent of many health – protecting and life-saving vaccines, such as those that prevent measles and polio; a critic of the well-established positive effects of fluoridation of drinking water; a promoter of conspiracy theories about remarkably successful treatments for AIDS and other diseases; and a belligerent critic of respected agencies (especially the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institutes of Health),” the scientists wrote. 

“In view of his record, placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors,” the Nobel laureates concluded. The US Senate, which has a narrow Republic majority, must confirm Trump’s nomination of Kennedy following the president-elect’s inauguration on 20 January 2025.

Trump team rejects Laureate’s appeal as ‘elites telling them what to do’ 

In response to the Laureates’ appeal, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team said: “Americans are sick and tired of the elites telling them what to do and how to do it. Our healthcare system in this country is broken, Mr. Kennedy will enact President Trump’s agenda to restore the integrity of our healthcare and Make America Healthy Again.”

Meanwhile, in a wide-ranging interview with NBC TV, Trump suggested that his pick for HHS Secretary might indeed re-open investigations into a long-debunked theory about a linkage between vaccines and autism,  which Kennedy has at times championed. 

“I think somebody has to find out,” Trump said in an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker in “Meet the Press”, adding that “if you go back 25 years ago, you had very little autism. Now you have it.”

Childhood vaccines prevent about 4 million deaths a year 

Welker challenged Trump with data showing that childhood vaccines save several million lives worldwide every year, while increases in autism diagnoses are attributable to increased screening and awareness – not vaccines.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one out of every 36 children in the US was diagnosed with autism in 2020, compared with one in 150 in 2000.

During the COVID pandemic, Kennedy led a worldwide anti-vaxer movement against SARS-CoV2 vaccines. Along with his organization, Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy has also advocated in the past against other routine childhood vaccines, saying in a 2023 Fox News interview: “I do believe that autism does come from vaccines.” 

“We should have the same kind of testing place or control trials that we have for every other medication,” Kennedy said at the time, claiming that “vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing control trials, so that there’s no way that anybody can tell the risk profile of those products, or even the relative benefits of those products before they’re mandated. We should have that kind of testing.”

In fact, all major childhood vaccines undergo extensive pre- and post-licensing trials for safety as well as for efficacy, prior to regulatory licensing. 

In 1998, a British doctor first claimed a link between autism and childhood vaccines, particularly the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR). His research was subsequently retracted, and he was later banned from practicing medicine in the United Kingdom. 

Finding common ground 

Despite the obvious concerns over Kennedy’s position on the vital role vaccines play in  preventing infectious diseases, WHO officials are also clearly looking for entry points where they might be able to build bridges with the new HHS Secretary, should his appointment be confirmed. 

And they don’t have to look very far.

Kennedy Jr. also has been outspoken about the epidemic of non-communicable (aka chronic) diseases faced by Americans – and the need for more emphasis on prevention with healthier diets, environments and active lifestyles – capped by social media posts of the 69-year old showing off his muscles in a workout.

Trump’s health czar pick RFK Jr. shows off his muscles in shirtless workout: ‘Practicing for my confirmation hearing’ pic.twitter.com/Xr45ubGAGo

— New York Post (@nypost) December 2, 2024

But in fact, these are also increasingly high priorities in WHO’s strategic work  – particularly in a year when the United Nations High Level Meeting on Noncommunicable Diseases will be a featured event at the UN General Assemblies September 2025 meeting.  

Over the past two decades, the agency has also locked horns with increasing frequency with powerful food industry interests on WHO guidance about reducing sugar intake, sugary drinks, transfats, processed meats, and other unhealthy foods – not to mention contaminants in food, air and water supplies.  

“We need to always look for what we have in common. What can we do together? Where do we agree?” said Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO Health Emergencies, at the briefing. 

“And if you’re looking at things like healthier lifestyles, health promotion, the reduction of toxins in food or in the environment, that’s common ground. There’s no question that that’s common ground. And there’s a huge agenda there to be worked on.

“I think we can choose to differ on many things, and sometimes we do have ideological differences. But Tedros often uses the example that we managed globally to eradicate smallpox at the height of the Cold War. 

“So if there ever is a reason to find common ground, [it is] now …when over half the world’s population lacks access to proper healthcare. We have a mental health crisis. We have a nutritional crisis. We have non-communicable disease crisis. 

“We have hundreds of millions of people slipping into fragility and conflict. If there ever was a reason to pull together to find common ground rather than the grounds for conflict, we have those problems now.”

‘No one has the right to take a life’

Saving both individual’s and societies high healthcare costs is yet another reason why national health systems need to “move towards prevention,” Ryan suggested. 

 “No one has a right to take a life,” he observed, commenting on the 4 December murder of a senior health insurance executive in New York City, in an apparent rage attack against the US health insurance industry. 

“But right now, becoming unwell can be both catastrophic to your health, catastrophic to your future, your children’s future.” Ryan added.  “There is a lot more financial hardship associated with people having to directly pay for healthcare when they’re not insured or they’re not part of a national insurance programme, … and that’s happening in many, many countries.

“We need to move towards …a health system that is more focused on keeping people healthy, and less focused on treating disease, reducing what we’re exposed to, in terms of protecting the health of our people, protecting them from what’s out there in the environment, protecting them from anything that was unsafe within our food or farms,” Ryan stressed. 

“Each sovereign country decides how it designed its health system. WHO’s concern is to ensure that every person has a right and access to health. WHO’s concern is that every individual has access to the same level of health care, and that we don’t see inequities in that health care is distributed within the society.”

Image Credits: Sarah le Guen/ Unsplash, NBC, WHO.