AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
In a marathon hearing on Thursday before the Senate Finance Committee, US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced a barrage of questions from senators who were outraged by his recent actions, especially those concerning vaccine policy and recent shake-ups at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy vigorously defended himself, often making statements that contradicted his previous assertions.
In some cases, Kennedy appeared to promote flat-out lies. He said any American who wants a Covid vaccine can get one. In many states, that’s now not true because of a recent ruling by his agency. He claimed that it was impossible to say how many Americans have died of Covid, despite widespread agreement among epidemiologists and modelers that the figure is well over a million. He accused the CDC of allowing “the teachers union to write the order closing our schools” during the pandemic; a Politifact fact check clarified that the agency had actually “consulted multiple stakeholders.” He suggested that widely used antidepressants could cause violent behavior including school shootings, despite the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that such a causal relationship exists.
“This is crazy talk—you’re just making stuff up,” he snarled at Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) when she suggested that he had restricted Americans’ access to Covid vaccines.
It’s possible that Kennedy was comfortable stretching the truth because he didn’t swear an oath at the beginning of the hearing, but it’s more likely that he simply suspected it didn’t matter what he said. He appeared utterly confident in the president’s estimation of him—and for good measure, he lavished praise on his boss. During the hearing, he told Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) that he thought Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for his Operation Warp Speed Covid vaccine initiative—an apparent about-face from his previous assertion in a since-deleted 2022 tweet that the vaccines were a “crime against humanity.” Kennedy’s tone during the hearing was, at times, downright Trumpian—he mocked his questioners and challenged them more belligerently than he had during previous hearings. “This is crazy talk—you’re just making stuff up,” he snarled at Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) when she suggested that he had restricted Americans’ access to Covid vaccines. As the New York Times reported, toward the end of the hearing, Kennedy appeared to lose interest, instead opting to scroll on his phone.
It’s also possible that Kennedy’s false statements were a reflection of the fact that he lives in a kind of a parallel MAHA universe, one defined by alternative “facts” and “data.” It’s important to keep in mind that Kennedy has no medical or scientific training—rather, he is a lawyer who has spent the last decade of his career working for the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense—and his worldview has been shaped by the activists he now considers to be experts and friends.
For example, in Kennedy’s circles, it is accepted wisdom that the drugs ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are effective Covid treatments, and that public health officials have deliberately restricted access to them. During the hearing, Kennedy praised Trump for promoting “therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.” Kennedy’s alternative health universe is populated by people who claimed that those drugs worked—sometimes profiting by doing so—despite resounding evidence that they are ineffective. For example, Dr. Meryl Nass, a Maine physician who served on the scientific advisory board of Children’s Health Defense and lobbied for the FDA to remove Covid vaccines from the market, temporarily lost her license in 2022 for prescribing ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to Covid patients.
In Kennedy’s world, claims of vaccine injuries are backed up by a robust database: the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). In today’s hearing, he claimed that more than 30,000 deaths from the Covid vaccine had been reported in VAERS. What he didn’t say was that mainstream scientists don’t consider VAERS an accurate source for vaccine safety data, because it isn’t designed that way: Rather, it’s a repository for reports of adverse events—to be included in the database, you only have to claim a vaccine injury or death, you don’t have to actually prove it. In its “Vaccine Curriculum,” Children’s Health Defense warns that “The public health establishment claims vaccine injuries are extremely rare, and the benefits of vaccination far exceed the risks. However, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) tells another story.”
Another accepted truth in the antivaccine universe is that the jury is still out on whether vaccines cause autism. In Thursday’s hearing, Kennedy accused public health officials of hiding the results from a study that showed that “that study showed that black boys who got the vaccine on time had a 260 percent greater chance of getting an autism diagnosis than children who waited.” In the real world, the idea of a link between vaccines and autism has been both exhaustively studied and roundly disproven. The study that Kennedy mentioned, meanwhile, was debunked and retracted. Guess where its author works now? Children’s Health Defense.
From the tense exchanges during the hearing, it was apparent that senators from both parties have realized that Kennedy is living in a world defined by activists who crusade against vaccines and, for that matter, the entire enterprise of public health science. So far, however, they seem unwilling to take any action—unmoved even by a letter this week in which 1,000 former HHS employees called for his resignation. If he didn’t resign, they urged President Trump and Congress to “appoint a new Secretary of Health and Human Services, one whose qualifications and experience ensure that health policy is informed by independent and unbiased peer-reviewed science,” the letter read. “We expect those in leadership to act when the health of Americans is at stake.”
