Nobel Prize winners call on Senate to reject RFK Jr. nomination: report

A group of over 75 Nobel laureates on Monday submitted a letter to the US Senate, according to The New York Times, urging lawmakers to reject President-Elect Donald Trump's Department of Health and Human Services lead nominee: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Per the report, Richard Roberts, who won the 1993 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine said the group of laureates typically shies away from politics, but Kennedy's nomination called for a change in protocol.

Roberts told the Times that the letter "marks the first time in recent memory that Nobel laureates have banded together against" a president-elect's Cabinet pick.

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"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 reads.

"The leader of DHHS should continue to nurture and improve — not to threaten — these important and highly respected institutions and their employees," it continued.

When Kennedy was nominated last month, Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law director Lawrence Gostin told TIME, "I can’t think of a darker day for public health and science itself than the election of Donald Trump and the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health."

He added, "To say that RFK Jr. is unqualified is a considerable understatement. The minimum qualification for being the head of the Department of Health and Human Services is fidelity to science and scientific evidence, and he spent his entire career fomenting distrust in public health and undermining science at every step of the way."

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The New York Times' full report is available at this link (subscription required).