Kennedy tries to defend COVID-19 vaccine stance in raucous Senate
hearing
[September 05, 2025]
By MATT BROWN and MIKE STOBBE
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., facing
pointed bipartisan questioning at a rancorous three-hour Senate
committee hearing on Thursday, tried to defend his efforts to pull back
COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and explain the turmoil he has created
at federal health agencies.
Kennedy said the fired CDC director was untrustworthy, stood by his past
anti-vaccine rhetoric, and disputed reports of people saying they have
had difficulty getting COVID-19 shots.
A longtime leader in the anti-vaccine movement, Kennedy has made
sweeping changes to agencies tasked with public health policy and
scientific research by laying off thousands of workers, firing science
advisers and remaking vaccine guidelines. The moves — some of which
contradict assurances he made during his confirmation hearings — have
rattled medical groups and officials in several Democratic-led states,
which have responded with their own vaccine advice.
Medical groups and several Democrats in Congress have called for Kennedy
to be fired, and his exchanges with Democratic senators on the panel
repeatedly devolved into shouting, from both sides.
But some Republican senators also expressed unease with his changes to
COVID-19 policies.
The GOP senators noted that Kennedy said President Donald Trump deserved
a Nobel Prize for the 2020 Operation Warp Speed initiative to quickly
develop mRNA COVID-19 vaccines — and that he also had attacked the
safety and continued use of those very shots.
“I can't tell where you are on Operation Warp Speed,” said Republican
North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis.
Tillis and others asked him why the director of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention was fired last week, less than a month into her
tenure.
Kennedy said she was dishonest, and that CDC leaders who left the agency
last week in support of her deserved to be fired.
He also criticized CDC recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic tied
to lockdowns and masking policies, and claimed — wrongly — that they
“failed to do anything about the disease itself.”
“The people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our
children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving,”
Kennedy said. He later said they deserved to be fired for not doing
enough to control chronic disease.
Trump was asked at a White House dinner with tech leaders on Thursday
night if he has full confidence in what Kennedy is doing.
Trump said he didn’t watch the hearings but said of Kennedy, “he means
very well.” Trump said Kennedy has “a different take, and we want to
listen to all those takes.”
“It’s not your standard talk, I would say, and that has to do with
medical and vaccines," Trump said. "But if you look at what’s going on
in the world with health and look at this country also with regard to
health, I like the fact that he’s different.”
Democrats express hostility from the start
The Senate Finance Committee had called Kennedy to a hearing about his
plans to “Make America Healthy Again,” but Democratic senators pressed
Kennedy on his actions around vaccines.
At the start of the hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon tried to have
Kennedy formally sworn in as a witness, saying the HHS secretary has a
history of lying to the committee. The committee's chair, Sen. Mike
Crapo of Idaho, denied the Democrat's request, saying “the bottom line
is we will let the secretary make his own case.”
Wyden went on to attack Kennedy, saying he had “stacked the deck” of a
vaccines advisory committee by replacing scientists with “skeptics and
conspiracy theorists.”
Last week, the Trump administration fired the CDC's director — a Trump
appointee who was confirmed by the Senate — less than a month into her
tenure. Several top CDC leaders resigned in protest, leaving the agency
in turmoil.
The ousted director, Susan Monarez, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on
Thursday that Kennedy was trying to weaken public health protections.
“I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory
panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine
rhetoric,” Monarez wrote. “It is imperative that the panel’s
recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and
scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected.”
Kennedy told senators he didn't make such an ultimatum, though he did
concede that he had ordered Monarez to fire career CDC scientists.
Monarez's attorneys later responded that she stood by the op-ed and
“would repeat it all under oath.”
[to top of second column]
|
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
appears before the Senate Finance Committee, on Capitol Hill in
Washington, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
 Shouting matches and hot
comebacks
Kennedy pushed back on concerns raised by multiple Republican
senators, including Tillis and Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming and
Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Both Barrasso and Cassidy are physicians.
The health secretary had animated comebacks as
Democratic senators pressed him on the effects of his words and
actions.
When Sen. Raphael Warnock, of Georgia, questioned Kennedy about his
disparaging rhetoric about CDC employees before a deadly shooting at
the agency this summer, Kennedy shot back: “Are you complicit in the
assassination attempts on President Trump?”
Kennedy called Sen. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico “ridiculous,” said
he was “talking gibberish” and accused him of “not understanding how
the world works” when Lujan asked Kennedy to pledge to share
protocols of any research Kennedy was commissioning into autism and
vaccines.
He also engaged in a heated, loud exchanges with Sens. Elizabeth
Warren of Massachusetts and Tina Smith of Minnesota.
“I didn’t even hear your question,” Kennedy replied to Sen.
Catherine Cortez Masto as the Nevada Democrat repeatedly asked what
the agency was doing to lower drug costs for seniors.
He also told Sen. Bernie Sanders that the Vermont independent was
not “making any sense.”
Some senators had their own choice words.
“You’re interrupting me, and sir, you’re a charlatan. That’s what
you are, ” said Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat. “The
history on vaccines is very clear.”
As the hearing neared its end, Kennedy pulled his cellphone from his
pocket and then tapped and scrolled as Wyden asked about
mifepristone, a drug used for medication abortion.
Kennedy disputes COVID-19 data
In May, Kennedy announced COVID-19 vaccines would no longer be
recommended for healthy children and pregnant women, a move opposed
by medical and public health groups.
In June, he abruptly fired a panel of experts that had been advising
the government on vaccine policy. He replaced them with a handpicked
group that included several vaccine skeptics, and then shut the door
to several doctors groups that had long helped form the committee's
recommendations.
Kennedy has voiced distrust of research that showed the COVID-19
vaccines saved lives, and at Thursday's hearing even cast doubt on
statistics about how people died during the pandemic and on
estimates about how many deaths were averted — statistics produced
by the agencies he oversees.
He said federal health policy would be based on gold standard
science, but confessed that he wouldn’t necessarily wait for studies
to be completed before taking action against, for example, potential
causes of chronic illness.
“We are not waiting for everything to come in. We are starting now,"
he said.
A number of medical groups say Kennedy can’t be counted on to make
decisions based on robust medical evidence. In a statement
Wednesday, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and 20 other
medical and public health organizations issued a joint statement
calling on him to resign.
“Our country needs leadership that will promote open, honest
dialogue, not disregard decades of lifesaving science, spread
misinformation, reverse medical progress and decimate programs that
keep us safe,” the statement said.
Many of the nation’s leading public health and medical societies,
including the American Medical Association, American Public Health
Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have decried
Kennedy’s policies and warn they will drive up rates of
vaccine-preventable diseases.
___
Stobbe reported from New York. Associated Press writers Mary Clare
Jalonick, Michelle L. Price and Chris Megerian contributed to this
report.
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
