Well being and Human Companies Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is testifying earlier than the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday.
The listening to comes every week after Kennedy pressured the brand-new Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention director, Susan Monarez, to resign, and when she refused, the White Home fired her. Three prime CDC officers then resigned in protest.
The listening to’s acknowledged focus is the president’s 2026 well being care agenda and Kennedy’s aim to Make America Wholesome Once more. However count on loads of questions for Secretary Kennedy about CDC management in disarray, his strikes to overtake federal vaccine coverage and rising requires his resignation, together with from greater than a thousand present and former HHS employees.
Listed here are three issues to know going into the listening to.
1. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism is alive and properly
Kennedy constructed his fame on anti-vaccine advocacy. That made some senators cautious of confirming him, so he frolicked main as much as his affirmation vote in February reassuring them:
“If confirmed, I’ll do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it tough or discourages folks from taking vaccines,” he wrote repeatedly in reply to written questions from members of the Senate Finance Committee.
He additionally mentioned that he would settle for “unprecedented” enter from Republican Sen. Invoice Cassidy, a doctor and vaccine supporter who chairs the Senate committee that oversees HHS and is a member of the finance committee.
Kennedy has damaged lots of the particular guarantees he made to Cassidy. He moved to dramatically rework the federal authorities’s method to vaccines, from funding in biomedical analysis to the FDA approval course of, to entry. Already, some who need the brand new COVID-19 booster are discovering they cannot get it.
Entry to different vaccines may very well be restricted subsequent. Kennedy fired all of the members of a key vaccine advisory panel in June and changed them along with his personal roster of people that have a historical past of anti-vaccine activism. Later this month, they’re set to contemplate suggestions for COVID-19 vaccines in addition to extra routine vaccines, together with the respiratory virus RSV and measles.
Modifications to these suggestions would have enormous implications for public well being, insurance coverage protection and availability throughout the nation.
2. He does not appear bothered by departures from the CDC
Kennedy wrote an op-ed in The Wall Road Journal defending his dealing with of the CDC over the weekend.
“Over the a long time, bureaucratic inertia, politicized science and mission creep have corroded [the CDC’s] goal and squandered public belief,” he wrote. “The trail ahead is evident: Restore the CDC’s deal with infectious illness, spend money on innovation, and rebuild belief via integrity and transparency.”
In an interview on Fox Information final week, Kennedy mentioned he wasn’t shocked by the three prime CDC scientists resigning. “The company is in hassle and we have to repair it and we’re fixing it, and it might be that some folks shouldn’t be working there anymore,” he mentioned.
It is not simply high-profile leaders who’ve left HHS in current days. Roughly 20,000 HHS employees — roughly one-quarter of the company’s workforce — have been fired or taken gives to go away voluntarily since Kennedy took over as secretary. The exodus was partly pushed by the Elon Musk-led effort to shrink the federal workforce, however Kennedy has additionally mentioned in April that chopping so many employees was essential to streamline the company and to capitalize on the “political momentum.”
HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon echoed that concept in response to the letter from HHS employees calling for Kennedy to resign:
“Secretary Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been damaged for a very long time. Restoring it because the world’s most trusted guardian of public well being will take sustained reform and extra personnel modifications,” Nixon wrote in an announcement shared with NPR.
3. Kennedy and his allies need to speak about wholesome meals
As public well being teams have grown more and more alarmed by what’s occurring at HHS, Kennedy has been touring across the nation selling state efforts to chop out sure dyes and restrict ultra-processed merchandise within the meals provide.
Kennedy held a press convention with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott final week as he signed a number of payments, together with one which limits components in class lunches and one other that forestalls folks from utilizing meals advantages for sugary drinks and sweet.
These efforts in Texas and related payments in different states will assist proper the well being of the American folks, Kennedy mentioned. “We now have extra continual illness than we are able to deal with and we all know what it’s and we all know it’s the meals we’re consuming,” he mentioned.
