Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, amid a “reboot” of his beleaguered campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, on Wednesday said he would consider naming anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration, should he win the White House.
“If you’re president, sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve. Or sic him on CDC,” DeSantis said on the popular “OutKick” podcast.
He added that he probably wouldn’t choose Kennedy, who is himself running for president but as a Democrat challenging incumbent Joe Biden, as a running mate.
Neither the DeSantis campaign nor the Kennedy campaign responded to HuffPost queries.
One prominent Republican DeSantis donor, speaking on condition of anonymity, described his new comments in a single word: “Stupid.”
Kennedy has spent decades making false claims about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, and has become a critic of those developed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, he claimed that the disease was specifically engineered to be less harmful to Chinese and Jewish people.
DeSantis had aggressively pushed COVID vaccines when they first became available to health care workers and the elderly in December 2020, staging dozens of events around Florida. By the following summer, when the supplies had grown to the point where they were available to everyone but the anti-vaccine segment of Republicans had become dominant within the party, DeSantis had stopped pushing them.
Joe Raedle via Getty Images
As a result, Florida’s COVID death rate spiked in late 2021 with the arrival of the virus’s delta variant. The state also earned the distinction of suffering more COVID deaths after vaccines were readily available than before.
Nevertheless, DeSantis has continued to attack the medical and pharmaceutical communities for encouraging the vaccine, pushing laws that make it illegal to mandate vaccines in Florida as a condition of employment and creating a special grand jury to investigate vaccine makers.
DeSantis, who recently won a second term as governor by a landslide margin, entered the presidential race with high expectations among Republicans eager to move beyond coup-attempting, under-criminal-indictment former President Donald Trump. But since an initial surge after his November reelection, DeSantis has seen his polling numbers against Trump plummet, both nationally and in early state surveys.
Over the past two weeks, his campaign has cut nearly half of its staff in an attempt to reduce spending and said it was restructuring to improve its ability to win the Republican nomination and then the presidency.