Key Republican Senator Raises Doubts Over RFK Jr.’s Fitness for HHS Job

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination for HHS secretary may be in jeopardy after Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD (R-La.), said he was “struggling” with Kennedy’s decades-long history of anti-vaccine advocacy during a confirmation hearing on Thursday.

In opening remarks, Cassidy, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee, recalled a young patient with liver failure from hepatitis B, whom he helped load onto an air ambulance for an emergency transplant.

“It was the worst day in my medical career, because I thought $50 of vaccines could have prevented this all,” said Cassidy, a gastroenterologist who specialized in liver disease. In the early 2000s, that procedure would have cost about a quarter of a million dollars and had a 5% to 10% mortality rate, Cassidy noted.

While his patient survived, Cassidy said since that incident he’s done everything he can to ensure he’d never have to talk to another parent about their child dying from a vaccine-preventable disease. “I know they save lives,” he said.

Cassidy sharply questioned the nominee at times and raised concerns about Kennedy’s “tremendous following” and power to influence others, noting that some of Cassidy’s own constituents at least partially credit Kennedy for their decision not to vaccinate their child.

“There are many who trust you more than they trust their own physician,” Cassidy said, noting that what Kennedy does with that trust is still uncertain.

Cassidy asked a number of questions seeking confirmation from Kennedy that he is truly “pro-vaccine,” as he claimed during a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday.

“Will you reassure mothers unequivocally and without qualification that the measles and hepatitis B vaccines do not cause autism?” Cassidy asked, noting that countless studies have shown no link between autism and vaccines.

Kennedy declined to answer directly, responding only that “if the data is there. I will absolutely do that.”

Referring to Kennedy’s public statements refuting vaccine safety, Cassidy said: “My concern is that … you’re making those claims and being so influential … [yet] you never acquainted yourself with anything that might contradict what you were previously saying.”

Cassidy asked Kennedy to promise he wouldn’t de-prioritize or delay approvals of new vaccines or change review standards for vaccines from “historical norms.” Kennedy answered in the affirmative.

Kennedy can afford to lose only three Republicans and still be confirmed as HHS secretary, assuming all Democrats vote against him. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have broken with their party on such issues in the past, and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — who had polio as a child and has raised concerns about Kennedy — recently joined both Murkowski and Collins in voting against Trump’s pick for secretary of defense.

Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) took umbrage with the argument from some Republican colleagues that the main reason Democrats oppose Kennedy’s nomination as HHS secretary is because he was tapped for the position by a Republican. Hassan recently voted to confirm five other Trump nominees, she said.

She also pushed back on Sen. Markwayne Mullin’s (R-Okla.) argument that those who oppose Kennedy are afraid to “question science.”

Mullin said when his kids received their vaccines, they looked like “a freaking pincushion … When you start looking at the rise of autism, why wouldn’t we be looking at everything?”

Hassan said that as a parent of a child with cerebral palsy, “a day does not go by when I don’t think about, What did I do when I was pregnant with him that might have caused the hydrocephalus that has so impacted his life?”

The debunked study by Andrew Wakefield, MBBS, in The Lancet linking autism to vaccines “rocked my world,” she said, adding that, like every mother, she worried she was to blame for hurting her child.

But “the journal retracted the study because sometimes science is wrong. We make progress. We build on the work, and we become more successful. And when you continue to sow doubt about settled science, it makes it impossible for us to move forward,” Hassan said.

Turning to another concern, Hassan raised questions about Kennedy’s lack of understanding of Medicare. During the Wednesday hearing, he confused Medicare with Medicaid. She asked him to define Medicare Part A and Part B and he confused the two. Kennedy also had difficulty linking Medicare Part C to Medicare Advantage.

“Mr. Kennedy, you want us to confirm you to be in charge of Medicare, but it appears that you don’t know the basics of this program,” she said.

In closing the hearing, Cassidy expressed his final reservations about Kennedy’s nomination, asking whether the nominee could “overturn a new leaf” at his age.

“Does a 71-year-old man, who spent decades criticizing vaccines and who’s financially invested in finding fault with vaccines, can he change his attitudes and approach now that he’ll have the most important position influencing the vaccine policy in the United States?” Cassidy asked.

He stressed that if Kennedy could “come out unequivocally [and say] vaccines are safe, it does not cause autism, that would have an incredible impact.”

Throughout the hearing, Kennedy claimed he was willing to be proven wrong about vaccines, yet he continued to raise points suggesting an anti-vaccine viewpoint, even suggesting questionable studies for Cassidy to review.

“My responsibility is to … try and determine if you can be trusted to support the best public health,” Cassidy said, acknowledging that politics factor into his decision, although not necessarily in a way that Kennedy would like.

As a Republican, Cassidy said he is rooting for President Trump’s success. “But if there’s someone that is not vaccinated because of policies or attitudes you bring to the department, and there’s another 18-year-old who dies because of a vaccine-preventable disease … That will cast a shadow over President Trump’s legacy, which I want to be the absolute best legacy it can be. So that’s my dilemma,” he said.

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