MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace and former Obama administration official Kavita Patel on Thursday bemoaned the nomination of former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services.

President-elect Donald Trump announced on Thursday afternoon that Kennedy would be his nominee for the cabinet post. Patel revealed she was receiving texts from Republicans and Democrats expressing disbelief at the nomination.

“My texts are flying off the chain, Democrats and Republicans saying, ‘This can’t be real. Someone must have gotten this wrong. This can’t be possible,’” Patel said to Wallace. “And now the second underlying chain, there’s some silver lining, the second thought I had was ‘He can’t get confirmed, can he?’ But I’m listening to you speak about the DNI and other roles that require some sort of White House confirmation, some combination, and here we are.”

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“It is really hard to believe there are career staff texting me saying this was just the push they needed to try to get out,” Patel continued. “They were already on the fence and worried. We’re not just going to see this incredible kind of integration of ideology that has no science behind it, but, Nicolle, we’re going to see the best of the best career staff leave.”

Kennedy announced he was suspending his presidential campaign on Aug. 23, endorsing Trump, who said Kennedy would have a “big role” in his administration.

“So the Secretary of Health and Human Services, as you mentioned, has a purview over many agencies that touch our lives. You touched on a couple of them, Food and Drug Administration, the CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, you may know these matters as we talked about vaccines during Covid, it touches everything,” Patel said. “Our food supply chain, I’ll give you an example, we had a supply chain shortage of baby formula. This hits a lot of people at home because none of the shelves could keep the formula stocked. The HHS secretary kind of pulled it all together and worked with other departments to try to make sure that we could get Americans formula to feed their children.”

“Add into that, just all the research, think of the National Institutes of Health, Nicolle, that’s also under HHS, research on drug development, and I actually pulled out just to remind myself, a tweet from RFK Jr. when running for president, where he says that if he were president, I guess thank goodness he’s not, he would stop research on drug development on infectious diseases for eight years,” Patel said.

Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, has been banned by Instagram for posting about his views on vaccines, which the social media site labeled “misinformation.” ABC News also censored his views during an April 27, 2023 interview.

“RFK has criticized childhood vaccination schedules, linked them to autism and other health issues against studies,” Wallace said. “CDC Director Rochelle Walensky warned in 2022 that vaccine misinformation is one of the biggest threats to children’s health.”

“In the sort of pickled community of anti-vax disinformation, there are people that refuse vaccines and there are outbreaks of polio and measles in this country, diseases that were once thought eradicated,” Wallace said.

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