If Trump's aim is to make each of his cabinet picks more controversial than the last - he's succeeding

First came Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host as defence secretary. Then Tulsi Gabbard, an apparent Vladimir Putin and Bashar al Assad sympathiser as intelligence chief.

Then came Matt Gaetz, under active investigation for allegedly sex trafficking a 17-year-old, as attorney general, the most powerful lawyer in the United States.

Thursday afternoon brought the nomination of Robert F Kennedy Junior, arguably the most prolific peddler of anti-vax conspiracy theories in the nation, as health secretary.

Not a shock, perhaps, given what had gone before. But in terms of upsetting the apple cart, it’s right there.

Kennedy is best known in the UK for being the son of Robert Kennedy, part of the great Kennedy political dynasty.

But on this side of the Atlantic, he’s gained a reputation for promoting baseless theories about vaccines being dangerous.

“I do believe no vaccine is safe and effective,” he said, while also linking childhood vaccines and autism.

Decades of research by the medical and scientific community has found no link between vaccines and autism.

In January 2022, I attended a rally headlined by Robert F Kennedy Junior in Washington DC. It took place on the stairs of the Lincoln monument.

Thousands of people, very few of them wearing masks even though the US was in the grips of the pandemic, packed together and listened to him speak.

He likened vaccine policies in the US to the actions of a totalitarian state, even suggesting Anne Frank was in a better situation when she was hiding from the Nazis.

The week before I had been to a hospital in Florida, inside an intensive care unit where the nurses told me that up to 99% of the COVID-19 patients hooked up to ventilators and struggling to breathe were unvaccinated.

I asked Kennedy about this. He said he doubted whether it was true.

I also asked if he was enriching himself as a result of the pandemic. He denied it.

He then said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the official US health protection agency, is a “sock puppet for Moderna and Pfizer” which “manipulates data” on COVID vaccines.

If he is confirmed, he would effectively be in charge of the CDC.

People on both sides of the political aisle are expressing shock at Kennedy’s nomination.

Some wonder whether he will defund research for infectious diseases, which could make it one of Trump’s most impactful and potentially dangerous decisions.

One thing is certain, and that is Trump rewarding loyalty.

After abandoning his own presidential campaign, Kennedy spent a huge amount of time and energy advocating for Trump in the final two-and-a-half months of the campaign.

“Promises made, promises kept,” Donald Trump Jr wrote on social media alongside a montage of photographs of himself and Kennedy.

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Kennedy will perhaps be the most difficult of president-elect Trump’s picks to get past the nomination process because notions of vaccines being dangerous is personal.

Some senators and their own families will have been touched by diseases which have vaccines.

Former senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, nearly died as a child from polio, a disease that has largely been eradicated in the USA due to vaccines.

As one observer pointed out – he and his colleagues will now vote to make an anti-vaxxer the top health official in the United States.

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