Former vice president Mike Pence on Wednesday promised to appoint only pro-life individuals to lead federal public-health agencies. This was clearly a rebuke of his rival Governor Ron DeSantis, who had said he’d consider tapping RFK Jr. for one of those roles.
“When I am President, I will only consider Pro-Life Americans to lead FDA, CDC, or HHS,” Pence tweeted. “To be clear, pro-abortion Democrats like RFK Jr. would not even make the list.”
When I am President, I will only consider Pro-Life Americans to lead FDA, CDC, or HHS. To be clear, pro-abortion Democrats like RFK, Jr. would not even make the list. https://t.co/XFTjQXSzta
— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) July 26, 2023
Speaking with Outkick host Clay Travis on Wednesday, DeSantis was asked whether RFK Jr. — a populist 2024 Democratic contender labeled a conspiracy theorist by his critics — could be his running mate. DeSantis assured that Kennedy was off the table as a vice-president choice because of their disagreement on many major issues. However, the governor noted that he’d be open to putting Kennedy in charge of a public-health body, suggesting that his dissident opinions on Big Pharma are in synch with the views of a growing cohort of conservatives.
“Sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC,” DeSantis said.
Long labeled as an “anti-vaxxer” who has claimed that some inoculations might be tied to the drastic uptick in autism diagnoses in recent years, RFK Jr. vehemently opposed the Covid vaccine, which he has called “deadly and ineffective.” He was also recently caught on a hot mic in an allegedly off-the-record conversation with the New York Post in which he said that some research suggests that Covid-19 disproportionately targeted some ethnic groups while sparing Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people — and he raised the possibility that the virus had been engineered as a bioweapon.
On the abortion question, Pence recently said during a CNN interview that he supports exceptions on abortion prohibitions for certain rare situations.
“I’ve always recognized and accepted abortions in tragic circumstances: rape, incest, the life of the mother,” he told the network’s Dana Bash. “And in cases like an ectopic pregnancy where the child cannot survive. I would assume that that would be covered by the life of the mother exception. But in cases where it’s simply a subjective judgement of a physician or a percentage potential, I always want to err on the side of life.”