by Rob Wasinger
RFK Jr.'s HHS nomination faces fierce Big Pharma opposition, but GOP grassroots support for MAHA reform may override Senate lobbying efforts to block his confirmation.
“There’s going to be pushback,” said Donald Trump Jr. after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was tapped as his choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services. “There’s going to be a lot of money spent. It will all be artificial, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have to deal with it because that’s how Washington, DC works.”
The president’s son was referring to the massive lobbying effort, in which “Big Pharma is going to spend money like you wouldn’t believe,” to prevent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from becoming Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The effects of the pharmaceutical industry’s well-funded campaign were already apparent from the tone of last week’s confirmation hearings. The objective is clear: peel away just enough Republican senators to keep Kennedy from taking control at HHS and implementing a Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda that represents an existential threat to the health establishment status quo.
Big Pharma, Big Food, and Big Ag and their lobbyists on K Street are dead set on preserving that lucrative status quo at all costs. It is a measure of President Trump’s bold audacity this time around that he gives less consideration to offending Big Pharma and the ire of their lobbyists than he does to the intensity of his own voters’ desire for sweeping reforms. Not only would RFK Jr. potentially slam shut the revolving-door capture of government agencies by the very industries they ostensibly regulate, but he also knows where the bodies are buried. The potential exposure of the corrupt process by which “science” has been invoked as a magic mantra to undermine public health in the name of protecting it is rightly regarded by the existing players as a catastrophic threat.
The Senate GOP presents K Street with a target-rich environment. The pharmaceutical and health-device manufacturing industries alone have spent upwards of $400 million in just the year 2024 lobbying Congress (about twice as much as a decade ago), and industry contributions to individual Republican Senators will likely exceed $5 million in this cycle. A recent analysis from The National Pulse showed Senators on the Finance Committee, which will first assess the Kennedy nomination, received more than $6.7 million in contributions from Big Pharma between 2019 and 2024, with the majority going to committee Republicans. And, as Kennedy pointed out, Democratic Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were among the top lifetime recipients of Big Pharma money on the other side of the aisle. In applying the screws to deny Kennedy’s confirmation, those industries—as well as Big Food and Big Agra—will be wanting to cash in their chips and get a return on their long-term investment.
The strategy to discredit Kennedy coming from the health establishment claims that RFK Jr. is a “conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic” who supports “dubious and unproven therapies,” and if Trump follows his dangerous agenda, “preventable diseases like measles and polio could make a comeback.” The same rhetoric was echoed in this week’s hearings, and not only by those on the Democratic side of the aisle. Republican HELP Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA) essentially conducted a struggle session with Kennedy, pressing him to renounce any skepticism he has expressed about vaccine efficacy and safety, and insisted that the scientific data is already conclusive on these matters, despite the egregious conflicts of interest that Kennedy and others have pointed to in the vaccine approval process.
The well-funded campaign to kill the Kennedy nomination will be difficult to pull off because of the public’s disillusionment with the health establishment as a result of the COVID debacle and because RFK Jr. won a mandate in the sweeping electoral victory that is arguably second only to Trump—who himself campaigned explicitly on the MAHA agenda. It is hard for GOP politicians to openly argue that sweeping reform of a corrupt health establishment and removing conflicts of interest is not an enormously popular idea after Kennedy delivered the MAHA coalition that may have tipped the balance. So pharma-backed senators are taking the line that while the goals of the MAHA movement are laudable, Kennedy must responsibly use his considerable public influence to reassure the public about the “settled science” showing vaccine safety and efficacy. Possible GOP defectors have been given cover by the institutionalist Right at the Wall Street Journal and National Review, who have joined in the campaign to smear Kennedy as a leftist quack and a fraud.
That will be a tough sell with so many credentialed figures in the health establishment itself who agree that sweeping reform is long past due, including Trump’s nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary; his choice to lead the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya; and Trump’s own former Director of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Robert Redfield. They are in complete agreement not only with the aims of MAHA but also with Kennedy’s stated aim of ending the DC revolving door culture in which nine out of 10 FDA commissioners went on to work for Big Pharma companies, and approximately 75 percent of the FDA’s budget for drug review comes from the pharmaceutical industry.
Indeed, Cassidy evidently heard from his constituents on the matter as the HELP committee chairman voted RFK Jr. out of committee (after a floor speech assuring his pharma backers that he had secured a series of promises from Kennedy not to act precipitously against the existing vaccine schedule without close consultation with his office). While that may have been simple window dressing for his yea vote, RFK Jr. is not yet out of the woods: any number of GOP senators might be convinced by pro-Pharma colleagues to take the constituent heat with an unexpected no vote to deny him the appointment.
But odds are that won’t happen, given the popular support for the MAHA agenda from the GOP grassroots. Now that so many Americans in the post-COVID era have awoken to the reality of this corruption, the tried and true tactic of attempting to marginalize reformers like Kennedy by claiming that they contradict the findings of “settled science” no longer retains its former power. The curtain has been pulled back. The vote to confirm RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary is now merely a question of whether the special interests arrayed against the express will of the people still control the U.S. Senate.
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Rob Wasinger is co-founder of The Ragnar Group. He was director
of Senate relations for the Trump transition team in 2016 and the first
White House liaison at the State Department during the Trump
administration.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/10/big-pharmas-armageddon-battle/
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