WASHINGTON ― Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was grilled by senators on both sides of the aisle at a tense hearing that was punctuated by loud shouting matches following last week’s chaos at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a physician and the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said he has grown “deeply concerned” by RFK Jr.’s vaccine policies since voting to confirm him as the nation’s top health official earlier this year. His comments came as a surprise because of his stalwart support for President Donald Trump.
“I support vaccines. Vaccines save lives. If we’re going to make America healthy again, we can’t allow public health to be undermined,” Barrasso said at the hearing.
“There are real concerns that safe, proven vaccines like measles, like hepatitis B, could be in jeopardy. That could put Americans at risk and reverse decades of progress,” the conservative added.
Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee holding the hearing, said Kennedy “is dead set on making it harder for children to get vaccines and kids are going to die because of it.”
The White House announced it fired CDC Director Susan Monarez last week because she was “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” The Senate confirmed Monarez only a month ago. At least four other CDC officials, including Dr. Demetre Daskalakis who served as director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, also left the agency, warning the public that Kenedy’s leadership threatened public health.
In his opening remarks, Kennedy said the CDC “failed miserably” during the COVID-19 pandemic and that is part of the reason the agency is in need of an overhaul.
“We are the sickest country in the world,” Kennedy said at the hearing. “That’s why we have to fire people at CDC. They did not do their job. This was their job to keep us healthy. I need to fire some of those people to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Monarez said she was asked to forgo scientific review and endorse the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel made up of vaccine skeptics after the health secretary replaced its 17 former members with eight handpicked advisers earlier this year. One of them has since left the group but Kennedy has reportedly picked an additional seven new members to join the committee.
“It was one of the more public aspects of a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections,” she wrote.
Asked about the opinion piece on Thursday, Kennedy denied personally ordering Monarez to accept the new panel’s recommendations and accused the ex-CDC official of lying. “I did not say that to her,” he told Wyden.
Monarez’s lawyers called Kennedy’s claims “patently ridiculous” and said she would be willing to testify under oath before Congress.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a physician who provided the key vote allowing Kennedy to become health secretary earlier this year, also grilled the top Trump official over his anti-vaccine policies, including his department’s cancellation of $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts. Messenger RNA (mRNA) was used to develop the COVID-19 vaccine by Trump’s first-term Operation Warp Speed program.
Cassidy asked Kennedy if he believed Trump deserved to win the Nobel Prize for initiating the Operation Warp Speed program. When the secretary replied in the affirmative, Cassidy said his statement “seems inconsistent” with HHS canceling mRNA vaccine contracts under his tenure.
“I would say, effectively, we’re denying people vaccines,” the senator said.
“You’re wrong,” Kennedy responded.
Democrats on the panel slammed Kennedy for seeking to take away vaccines from people who need them. Eleven of the 12 members in the Democratic minority on the Senate Finance Committee called on him to resign prior to Thursday’s hearing. Their questioning of the secretary often devolved into shouting matches. He bristled at their inquiries, accusing them of seeking to make a spectacle and “talking gibberish.”
“Sir, you’re a charlatan. That’s what you are,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) told the health secretary at one point.
After Kennedy said he didn’t know the number of Americans who died from COVID-19, which is estimated at over 1 million, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) responded incredulously, “How can you be that ignorant?”
“You’re the secretary of health and human services. You don’t have any idea how many Americans died from COVID?” he added.