As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. prepared to sit for his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, former U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy is warning senators that her cousin is a “predator” who is “addicted to attention and power.”

In a letter obtained by The Washington Post, and later published online, Kennedy wrote that the prospective Health and Human Services secretary is “unqualified” to fill a government position tasked with “overseeing the FDA, the NIH, the CDC and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, agencies that are charged with protecting the most vulnerable among us.” 

“He lacks any relevant government financial management or medical experience. His views on vaccines are dangerous and willfully misinformed,” she wrote. “These facts alone should be disqualifying, but he has personal qualities related to this job, which for me pose even greater concern.”

Kennedy began by highlighting her cousin’s behavior as a young man, when he struggled with addiction and, according to the former ambassador, encouraged his “younger brothers and cousins [to] follow him down the path of drug addiction.”

“Bobby was able to pull himself out of illness and disease,” Kennedy wrote. “I admire the discipline that took and the continuing commitment it requires, but siblings and cousins who Bobby encouraged down the path of substance abuse suffered addiction, illness and death, while Bobby has gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life today.”

Kennedy described her cousin as supplanting a substance dependency with a hypocritical “addiction to attention and power,” noting that “Bobby preys on the desperation of parents of sick children vaccinating his own kids, while building a following hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs.” 

She also pointed to the real-world impact of RFK Jr.’s conspiracies about vaccines, referencing a 2019 outbreak in Samoa — where Kennedy and his organization The Children’s Defense Fund had fomented public and governmental fear of the measles vaccine and praised local anti-vaccine activists. 

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Kennedy also warned that the HHS nominee’s “ethics report makes clear that he will keep his financial stake in a lawsuit against an HPV vaccine. In other words, Bobby is willing to profit and enrich himself by denying access to a vaccine that can prevent almost all forms of cervical cancer.”

Disclosures released earlier this month revealed that RFK Jr. has raked in almost a million dollars in referral fees from Wisner Baum, a law firm suing the pharmaceutical company Merck over allegations that the company did not properly warn recipients of the HPV vaccine of potential side effects. 

“The American health care system, for all its flaws, is the envy of the world,” Kennedy wrote, adding that doctors, nurses, and other health workers “deserve a secretary committed to advancing cutting edge medicine to save lives, not to rejecting the advances we have already made. They deserve a stable moral and ethical person at the helm of this crucial agency. They deserve better than Bobby Kennedy, and so do the rest of us.” 

“I urge the Senate to reject his nomination,” she concluded. 

RFK Jr. is scheduled to appear before the Senate Committee on Finance on Wednesday. He remains one of Trump’s most controversial Cabinet appointments, and will likely be subjected to tough questioning regarding his views on vaccinations and other crackpot medical claims he’s made in the past. 

If his nomination advances to the Senate, RFK Jr. can only afford to lose three Republican votes and still secure his position as HHS Secretary. While no Republicans have explicitly committed to vote against him, some have expressed hesitancy over the nominee. 

“Well I’m certainly concerned about it. I know others have other, other points of concerns that they want to drill down on and try to get some commitments, public commitments, from him,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). “Vaccines are important.”