Rod Lamkey/AP Photo
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies during a Senate HELP Committee hearing for his pending confirmation on Capitol Hill, January 30, 2025, in Washington.
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. narrowly survived a Senate Finance Committee vote on his confirmation for health and human services (HHS) secretary, with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a doctor, flipping to support at the last minute, one billionaire was exuberant. “Yay!!!! The transformation of healthcare begins,” wrote Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong on X. A minute later, he thanked Cassidy for his commitment to Kennedy. “The nation needed this on behalf of our patients.”
It was the culmination of a long campaign for Soon-Shiong, who says he met Kennedy a few months ago and was captivated by his views on the health system. Dozens of posts on Soon-Shiong’s social media promote Kennedy, even one in December that marvels at his skill in doing pull-ups. “Not many 70 year olds could do that!” the doctor gushes.
Soon-Shiong also owns the Los Angeles Times, and like many media moguls of late, he has used that platform to cozy up to the Trump administration, including by axing articles critical of Trump. In December, he blocked an editorial that condemned Trump cabinet choices, which according to people with knowledge of the situation included Kennedy. Last week, the newspaper was accused of “distorting” an op-ed critical of Kennedy by adding a positive headline and cutting some of the more negative commentary. (The full op-ed can be read here.) Soon-Shiong promoted the op-ed as if it supported Kennedy, and later commissioned a new op-ed that was broadly positive about the nominee.
Dr. Soon-Shiong has maintained that he merely supports evidence-based medicine and better health outcomes for all Americans. But he has a clear financial interest in wanting an ally in a key health care policymaking position.
ImmunityBio, the biotech firm that Soon-Shiong founded, has three drug applications in front of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The billionaire scientist may be thinking that cultivating a relationship with the next HHS secretary can smooth a path to approving the high-cost cancer treatments for use in the U.S.
In its first term, the Trump administration showed a willingness to politicize decision-making throughout the government, particularly when media figures are involved. Soon-Shiong appears to be trying to avoid that possible barrier to his outstanding FDA approvals with his boosting of Kennedy.
Contacts to ImmunityBio and the Los Angeles Times, and requests to interview Dr. Soon-Shiong, were not returned.
On January 15, ImmunityBio announced “significant progress” in ongoing discussions with the FDA regarding clinical development in 2025. The biotech firm plans to submit a supplemental biologics license application for an immunotherapy treatment for bladder cancer. The FDA approved the drugs, ANKTIVA plus Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), last April, after previously rejecting them. But the supplemental license would add a papillary indication, increasing the number of patients who could use the therapy.
In addition, the company will make a regulatory submission in association with the Serum Institute of India that would expand the availability of BCG, which ImmunityBio states is in shortage. Because that drug is manufactured in India separate from ImmunityBio’s existing process, it would require additional FDA approval. Finally, ImmunityBio expects to submit a biologics license application for ANKTIVA as a secondary treatment for non-small cell lung cancer patients who are taking checkpoint inhibitors, a form of immunotherapy. ImmunityBio has a Phase 3 trial for ANKTIVA plus these checkpoint inhibitors in progress.
Dr. Soon-Shiong, who is listed as the executive chairman and global chief medical and scientific officer for ImmunityBio, was quoted in the announcement, citing the “large potential … to prolong overall survival without the toxicities of immunotherapy.”
The combination of FDA approvals sought by Soon-Shiong’s company places his vociferous support for Kennedy, and the use of the newspaper he owns in that effort, in a different light. Eric Reinhart, the author of the critical Kennedy op-ed that was altered by the L.A. Times, told me that he thinks the pending approvals were a factor in his situation. “I strongly suspect––although I cannot prove, even as LA Times editors have since written to me to apologize to me for what happened and stated that the unapproved changes made were a surprise to them too—that Pat was personally involved in the last-minute changes to my OpEd and that his conflicts of interest were the primary factor in that,” Reinhart told the Prospect.
Dr. Soon-Shiong has acknowledged speaking personally with Kennedy, though it is unknown whether FDA approvals came up in that conversation. It would be an ironic development given how vociferously Kennedy has criticized pharma companies over vaccines and other treatments.
During Trump’s first term, media owners who oversaw critical coverage at their outlets were targeted in rather brazen fashion. Two examples are the administration’s challenge to the AT&T and Time Warner merger (the parent company of CNN), and the denial of a military cloud contract to Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. In both cases, evidence emerged of Trump’s personal involvement. He specifically asked his then-National Economic Council director Gary Cohn to get the AT&T–Time Warner deal blocked, and directed his defense secretary to review the cloud contract after it looked like Amazon would receive it, according to published reports.
Media owners have taken the lesson that slanting coverage to suit the president is a good way to stay out of his crosshairs. Dr. Soon-Shiong’s support for Kennedy, along with intervening in L.A. Times opinion coverage to overrule anti-Trump messaging, fits this pattern, only potentially in a more transactional fashion, given the pending FDA approvals.
The Times has said that the Reinhart op-ed complied with the usual process of gaining permission from the author for edits to the body of the piece. But Reinhart maintains that the headline was at odds with his intended meaning, along with the cuts to the stronger passages of opposition.
“If RFK Jr. has his way, we will be suffering from the consequences for literally generations to come, both in the U.S. and around the world,” Reinhart said. “But despite Pat [Soon-Shiong]’s awareness of this reality, money and the power and attention it brings, particularly for the billionaires who can never get enough to satisfy themselves regardless of how many deaths they cause in the process, is a powerful motivator. It seems that, for Pat, it may be the only one that counts.”
