WV senators noncommittal on Trump health secretary pick, despite false claims

West Virginia’s senators — current and incoming — aren’t objecting to the nomination of Kennedy, despite an outcry of public health advocates fearful that he’ll push junk science atop the 80,000-plus-employee agency with a $1.7 trillion budget that oversees food and drug safety, Medicare and Medicaid, and health care research.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., on Monday didn’t weigh in on Kennedy’s nomination announced Thursday in a statement provided by communications director Kelley Moore, instead observing that “[i]t is the president’s prerogative to nominate [C]abinet secretaries, and he has the right to nominate the team he would like to carry out his agenda.�

Capito promised to “examine each nominee fairly� and that the Senate would quickly consider and confirm the president’s nominees and execute his agenda� under incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.

Spokespeople for Gov. Jim Justice — with the Governor’s Office and his Senate campaign — did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for Sen. Joe Manchin, I-W.Va., said Manchin won’t vote on any of Trump’s nominees due to his retirement at the end of the congressional term.

Presidential cabinet nominees generally are confirmed within weeks of a new president taking office. Justice is slated to take Manchin’s seat upon the new congressional session, starting Jan. 3.

Kennedy’s vaccines claims, other health issues

Kennedy, 70, has been an environmental lawyer and is not a medical professional.

The nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, he has shared false claims about vaccines, saying they cause autism.

Kennedy falsely called COVID-19 vaccines the “deadliest vaccine ever made� in a meeting with Louisiana lawmakers — a claim that PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact-checking website, labeled as “Pants on Fire!�

Kennedy has said he drinks only raw milk — which is milk from cows, sheep, goats or other animals that hasn’t been pasteurized to kill disease-causing pathogens. Raw milk can carry dangerous germs, such as Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, Campylobacter, and others that cause foodborne illnesses, according to the Food and Drug Administration — an agency Kennedy would oversee as HHS secretary.

Heightening the importance of milk pasteurization in recent months has been the detection of highly pathogenic avian influenza — better known as the “bird flu� — causing outbreaks in U.S. dairy cows.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — another agency Kennedy would oversee — has responded to the bird flu outbreaks by recommending that health care providers keep supporting the consumption of only pasteurized milk and dairy products made from pasteurized milk.

Last year, Kennedy claimed at a media event that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted� to spare Chinese people and Ashkenazi Jews — an ancestral group of Jewish people whose ancestors lived in France and central and eastern Europe. There is no evidence that race affects COVID immunity, and health experts have called the theory antisemitic and racist.

Kennedy has linked school shootings to drugs that treat depression, suggesting to X (formerly Twitter) owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a conversation on the X platform last year that such shootings might be attributable to antidepressants.

Justice vetoed vaccine exemptions before RFK pick

During a news briefing Friday, Justice said it would be “premature of me to comment� on Trump’s Cabinet nominations. But the senator-elect offered a blanket defense of Trump’s picks, touting the importance of loyalty.

“His appointment on the surface may look like, well, gosh, why’d he do that? Really, truly, there’s a person out there that’s more qualified,� Justice said. “But he has to have people around him that he can really count on, that are loyal to him and that he can really count on. They’ll make mistakes. But at the end of the day, if he’s got the right team, a team that he can really work with and everything and really work well with, it’ll end up a better, better thing for all of us.�

A Manchin spokesperson said the outgoing senator expects there to be a “thorough nomination process next Congress where every [s]enator has an opportunity to assess each candidate based on their merits.�

Vaccinations became a focal point during the West Virginia Legislature’s most recent regular season earlier this year, culminating in Justice’s veto of a bill that would have exempted private and parochial schools from mandatory vaccination requirements.

Opponents of House Bill 5105 included the West Virginia Nurses Association, the state Association of Nurse Anesthetists and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Justice cited in his veto letter “constant, strong opposition to this legislation� from the state’s medical community. He also noted increases in diseases that had been thwarted by vaccines following “lesser vaccine requirements� in other states.

In April, a month after Justice’s veto, the West Virginia Department of Health confirmed the first case of measles in the state since 2009 in a Monongalia County resident. The person was under-vaccinated and had recent international travel, the department said.

Raw milk was another focal point of the legislative session leading up to the March passage of a law, House Bill 4911, that allowed unpasteurized milk to be sold in West Virginia.

Justice let the bill become law without his signature.

‘Crisis of conservative trust in science’

West Virginia has emerged in recent elections as one of the most reliably Republican states in the nation.

In Pew Research Center survey results released Thursday, a much larger majority of Democrats than Republicans expressed confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests — 88% to 66%.

Four out of every five Democrats viewed research scientists as honest, compared with 52% of Republicans, according to Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank that conducted the survey last month.

Among Democrats, 64% viewed scientists as making judgments based solely on the facts, and 58% thought they are generally better than other people at making policy decisions about scientific issues.

Republicans were much more skeptical, the Pew Research Center said, reporting that 62% said scientists’ judgments are just as likely to be biased as other people’s, with only 28% thinking they generally make better science policy decisions than other people.

Researchers concluded in a 2022 article published in Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, that empirical data indicated a “crisis of conservative trust in science,� noting polls show that American attitudes toward science are highly polarized along political lines.

The article’s authors argued that conservative hostility toward science is rooted in conservative hostility toward government regulation of the marketplace, which morphed in recent decades into conservative hostility to government.

The article noted that by the summer of 2021, barely half of all Americans had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 even though free vaccines were widely available, with public health officials struggling to convince more Americans to get vaccinated.

Capito justifies Trump’s AG and Defense picks

Kennedy isn’t the only controversial selection Trump has made to fill his Cabinet.

Trump has tapped former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to be the nation’s next attorney general, a position from which he would lead the Justice Department that has conducted a sex-trafficking inquiry focused on him.

The sex-trafficking probe began in Trump’s first term under then-Attorney General Bill Barr, centered on allegations that Gaetz paid underage girls and escorts or offered them gifts in exchange for sex.

The House Ethics Committee started reviewing Gaetz in 2021, resuming it after Gaetz announced that the Justice Department had finished a sex-trafficking investigation.

The committee later said its review has included whether Gaetz took part in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, accepted improper gifts and aimed to obstruct government investigations of his conduct. Gaetz has denied the allegations.

Gaetz resigned Wednesday, the same day as Trump announced him as his attorney general nominee. The resignation effectively ended the House Ethics Committee probe, since the committee stops ongoing investigations of lawmakers if they resign from, are expelled from or leave Congress.

In a Thursday interview with Fox News host Neil Cavuto, he asked whether Trump had “invited controversy� by picking Gaetz. Capito suggested that Trump’s nomination of Gaetz is understandable.

“I think that’s what he’s reflecting in a pick that is, sort of, raising eyebrows across the nation in some ways,� Capito said. “I’m not surprised that the president[-elect] picked somebody that’s going to shake it up, particularly at the Department of Justice.�

Since Trump’s 2024 general election win, the Department of Justice has been assessing how to wind down federal criminal cases against Trump to comply with department policy that a sitting president can’t be prosecuted, according to national reports.

Capito has expressed support for other Trump Cabinet nominees, including Fox News Channel host Pete Hegseth to head the Department of Defense and former Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., a fossil fuels proponent, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

Hegseth, a combat veteran, lacks senior military or national security experience. He has lobbied for pardons of U.S. service members accused of war crimes, and opposes combat roles for women.

Capito congratulated Hegseth on his nomination Wednesday in an X post.

“We need strong leadership at [the Department of Defense] to rebuild our military and make sure it is the most lethal fighting force in the world — not a test bed for liberal social policies,� Capito’s account stated. “I look forward to working with him in my role as a defense appropriator to do just that.�

Hegseth paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault to avoid the threat of an allegedly baseless lawsuit, according to Hegseth’s lawyer, The Associated Press reported Sunday.

A majority of senators must vote to support a nominee for the position to be confirmed. Republicans will have at least 52 seats in the 100-member Senate in the upcoming session of Congress.