Senators from both parties expressed scepticism of the health secretary’s statements on COVID-19 vaccines and more

RFK Jr. slings accusations and defends public-health upheaval at fiery hearing

Senators from both parties expressed scepticism of the health secretary’s statements on COVID-19 vaccines and more

Senators grilled Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, on Thursday about vaccines, the firing of federal health officials and other matters.Credit: Andrew Harnik/Getty

US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr defiantly defended his controversial actions to upend public health at a Senate hearing on 4 September. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine advocate, also made unfounded allegations about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and accused the medical establishment of corruption.

What was supposed to be a routine hearing about the health care agenda of Republican President Donald Trump was anything but. The hearing devolved at several points into a shouting match, as senators grilled Kennedy on turmoil and a leadership shakeup at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which he oversees, and on his efforts to scuttle research on mRNA vaccines.

In response, Kennedy repeatedly alleged collusion between the pharmaceutical industry and scientists, including researchers at federal agencies. He also emphasized the high rates of chronic disease in the United States, citing them as justification for his agenda. “That’s why we had to fire people at the CDC,” he said at the hearing.

In turn, several senators accused Kennedy of stacking advisory panels of independent scientists with members whose beliefs on vaccines fall outside the scientific consensus. “This is not a podcast,” said Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, referring to Kennedy’s frequent appearances on conservative media outlets. “This is the American people’s health that’s on the line here.”

Turmoil besets the CDC

Only last week, Trump fired CDC director Susan Monarez as CDC director, barely one month into her tenure. In an opinion piece published today in The Wall Street Journal, Monarez wrote that she was dismissed after being told to fire top career CDC scientists and “preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric”. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a group that provides vaccine recommendations to the federal government, and appointed new members, some of whom are outspoken critics of US vaccination policies.

At the hearing, Kennedy denied he had told Monarez to preapprove the vaccine panel’s recommendations and said she was lying. He claimed he had fired her because he asked her if she was “trustworthy” and she said “no”. Asked for comment after the hearing, Monarez’s attorneys told Nature that “Secretary Kennedy's claims are false, and at times, patently ridiculous”.

After her firing, four top CDC officials resigned in protest. Kennedy admitted at the hearing that he had asked Monarez to fire career CDC staff members.

Kennedy repeatedly criticized the CDC during the hearing, saying it was the most corrupt health agency, and perhaps the most corrupt agency in the entire federal government. To justify the recent shake-up at CDC, he pointed to its performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. The CDC staff members “who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving”, he said in his opening remarks.

At one point, he said he did not know how many people had died from COVID-19 in the United States — or the number of lives saved by COVID-19 vaccines — during the pandemic. “I don’t think anybody knows, because there was so much data chaos coming out of the CDC,” he said, without elaborating. (The CDC says some 1.2 million people in the United States have died of COVID-19 to date.)

Senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, asked Kennedy whether Trump deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for the initiative he launched in 2020, during his first term as president, to accelerate the development and distribution of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. Kennedy said yes. Several senators were incredulous at this statement, given that Kennedy has cut more than US$500 million of research projects investigating mRNA vaccines and has repeatedly slammed the initiative in social-media posts.