To look at the short list of names Donald Trump is hoping to appoint to the country’s leading public health roles, it’s easy to see that Covid-19 has remade the country and its ideological arrangements — but perhaps especially the Republican Party. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, is the most conspicuous example — a reflexive anti-establishment agitator who has trafficked in conspiracy theories about the origins of AIDS, 5G and especially the dangers of common vaccines. Kennedy has called the Covid vaccines, which have probably saved more than 20 million lives globally, “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” and as recently as during his own presidential campaign, he suggested that the coronavirus might be an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon that preferentially spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. But the others named for top public health posts, though not transparent cranks, are also Covid contrarians whose most important qualification for these positions are their crusades against the public health establishment during the pandemic period: Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, and Johns Hopkins’s Marty Makary to run the Food and Drug Administration. Dave Weldon, Trump’s pick to oversee the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was a vocal vaccine skeptic long before the pandemic.

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Persons: Donald Trump, Robert F, Kennedy Jr, Kennedy, Barack Obama, Trump, Jay Bhattacharya, Johns Hopkins’s Marty Makary, Dave Weldon, Trump’s Organizations: Republican Party, Department of Health, Human Services, Environmental Protection Agency, National Institutes of Health, and Drug Administration, for Disease Control Locations: Trump