Pharmaceutical industry critic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be the nation’s top health official — on Thursday elaborated on his stance about the fast-growing class of weight-loss drugs known as GLP-1s. “The first line of response should be lifestyle. It should be eating well, making sure you that you don’t get obese, and that those GLP drugs have a place,” Kennedy told CNBC’s Jim Cramer from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Kennedy was there alongside many of Trump’s Cabinet nominees as Trump rang the opening bell to kick off Thursday’s session. Kennedy’s past criticism of GLP-1 drugs has been in focus on Wall Street since Trump nominated him in November to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other agencies. Kennedy needs to be confirmed by the Senate before he can take the role, and in the meantime, investors have been trying to gauge what he could mean for policy. In recent years, the drugs — headlined by Novo Nordisk ‘s Wegovy and Ozempic, along with Eli Lilly ‘s Zepbound and Mounjaro — have soared in popularity and set off a race in the pharmaceutical industry to join the party. Investor optimism about Novo’s and Lilly’s standing in the competition has propelled their stocks to impressive heights along the way. Lilly, in particular, has grown to become the most valuable health-care company in the world. Some on Wall Street see the market for GLP-1 drugs growing to at least $100 billion by 2030. More than two years ago , Cramer predicted that the active ingredient behind Lilly’s Zepbound and Mounjaro could become the best-selling drug of all time. Cramer’s Charitable Trust, the portfolio used by the CNBC Investing Club, has owned a stake in Lilly since 2021. Kennedy has previously suggested the U.S. should consider capping drug prices and specifically mentioned Novo’s Ozempic in his argument, which was published in The Wall Street Journal in September. In a post on social media site X that same month, Kennedy wrote that weight-loss drugs do not get to the “root” cause of obesity and instead merely “gladden the wallets of distant Big Pharma execs.” On Thursday, Cramer also asked Kennedy — who has pushed unfounded claims that child vaccines are linked to autism despite numerous studies that debunk such assertions — whether he is against “all vaccines.” “Yeah, that’s untrue,” Kennedy responded.
