Public health experts and Democrats are worried the incoming Trump administration will leave public health agencies understaffed and underfunded, which they worry, in turn, will leave them ill-equipped to handle another pandemic.
President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday he picked vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which would give him responsibility for 13 agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. These agencies would be key players in a future pandemic — a prospect experts say is just a matter of time.
“The elephant in the room is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” said Allison Winnike, director of the western region of the Network for Public Health Law. “I worry that we will not have the sort of levels of subject matter expertise leading these agencies that we have in past administrations, or even in the previous Trump administration.”