Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s past comments on vaccines were the main focus of his second confirmation hearing for his nomination as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee questioned Kennedy for three hours on Thursday, a day after the Senate Finance Committee met with him for three and a half hours. The Senate Finance Committee will be the body that votes on whether to bring his nomination before the full Senate. A date for the Senate Finance Committee vote has not been set. If the nomination does move forward, Kennedy will need 51 votes to be confirmed.
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Kennedy, an environmental lawyer who suspended his independent presidential campaign to support President Donald Trump, has a long history of questioning the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccinations, as well as the COVID vaccine. He has continued to make claims implying a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and autism, even though the study that made those claims was debunked years ago and retracted from the Lancet, the medical journal that originally published it.
HELP Committee Chair Sen. Bill Cassidy, M.D., (R-La.), told Kennedy he was struggling with his nomination because of his years practicing medicine at public hospitals in California and Louisiana, where he specialized in liver disease. He told a story of an 18-year-old patient who had acute liver failure from Hepatitis B and needed a liver transplant. Hepatitis B is a vaccine-preventable disease.
Vaccines save lives, Cassidy said, yet Kennedy has made misleading and unfounded arguments that have undermined confidence in vaccines. “Bobby, you have a tremendous following…the question I need to have answered is what will you do with that trust,” he said. “You have a responsibility to restore trust in public health positions.”
Although Kennedy’s opening statement at both hearings said he was not anti-vaccine but rather pro-safety, Cassidy said he wonders if his comments on vaccines were truly in the past. “Can data and information change your opinion, or will you only look for data that supports your predetermined conclusion? This is imperative, if you have the responsibility to restore trust in our public health institutions as the nation’s top health official,” he said.
An emotional Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) told Kennedy about her 36-year-old son who has severe cerebral palsy and questioned what she may have done when she was pregnant that may have caused it. When the now discredited study about vaccines and autism was first published, Hassan said it “rocked her world,” and she worried whether a vaccine did something to her son.
“Please do not suggest that anybody in this body of either political party doesn't want to know what the cause of autism is...The problem with this witness's response on the autism cause and the relationship to vaccines is because he's relitigating and churning settled science so we can't go forward and find out what the cause of autism is and treat these kids and help these families."
But some Senators praised Kennedy for his views. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said his son and wife are expecting their first child in a few weeks and have done research about vaccines and won’t allow the child to become a “pincushion.” Sen. Markwayne Mullen (R-Okla.) supported the continued skepticism of vaccine safety due to the rise of autism. “Why wouldn’t we be looking at everything?” he asked.