On Thursday, Trump announced his nomination of former independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services in the new US government. For pharmaceutical companies, this is like a nightmare coming true.
If Kennedy is approved by the Senate to serve as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, he will lead one of the largest departments in the United States, including the Medicare and Medicaid health insurance programs, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some of Kennedy's policy proposals were quite radical. He has been promoting opposition to vaccines since 2005 and publicly stating that there is opaque information about public health within the US government. Although many of his statements have been falsified and criticized by health experts, Kennedy still maintains a tough stance on related issues.
As early as October, Trump promised Kennedy, who had helped him campaign, that if he moved back into the White House, he would allow Kennedy to act "crazily" on health issues.
Kennedy himself stated after Trump announced his victory that he would push to clean up some corrupt public departments, such as the nutrition department under the Food and Drug Administration, which must be completely disbanded.
A disaster?
Kennedy came from a political family, with his father being the late US Attorney General and Democratic Senator Robert Kennedy, and his uncle being former US President John F. Kennedy.
Kennedy himself devoted himself to environmental issues and child welfare at an early age. After his tenure as a US district attorney, he joined and founded multiple social organizations to call on the public and authorities to pay attention to health and wellness. In addition, he gained great fame for winning multiple lawsuits against large corporations regarding pollution.
From this perspective, Kennedy, who is now 70 years old, has considerable experience in public health and is more easily integrated into government affairs than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others previously appointed by Trump.
When Trump announced his appointment, he stressed that for a long time, Americans have been squeezed by industrial food companies and pharmaceutical groups, and stakeholders have cheated, misled and falsified on public health issues. He hoped that Kennedy could clean up corruption within the federal health agencies.
On the other hand, Kennedy's policy goals sparked widespread market anxiety. After Kennedy's nomination was confirmed by Trump, vaccine related pharmaceutical stocks collectively fell in the last hour of trading on Thursday.
Among them, Moderna's stock price closed down more than 5%, Novavax's stock price closed down more than 7%, and Pfizer's stock price fell by more than 2%. Other pharmaceutical companies such as BioNTech in Germany also experienced a decline of over 6%. And these stocks were further sold off after the US stock market closed.
Andrea Ducas, Vice President of Health Policy at the Center for American Progress, an advocacy organization, said that Trump's choice of Kennedy is nothing short of a disaster for the United States. Kennedy's long-term scepticism of medical science may jeopardize the achievements of the United States in public health, especially in the COVID-19 period, when vaccines helped to avoid countless infections and deaths.