In his first Senate confirmation hearing to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. repeated claims we have written about before on vaccines and chronic disease.
Known for spreading misinformation about vaccines, including the debunked idea that they cause autism, Kennedy said in his opening remarks, “News reports have claimed that I am anti-vaccine or anti-industry. I am neither. I am pro-safety.”
He has made similar statements recently. On Nov. 6, he told NPR that he wouldn’t take vaccines away, but wanted to “make sure that Americans have good information. Right now, the science on vaccine safety, particularly, has huge deficits in it, and we’re going to make sure those scientific studies are done and that people can make informed choices about their vaccinations and their children’s vaccinations.”
But, as we’ve explained, vaccine safety studies have been done and Americans do have access to that information. Multiple independent panels of scientists help review the data on each vaccine to make sure the benefits outweigh the risks. Several vaccine safety monitoring systems then watch for subsequent issues.
In December, Kennedy stepped down as chairman of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit he founded that has pushed false claims about vaccines.
If confirmed, Kennedy would oversee 13 agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
His Jan. 29 hearing was before the Senate Finance Committee. He will answer questions before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions on Jan. 30.
(For more on Kennedy’s past claims, see our 2023 three-part series.)
Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., questioned Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about flip-flopping views on healthcare issues during his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
COVID-19 Vaccines and Transmission
When asked by Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina if he was a conspiracy theorist, Kennedy said he has been labeled with the “pejorative” term “mainly to keep me from asking difficult questions of powerful interest.”
“That label was applied to me because I said that the vaccines, the COVID vaccine, didn’t prevent transmission and it wouldn’t prevent infection when the government was telling people, Americans, that it would,” Kennedy said. “Now everybody admits it.”
Vaccines do not have to prevent infection to be effective — and many do not. The primary goal of many vaccines is to prevent disease, including severe disease, which is the main function of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The COVID-19 vaccines were authorized for emergency use based on their ability to reduce the risk of symptomatic disease in clinical trials. When the vaccines were authorized, the Food and Drug Administration warned that there was no “evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.”
Yet, as we’ve explained, data showed that vaccination did reduce the spread of the disease, either because vaccinated people were protected against infection or because they were less contagious if infected. The emergence of more transmissible variants reduced the capacity of the vaccines to stop transmission, but they still provided some protection against infection and reduced the risk of severe disease.
Kennedy often cites monkey studies published in 2020 when raising this issue, and he did so again during his confirmation hearing. But several early studies showed that vaccinated animals infected with the virus had lower levels of virus than infected unvaccinated animals.
“I was called a conspiracy theorist because I said red dye caused cancer and now FDA has acknowledged that and banned it,” Kennedy continued at the hearing. “I was called a conspiracy theorist because I said fluoride lowered IQ. Last week JAMA published a meta review of 87 studies saying that there’s a direct inverse correlation between IQ lost.”
On Jan. 15, the FDA did revoke the authorization for the use of red dye No. 3, which is present in many foods and certain medications. But in doing so, the agency said claims that the use of the dye “puts people at risk are not supported by the available scientific information.” The agency noted that the way that red dye causes cancer in rats “does not occur in humans.”
As for fluoride and IQ, as we’ve explained before, the data on water fluoridation and neurotoxicity is not 100% clear. Some research suggests that higher levels of fluoride are linked to decreases in children’s IQ but the evidence that this occurs at lower levels similar to what the U.S. recommends using in drinking water is much weaker and inconsistent.
The paper mentioned by Kennedy, a meta analysis of 74 studies published in JAMA Pediatrics on Jan. 6, has been described as controversial. Many of the included studies had a “high risk of bias,” the paper said, and none had been conducted in the U.S.
In September, a federal District Court judge ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate fluoride in drinking water, saying that it “poses an unreasonable risk of reduced IQ in children.” The ruling added that “this finding does not conclude with certainty that fluoridated water is injurious to public health.”
Overestimate of Chronic Disease in Children
As expected, Kennedy spoke repeatedly about the increase in chronic disease and his intention of ending what he describes as an “epidemic.” But he exaggerated the number of children affected by it.
“I was raised in a time where we did not have a chronic disease epidemic. When my uncle was president, 2% of American kids had chronic disease. Today, 66% have chronic disease,” he said.
Some chronic health conditions such as obesity, Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism and food allergies have been more commonly reported among children in the U.S. in recent decades. But as we’ve explained, experts say that Kennedy’s number of the percentage of kids with chronic disease, which he typically puts at 60%, is an overestimate.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing data from the 2018 National Survey of Children’s Health, “more than 40% of school-aged children and adolescents have at least one chronic health condition such as asthma, obesity, other physical conditions, and behavior/learning problems.”
It is worth noting that there’s no data to compare today’s prevalence of chronic disease with that in the early 1960s, given changes in how chronic conditions are diagnosed, tracked and defined. And there is no standard definition today of what counts as a chronic condition. See our August story on this topic for more.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, appeared before the Senate Finance Committee for his first confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
False Claim About Previous Podcast Remarks
Early in the hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the committee, " target="_blank">pushed back against Kennedy’s insistence in the hearing that he is not anti-vaccine by noting that in a podcast interview with Lex Fridman in July 2023, Kennedy said “no vaccine” is safe and effective.
Kennedy responded by telling Wyden that his description of what happened had been “repeatedly debunked” — and that Kennedy’s comment about vaccines “was a fragment of a statement” that occurred, because he had been cut off in the interview.
“He asked me,” Kennedy said of Fridman, “‘Are there vaccines that are safe and effective?’ And I said to him, ‘Some of the live virus vaccines are.’ Then I said, ‘There are no vaccines that are safe and effective.’ And I was going to continue, ‘for every person.’”
“Every medicine has people who are sensitive to them, including vaccines,” Kennedy continued. “He interrupted me at that point. I have corrected it many times, including on national TV. You know about this, Sen. Wyden, so bringing this up right now is dishonest.”
But it hasn’t been debunked. And in fact, we’ve fact-checked Kennedy before on this very issue, when he falsely denied in a November 2023 “PBS NewsHour” interview that he ever said “no vaccine” is safe and effective during the podcast. In the PBS interview, he accused the interviewer of “making something up” and avoided answering whether he still thought there were no safe and effective vaccines.
In the hearing, Kennedy’s story about his podcast remarks has now shifted, but it’s difficult to reconcile his claim with what else was said on the podcast.
Fridman had " target="_blank">asked Kennedy, “Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?”
“I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing,” Kennedy replied. “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”
Kennedy finished the latter sentence in full. He then was about to say something else — perhaps an “in fact” — when Fridman stopped him to say that those were “big words — what about polio?”
Given this additional time to expand on his comment, Kennedy proceeded to explain why, in his view, even the polio vaccine may have “caused more death than [it] averted.” (For that, Kennedy cited concerns about SV40 contamination of some polio vaccines in the 1960s possibly causing cancer. But there isn’t evidence that people receiving those vaccines were more likely to develop cancer.)
Comments on COVID-19 Ethnic Targeting
In a heated exchange, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado quizzed Kennedy on some of his past controversial and unsupported statements, including remarks during a press dinner in 2023, when he said, “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” His comments were made public by the New York Post.
At the time, Kennedy said on the platform now known as X that he “never, ever suggested” that the virus “was targeted to spare Jews,” but that he had “accurately pointed out” that “governments are developing ethnically targeted bioweapons” and a study “shows that COVID-19 appears to disproportionately affect certain races.” He also iterated that he did not think “the ethnic effect was deliberately engineered.”
During the hearing, when asked about those comments, Kennedy echoed this defense.
“I didn’t say it was deliberately targeted,” Kennedy replied. “I just quoted an NIH-funded and NIH-published study.”
The study Kennedy cited, which did receive some NIH funding, was conducted by scientists at the Cleveland Clinic and published in BMC Medicine in 2020. As we have explained before, the results only “suggested possible associations” between certain gene variants and COVID-19 susceptibility, the study said. Even if validated, the effects would be small. An author of the paper also said the study’s findings “never supported” Kennedy’s claim. Racial disparities in COVID-19 cases and deaths have not been shown to be explained by genetic differences.
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