More than 75 Nobel Prize winners have signed a letter urging senators not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
The letter, obtained by The New York Times, marks the first time in recent memory that Nobel laureates have banded together against a Cabinet choice, according to Richard Roberts, winner of the 1993 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine, who helped draft the letter. The group tries to stay out of politics whenever possible, he said.
But the confirmation of Mr. Kennedy, a staunch critic of mainstream medicine who has been hostile to the scientists and agencies he would oversee, is a threat that the Nobel laureates could not ignore, Dr. Roberts said.
“These political attacks on science are very damaging,” he said. “You have to stand up and protect it.”
The laureates questioned whether Mr. Kennedy, who they said has “a lack of credentials” in medicine, science or administration, was fit to lead the department responsible for protecting public health and funding biomedical research.
“Placing Mr. Kennedy in charge of DHHS would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences,” the letter warned.
If confirmed, Mr. Kennedy’s opposition to well-established public health tools, like vaccines and the fluoridation of drinking water, would pose a risk to the country’s well-being, the letter said.
The laureates decried Mr. Kennedy’s promotion of conspiracy theories. Mr. Kennedy has falsely linked vaccines to autism, rejected established science showing that H.I.V. causes AIDS, and suggested, without evidence, that the coronavirus targeted and spared certain ethnic groups.
The laureates also noted that Mr. Kennedy has been a “belligerent critic” of the agencies that would fall under his purview, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.
Mr. Kennedy has threatened to fire employees of the F.D.A., which he says has waged a “war on public health,” and has promised to replace hundreds of N.I.H. employees the day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
More broadly, he said that vaccine scientists “should be in jail and the key should be thrown away,” according to NBC News.
“The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve — not to threaten — these important and highly respected institutions and their employees,” the letter said.
The Trump transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Seventy-seven laureates — in medicine, chemistry, economics and physics — signed the letter. They included Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who were awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of microRNA, and Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, who won the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences for research on global inequality.
Dr. Harold Varmus, a 1989 Nobel Prize laureate who signed the letter, said that scientific research — which depends on federal funding and helps drive the country’s economic growth — is impossible to disentangle from the political climate.
“Science is dependent on the political structures of this country,” he said. “I don’t think we should be burying our heads in the sand just because we’re scientists.”
For many of the signatories, this is the second political campaign they’ve participated in this year. Dozens of Nobel Prize winners signed an open letter in October endorsing Kamala Harris for president.
Dr. Roberts hoped that this letter will be successful. Even if the letter swayed a small number of senators, he said, it might be enough to block Mr. Kennedy’s appointment.
“Maybe there are some who will read this and think, Well, we really do want to protect the health of our citizens,” he said. “They didn’t elect us so that we could kill them.”
