Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the bear-fondling, gravel-voiced Camelot scion, is President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where presumably he will “go wild on health,” to quote Trump. His nomination has raised concerns among public-health experts because many of Kennedy’s views on health are, well, wild.

To be sure, among Kennedy’s battier ideas are a few reasonable ones, such as reducing obesity and cracking down on direct-to-consumer drug commercials and conflicts of interest among researchers. But these are eclipsed by some troubling ones, such as the ideas that common cooking oils are poisonous, that fluoride doesn’t belong in tap water, and that childhood vaccines are questionable.

What if Kennedy did, in fact, go wild on health, get his way, and remake America in his own image? If his worst ideas come to pass, experts tell me, heart attacks might increase, dental infections might spike, and children might needlessly die of completely preventable diseases.

[Read: RFK Jr. collects his reward]

Even if he is confirmed as health secretary, Kennedy’s influence on some of these domains might be limited. Most public-health measures—including water fluoridation and vaccines—are a matter for states and localities, not the federal government. (This is why different states had such different COVID-19 responses.) But even so, a Secretary Kennedy would have a prominent perch from which to espouse his ideas, and his position would give him a veneer of credibility that he has not earned. Right-leaning states and judges might listen, and adapt local policies to suit his worldview. At the very least, parents who support Trump and Kennedy might take the administration’s views into account when making decisions for their families.

Let’s begin with seed oils, which keep popping up in Kennedy’s speeches and media clips. (He even mentioned them while suspending his presidential bid.) Kennedy has called seed oils, which include common cooking oils such as canola oil and sunflower oil, “one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods,” and says Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by them.

Kennedy believes that seed oils cause “body-wide inflammation” and disease. But this isn’t true, Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at Stanford, told me. In fact, replacing foods high in saturated fat, such as butter, with those high in unsaturated fat, such as canola oil, has been proven again and again to lower cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of heart disease. To the extent that seed oils are bad, Gardner said, it’s because they often show up in highly processed junk and fast food.

And Kennedy’s solution to this supposed health crisis—to replace seed oils with beef tallow—is troubling. (Several of his seed-oil clips end with a promo of red Kennedy swag that reads MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN.) Whatever you do with seed oil, “don’t replace it with beef tallow,” Gardner said. “That’s friggin’ nuts.” Replacing all the oil you eat with beef fat can cause cholesterol to pile into plaques in your arteries, impeding the flow of blood. “That’s how you get a heart attack,” Gardner said.

Kennedy has also said he wants to remove fluoride from tap water, claiming that the compound is an “industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”

There is some risk associated with excessive fluoride intake: Consuming fluoride above a level of 1.5 milligrams a liter—about twice the level that’s in most fluoridated tap water—has been linked to lowered IQ in children. Fluoridated water can also cause light stains on teeth, which affect about 12 percent of people in the United States.

But researchers say these risks are generally worth it because the consequences of removing fluoride from the water are much worse. Fluoride helps strengthen tooth enamel, and it also fights off the acid that attacks our teeth any time we eat carbohydrates. If the teeth lose this battle, decay can set in—and if the decay goes untreated, it can cause excruciating pain and, in extreme cases, pus-filled abscesses. “There will certainly be an increase in dental decay if fluoride is removed from the drinking water,” Gary Slade, a dentistry professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Slade found in a study that fluoride in drinking water reduces decay by 30 percent in baby teeth and 12 percent in permanent teeth.

Some cities and countries have removed fluoride from the water, and kids’ dental health suffered as a result. After Israel ceased water fluoridation in 2014, dental treatments in a clinic in Tel Aviv increased twofold across all ages. In Canada, after Calgary ceased water fluoridation in 2011, second graders there experienced more cavities than those in Edmonton, where water was still fluoridated. After Juneau, Alaska, ceased water fluoridation in 2007, children younger than 6 underwent more cavity-related dental procedures—at a cost of about $300 more a year per child. Some cities have even reintroduced fluoride into the water supply after noticing an uptick in tooth decay among children.

Kennedy is perhaps most infamous for his skepticism of vaccines, and this is also likely the issue where his views are most consequential and worrisome. Although Kennedy sometimes shies away from calling himself anti-vaccine, he is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense and once wrote a (now-retracted) magazine story on the (false) link between vaccines and autism. He’s called vaccines “a holocaust” and has claimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” A co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team has said that Kennedy would be given access to federal health data in order to assess the safety of vaccines.

Though school vaccine requirements are determined by states, a prominent national-health figure casting doubt on vaccines’ safety can influence both state policy and individual parents’ decisions to vaccinate. If vaccination rates do drop, among the diseases that health experts worry will return is measles, the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases.

A person infected with measles is most contagious right before they develop symptoms. They can infect others simply by sharing their air space; tiny droplets infected with measles can hang in the air for two hours “like a ghost,” Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me.

Kids with measles are sick and miserable. They’re photophobic—afraid of the light—and may struggle to breathe. Before the measles vaccine came along in 1963, 48,000 people were hospitalized with measles each year in America, many with pneumonia or inflammation of the brain. Five hundred of them died each year. When Samoa suffered a measles outbreak in 2019, 83 people died, out of a population of just 200,000.

Measles can also weaken the immune system, Matthew Ferrari, a biology professor at Penn State, told me. For two to three years after contracting measles, you’re likely to be hit harder by flu and other viruses. In rare cases, measles can cause a chronic form of brain inflammation that leads to a gradual loss of mental faculties and motor skills, and eventually, death.

[John Hendrickson: The first MAGA Democrat]

Measles is such a menace, in fact, that giving people “a choice” about whether to vaccinate their kids, as Kennedy often suggests, is not sufficient. People who have received two doses of the MMR vaccine are 97 percent protected against measles. But about 9 million people, including kids who are undergoing chemotherapy or who are on some kinds of immunosuppressants, can’t get vaccinated. These individuals rely on herd immunity from other vaccinated people, and when more than 5 percent of people choose not to be vaccinated, herd immunity suffers.

“Is it your right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection? No, it’s not,” Offit said. “You are part of this society, and you have to recognize that what you do affects other people.” Offit told me he’s already talked with pediatricians who say parents are hesitant to get their children vaccinated because of what they’ve heard Kennedy say.

Of course, there is a way to prevent Kennedy from having this much influence over public health: The Senate could reject his nomination. But that would require Republicans to stand up to Trump, which is a wild idea in itself.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s movement has repeatedly been written off as a farce, a stunt, a distraction. Now Donald Trump has nominated him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where, if confirmed, he’ll oversee a life-and-death corner of the federal government.

RFK Jr.’s operation had been building toward this moment for months. On August 23, Kennedy suspended his independent presidential bid and endorsed Trump after what he described as “a series of long, intense discussions” that proved the two were ideologically aligned. Almost immediately, the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement was born, as was a super PAC of the same name.

The group’s near-term goal was simple: persuade Kennedy’s coalition to vote for Trump. His former national field director, Jeff Hutt, became one of the MAHA PAC’s leaders, and throughout the fall, in his phone calls and meetings with Kennedy supporters, he kept hearing the same message: If RFK Jr. couldn’t become president, he should zero in on health reforms.

[John Hendrickson: The first MAGA Democrat]

“HHS is the place where they wanted Mr. Kennedy to be,” Hutt told me last night. He fully expects Kennedy to be confirmed. Hutt and his team have set up a “war room” and are identifying which senators will support the HHS nomination, and which will need coaxing. Either through standard procedure or via a recess appointment (an idea Trump has teased), Hutt said he was confident that Kennedy will land the job.

Kennedy was offered such a significant position—and will have such a “big rein,” as Hutt put it—because Trump returns favors. In 2016, Trump courted Christian voters by dangling the prospect of appointing conservative judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade. This year, Trump spent the final months of the election wooing the MAHA bros. How many Kennedy supporters actually voted for Trump is unclear, but Hutt and others I spoke with believe that Trump’s victory is partially on account of the RFK Jr. brigade showing up. “He got behind them, and he got elected,” Hutt said of Trump.

Kennedy’s acolytes are elated that he will have such a prominent position in the administration. In my conversations with former Kennedy volunteers and others in his orbit this week, I heard some skepticism as to whether he’ll actually be able to accomplish a revolution inside a sprawling government bureaucracy. But for now, Kennedy’s champions are hopeful that he’ll catalyze policy changes that would lead to a “healthier” society—even if they don’t all agree on what that means.

In late September, at a festival of “free thinkers” in Washington, D.C., where RFK Jr. was the star attraction, Mike Patton, a former campaign volunteer who lives in Florida, told me he was unsure about whether he could bring himself to vote for Trump after all the work he’d done for Kennedy.

This week, Patton told me that, in the end, he and his wife each wrote in Kennedy’s name on their ballot. He is happy that Kennedy is ascending to a place of power, and excited that Trump has promised to give Kennedy authority over health matters, but he’s dismayed that Trump apparently wants to keep him away from areas involving fossil fuels and renewable energy. Patton isn’t sure what Kennedy might be able to accomplish within Trump’s administration. The idea of fighting all manner of chronic diseases with cleaner food and water is a pillar of the MAHA movement. But this will be an uphill battle. “Even when he was campaigning, he was saying he was going to make a drastic reduction in chronic disease in his four years, and I can’t wrap my head around how you can make a measurable difference [that quickly],” Patton told me. “But he seems confident, and Bobby seemed confident before. So, pop some popcorn.”

Another Kennedy supporter, Jennifer Swayne, who served as his campaign’s Florida volunteer coordinator, told me she somewhat reluctantly voted for Trump. Swayne is the mother of a child with autism, and she believes that mothers like herself are searching for answers—that’s partly what drew her to Kennedy. “We want to know what's causing this,” she said of autism. “We want to prevent other moms from having to go through this.” She said she would define success for Kennedy’s HHS tenure as removing “dangerous products off the market” and holding drug manufacturers accountable for adverse effects and chemical dependency.

[Yasmin Tayag: ‘Make America healthy again’ sounds good until you start asking questions]

When I asked Hutt how he’d gauge Kennedy’s success, he had a range of ideas. “The amount of money flowing through government into corporations would be dramatically reduced. Government would be out of a lot of things, like health care. We would take the middleman out of a lot of things. We would have government agencies whose sole purpose is to publish and report facts and numbers in ways that educate the American people, not to convince them one way or the other of something,” he said. He envisioned Kennedy ushering in an era of more family farms, of citizens gardening and growing their own food. “I guess that's really what it looks like: sort of a health revolution, in a sense,” he said. “Nobody’s ever asked me that question before.”

In announcing the nomination, Trump echoed Kennedy’s core campaign messaging: “Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health.” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and one of the key people behind Project 2025, said in a statement that Kennedy’s nomination “sends a clear message to our failed public health establishment,” and that under Trump and Kennedy, “Americans will be in control of their health, not the commissars of three-letter health agencies.”

Many questions surround the HHS nomination, none more significant than whether Kennedy would use his authority to block or recall certain vaccines. Kennedy has spent years sowing doubt about their safety. In the early 2000s, he helped popularize the unproven theory of a link between vaccines and autism. More recently, he was an influential opponent of the COVID vaccines and accompanying mandates. Now he’s poised to inform drug policy at the highest level.

Kennedy’s spokesperson did not respond to my request for comment last night as to whether, as HHS secretary, RFK Jr. would move to outlaw any existing vaccines, and referred me to his victory-lap post on X, which did not mention the topic. Tony Lyons, who founded a different Kennedy super PAC, American Values 2024, said in a text message: “Bobby has said very clearly that he’s not going to take away anyone’s vaccines.” If, hypothetically, we faced another pandemic during Trump’s second term, I asked Lyons, would Kennedy stand in the way of a vaccine-development project such as Operation Warp Speed? Lyons didn’t offer a clear answer. “[Kennedy] believes in robust, transparent and independent science, rather than corporate science propped up by censorship and propaganda,” he wrote.

In my conversations with Kennedy’s supporters, I heard a lot about “medical freedom” and “personal choice,” but no one mentioned the word ban. Kennedy stiff-arms the “anti-vax” label, and his allies steadfastly maintain that he’ll use his position to scrutinize vaccine science—but not to institute a vaccine moratorium for the greater population.

[Benjamin Mazer: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

Perhaps the clearest way to understand Kennedy’s HHS aim is to listen to his musings on “corporate capture”: the idea that government agencies are overly influenced by the companies within the industries they’re supposed to be regulating. This is a long-standing liberal complaint, which Kennedy has built up to the status of a conspiracy theory. (Anthony Fauci, for instance, has not personally profited off of vaccines, as Kennedy has claimed.) His top-line goal is to sever the relationships between corporations and the federal government, but he has yet to explicitly state how he’ll do that. Reforming fast food may be his biggest source of tension with Trump. The future 47th president didn’t just serve fries at a (closed) McDonald’s as a campaign stunt; he seems to genuinely love Mickey D’s, while Kennedy sees it as a scourge—the antithesis of MAHA. But that’s just one company. Hutt conceded that his team faces a challenge in persuading senators from agricultural-heavy states to support the sort of reforms Kennedy is promising: fewer food chemicals, an emphasis on regenerative soil.

And some of what Kennedy speaks of accomplishing is well beyond his reach. For instance, he has called for removing fluoride from our drinking water—something even Republican dentists oppose. But such a change could occur only at the local level, not the federal level. In New York City, for example, Mayor Eric Adams has said he will follow the fluoridation recommendations of city and state health departments.

As Trump prepares to take office again, Kennedy remains a confounding presence: He’s a dreamer, but he’s destructive. Kennedy was never going to win the White House, but he’s now, at last, on his way to Washington. And we all have to live with it.

Photographs by Zack Wittman

On Tuesday, as Americans across the country headed to the polls, a few dozen members of the MAGA faithful flocked to the road outside Mar-a-Lago, where they spent the day tailgating, dancing, and praying for Donald Trump’s restoration to the White House.

This was a pilgrimage for some of Trump’s most loyal supporters. Many hailed from Florida, but others had traveled from as far as California to be there, Zack Wittman, who photographed the scene for The Atlantic, told me. They wore their enthusiasm for Trump proudly, and literally: Almost everyone sported some kind of MAGA apparel. Among the regalia on display were shirts featuring Trump’s mug shot, a leather vest with a Trump Save America patch, and an FJB necklace. (Suffice it to say, the JB stands for Joe Biden.)

As the polls closed, the crowd gathered in front of the TV and said a prayer for Trump’s electoral chances. They became more somber as they waited for the returns to trickle in. The swing states were initially too close to call, and some attendees groaned about electoral fraud, Wittman told me. They wanted a victory that was “too big to rig,” they said. As the hours passed, their wish began to materialize. By the middle of the night, the preliminary results pointed clearly to a Trump victory. At the Palm Beach County Convention Center, where Trump would deliver his victory speech, people hoped to catch a glimpse of the motorcade or even the man himself. The surrounding area became a site for celebration. People hugged, cheered, and danced in the rain. They spoke of “taking the country back” and their glee at how unhappy Nancy Pelosi would be, Wittman said.

The movement surrounding Trump has always contained an element of ecstatic joy. The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson recently noted the “carnival-type atmosphere” in the crowds at Trump’s rallies, where attendees seemed to have a powerful sense that they were part of something bigger than themselves. Throughout the campaign, however, Trump supporters’ happiness could not be total. If they took Trump’s dark, angry rhetoric at face value, then the country was failing, under attack from within. The government was out to get them. Under those circumstances, they couldn’t be too thrilled about the state of things.

Until Tuesday. For one night, at least, the anger and paranoia were gone. Only the joy remained.