Sen. Bill Cassidy began the second day of Robert F. Kennedy’s confirmation hearings by reminding President Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services that “it’s no secret” he has some reservations about Kennedy’s positions on vaccines.
“Your past of undermining confidence in vaccines with unfounded or misleading arguments concerns me,” Cassidy, who chairs the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said. “Can I trust that that is now in the past?”
Kennedy is one of Trump’s most controversial nominees, in no small part because of his long public history on vaccines. That’s a potential difficulty for him making it out of the Senate: He can only lose three Republican votes and still be confirmed without Democratic support.
At least three publicly uncertain Republicans engaged with Kennedy during the hearing: Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Cassidy.
Questions about vaccination ricocheted across Thursday’s hearing. Cassidy kicked it off, asking Kennedy, “Will you assure mothers, unequivocally, that the measles and hepatitis B vaccines do not cause autism?”
When Kennedy didn’t respond with a clear answer right away, Cassidy interrupted him.
“It’s a yes or no question,” he said.
Kennedy replied that “if the data showed” that was true, he would.
After a terse exchange, Cassidy asked Kennedy if he would accept data that showed that vaccines are safe.
“Not only will I do that, but I will apologize for any statements that have misled people otherwise,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy, who spent years claiming that vaccines were unsafe and unnecessary, was flanked by his family and supporters in the hearing room.
Cassidy continued with a series of questions asking Kennedy to renounce some of his past statements, including that Lyme disease was created in a lab and that he would not accept the recommendations of the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He ended his initial questioning by asking Kennedy to affirm that “the FDA will not deprioritize and/or delay review or approval of new vaccines and that vaccine standards will not change from the proven norms.”
Kennedy did not respond directly to the question. And Cassidy took note. Seeming frustrated with Kennedy’s responses, he asked the question a second time.
“Yes,” Kennedy responded.
Cassidy later closed out the hearing by saying that a friend recently told him about two children dying from vaccine-preventable diseases.
“My concern is that if there’s any false note any undermining of a mother’s trust in vaccines, another person will die from a vaccine preventable disease,” he said. “My responsibility is to try to determine if you can be trusted to support the best public health.”
Cassidy said that’s why he’s been struggling with Kennedy’s nomination.
“As someone who has discussed immunizations with thousands of people, I understand that mothers want reassurance that the vaccine their child is receiving is necessary and safe,” he said. “I think I can say that I’ve approached it using the preponderance of evidence to reassure, and you’ve approached using selected evidence to cast doubt.”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski — who, like Cassidy, has been reticent to say whether she supports Kennedy’s nomination — opened her questioning by talking about the success of vaccines in her home state of Alaska.
“We can’t be going backwards on our vaccinations that will allow for this level of prevention and protection,” Murkowski told Kennedy.
She pressed Kennedy to “please convey” that vaccines are “measures we should be proud of as a country.”
But her only question for Kennedy focused on how he would prioritize Native Americans’ health needs.
Kennedy thanked her for the question and told her that he would “bring in a native at the assistant secretary level.”
Sen. Susan Collins — another potentially difficult Republican for Kennedy to win over — called attention to the prevalence of Lyme disease in her state of Maine and asked Kennedy how he would prioritize new vaccines for the illness.
Kennedy said that he and everyone in his family has had Lyme disease, saying, “There’s nobody who will fight harder to find a vaccine or a treatment for Lyme disease.”
Collins thanked him for his assurance and did not ask any other questions.
Many other senators on the panel took up similar questions on vaccination.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who leads the minority party on the committee, was not satisfied with Kennedy’s responses to Cassidy, in which he routinely called himself “evidence”-driven and asked the senators to present him with data.
Sanders reiterated his Republican colleague’s questioning, asking whether Kennedy agreed that vaccines do not cause autism.
“You’re applying for the job, clearly you should know this,” Sanders told Kennedy, when Trump’s HHS pick again said he would make a determination after seeing widely accepted research.
When Sanders got a similar response when he asked whether Kennedy agreed that the COVID-19 vaccines saved lives — he said he had not seen the evidence — Sanders insinuated that Kennedy’s attempts to assuage concerns that he’s anti-vaccine were disingenuous.
“That is a very troubling response because the studies are there,” Sanders said.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, like Sanders, pressed Kennedy on his refusal to accept the current scientific vaccine research. She noted that Kennedy has said there is no post-approval safety monitoring on vaccines, saying, “That led me to believe that you’re not aware of the significant and ongoing safety monitoring that occurs after years of rigorous studies.”
“Are you aware of the measures in place throughout Health and Human Services to ensure vaccine safety after approval?” Baldwin asked.
Kennedy said that yes, he is aware, but that the CDC keeps vaccine safety data “under lock box and will not let independent scientists look.”
The tension dissipated when Sen. Rand Paul, a longtime ally of Kennedy’s, took the mic, using his questioning time to defend those who question vaccines, saying that he himself is not a “one size fits all” person when it comes to vaccines.
“I chose to wait on my hepatitis B vaccine,” Paul said. “Does that make me an anti-vaxxer?”
He then said that “no healthy child” died of COVID-19 and that “there’s no good science to say what causes autism.”
“Shouldn’t we want to be open-minded,” asked Paul, to not accepting things just because the science says so?
“Science doesn’t say anything,” Paul said. He didn’t ask Kennedy any questions, but the audience applauded him when his time ended.
Sen. Tim Kaine’s questions took a slightly different tack. He displayed a large image of one of Kennedy’s posts on X.
“‘I won’t take sides on 9/11,’” he read. “Wow.”
“Do you find it hard to tell what is a conspiracy theory and what isn’t?” Kaine asked Kennedy. “Is that a kind of general deficit that you find in your own analytical abilities?”
“I haven’t investigated it,” Kennedy said about 9/11.
Kaine then moved on to Kennedy’s work as a litigator suing the manufacturers of the HPV vaccine Gardasil.
“How can folks who need to have confidence in federal vaccine programs trust you to be independent and science-based when you stand to gain significant funding if lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers are successful?” he asked.
Kennedy responded that he has “given away any right to any fees” he might have received from that lawsuit.
Sen. Chris Murphy returned to Kennedy’s testimony before the Finance Committee on Wednesday, saying that Kennedy either “feigned ignorance” or “outright denied” some of his past statements.
“Sen. Warnock asked you yesterday if you had compared America’s vaccine program to the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal,” said Murphy, and Kennedy interrupted him to say that he’d never said that.
“That’s fine, you’re doubling down on that,” Murphy said. He then read quotes directly from Kennedy’s book.
“You’re not questioning science. You’ve made up your mind,” Murphy told Kennedy. “You’ve spent your entire career undermining America’s vaccine program.”
He told Kennedy that it was “unbelievable” that he would “all of a sudden change his stripes.”
Kennedy denied that his comparing vaccines to pedophilia was a “perfect metaphor” but said that if “one in 36 kids have neurological injuries” then he believes that it’s something that should be studied.
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks brought up statements Kennedy made on a podcast episode in 2021 about how he believes the vaccine schedule should be different for Black people because “their immune system is better.”
“What different vaccine schedule should I receive?” Alsobrooks asked Kennedy.
“The public article suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens,” Kennedy began, but Alsobrooks cut him off.
“Mr. Kennedy, with all due respect, that is so dangerous,” Alsobrooks said. “Your voice would be a voice that parents would listen to.”
Sen. Maggie Hassan became emotional when speaking about her adult son with severe cerebral palsy and the suggestion that she and other Democrats opposed Kennedy’s nomination simply on partisan grounds.
“Like every mother, I worried whether in fact vaccines did something to my son,” she said. But after the scientific community “studied and studied” the issue and found that an initial study suggesting a connection was wrong, she took issue with Kennedy’s continued insistence that vaccines cause autism.
“That’s what the problem is here. It’s the relitigating and rehashing and continuing to sow doubt so we can’t move forward, and it freezes us in place,” she said.
Sen. Andy Kim asked Kennedy whether he supported GLP-1 drugs to fight obesity.
Kennedy called them “miracle drugs” but said that he doesn’t think they should be the “first, frontline intervention” for children, calling it the “standard practice now.”
One of the committee’s Republicans, Sen. Jon Husted, took up a similar line, asking Kennedy to “shed some light” on how he would see his role in fighting the obesity epidemic.
Kennedy said that funding at the NIH has been “diverted away from studying the ideology of chronic disease” and that obesity is caused by an “environmental toxin.”
“Why aren’t we devoting science to find out what those toxins are and then eliminate them?” he asked. He then blamed the U.S. COVID-19 death rate, which is relatively high compared to other developed nations, on chronic diseases.
Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester told Kennedy that she was concerned not only with his vaccine record but also with his level of understanding and support of laws like the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, known as EMTALA.
She questioned Kennedy on whether he felt programs counted as “health DEI programs,” such as programs that target Black women to address the maternal mortality crisis.
“It’s not a simple yes or no answer,” Kennedy replied.
Sen. John Hickenlooper, a scientist, told Kennedy that he believes a “healthy skepticism” can be useful until it becomes “promoting an idea.” He then asked Kennedy about his claims that Lyme disease is a bioweapon.
“When you’ve only read three books, little bits of the three books, not the whole three books, isn’t that reckless?” asked Hickenlooper.
Sen. Ashley Moody told Kennedy that she believes America is at a crossroads.
“Unfortunately, things that used to not be particularly political, like science and medicine, are now politicized to the point where reality is distorted,” said Moody. “What you believe has little to do with truth or facts and everything to do with your party.”
She added that she hopes Kennedy and Trump will “break this cycle.” Moody then asked Kennedy if he will use the HHS secretary position to “squelch” medical or scientific views that he disagrees with.
“Absolutely not,” said Kennedy, but he added that “we’ve tried this system where the government lies to Americans,” and it isn’t working.
Sen. Ed Markey asked Kennedy to confirm that his trip to Samoa in 2019 had “nothing to do with vaccines,” which Kennedy said was correct.
Markey then read from a blog post of Kennedy’s in which he states that the trip was funded by an anti-vaccine activist, and compares vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany.
“I’ll ask you again. Did the trip have nothing to do with vaccines?” Markey said.
“No, it did not,” Kennedy replied. “I ended up having conversations with people, some of whom I never intended to meet.”
But Markey wasn’t convinced.
“That one incident, in my perspective, disqualifies you from holding any position in health care, much less than No. 1 health in the United States,” Markey said.
Markey then pointed to a letter that 75 Nobel Prize winners signed asking the Senate not to confirm Kennedy.
“You should look at the conflicts of those individuals,” Kennedy replied.
Cassidy used his a few minutes late in the hearing to talk about the plethora of studies showing that vaccines do not cause autism.
“Convince me that you will become a public health advocate, and not just churn out old information so that there’s never a conclusion,” Cassidy told Kennedy.
Kennedy did his best.
“I’m going to be an advocate for strong science,” Kennedy said. “There are other studies as well.”
Cassidy shook his head slightly as Kennedy spoke.
Kennedy went on to wonder why science doesn’t know the answer to rising autism rates. “We should know the answer,” said Kennedy.
Cassidy assured Kennedy — and anyone watching — that he “wants President Trump’s policies to succeed.”
“But I can also tell you an absolute tragedy will cast a shadow over President Trump’s legacy, which I want to be the absolute best legacy it can be,” he said. He then told the nominee that he would be hearing from him over the weekend.
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.