Guardian

Seventy-seven prize winners sign letter arguing Trump’s DHHS pick will put US public health ‘in jeopardy’

Seventy-seven Nobel laureates have signed a letter urging the US Senate to reject Robert F Kennedy Jr as Donald Trump’s nominee for health and human services secretary, arguing that he is unfit and would put American public health “in jeopardy”.

It is believed to be the first time in living memory that Nobel prize winners have united against a presidential cabinet pick, and comes against a backdrop of Kennedy’s public support for discredited theories, including a claim that childhood vaccines cause autism.

In their letter, prize winners in the fields of medicine, chemistry, physics and economics castigate Kennedy for a “lack of credentials” and point out that he has been “a belligerent critic” of some of the agencies that he would oversee, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).