Donald Trump announced that he’s chosen vaccine denialist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of Health and Human Services, Trump said on social media Thursday afternoon. 

“I am thrilled to announce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as The United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). For too long, 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,” Trump wrote. “The Safety and Health of all Americans is the most important role of any Administration, and HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country. Mr. Kennedy will restore these 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 ended his independent presidential run in August and endorsed Trump, has a long history of embracing conspiracy theories and has been repudiated by his famous family. Among his bizarre theories are that the environment turns children transgender and that vaccines cause autism. He’s also said that HIV does not cause AIDS. It does. 

His campaign was marked by many strange stories. He had been “accumulating negative headlines — an allegation that he groped a former family babysitter (to which he responded to by declaring, ‘I am not a church boy’); a revelation that he used a dead bear he found on a roadside to stage a fake bicycle accident in New York’s Central Park; and a claim by Kennedy that doctors found a parasite in his brain more than a decade ago, among other things,” NBC News reported earlier. He has painted both himself and Trump as victims of the media and the political establishment, and contended that President Joe Biden and now Vice President Kamala Harris have a dictatorial hold on the Democratic Party.

“The American people should be able to trust that our health care system is led by experts who believe in science and want to safeguard the health and wellbeing of the country,” Brandon Wolf, spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement to The Advocate. “Robert F Kennedy Jr. lacks the qualifications and judgment to manage the Department of Health and Human Services. As an anti-vaccine conspiracist and denier of the medical consensus on health care for transgender youth, Kennedy’s views are dangerous and harmful. Donald Trump is desperately trying to stack the federal government with unqualified loyalists and it’s the American people who will suffer as a result. The Senate must reject this nomination.”

Christopher Wiggins contributed reporting.