It appears Bill Cassidy is going to make every effort to ignore his own culpability for RFK Jr. on his way out the door. In case you need to be reminded, Cassidy was a key, if not deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. to his current role as Secretary of HHS. Cassidy’s background is as an MD and many of his GOP colleagues reportedly looked to his vote as to whether to support Kennedy’s nomination, despite Kennedy being perhaps the loudest evangelist for anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories on the planet. He voted to confirm Kennedy, leading several others to follow suit. It’s probably not inaccurate to say that Kennedy has his position because Cassidy voted for him.
Despite his attempts to lick Trump’s boots so clean that he could perform surgery with them, Cassidy lost his primary because his love for Trump went unrequited. In the immediate aftermath of that loss, Cassidy rediscovered his own backbone and flipped his vote from no to yes on the war powers resolution that went before the Senate. While that was bad enough for Cassidy to get a big ol’ middle finger from me, listening to him now try to poke a finger in Kennedy’s eye is a bridge too far.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) directly blamed Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses Thursday.
On the social media platform X, Cassidy shared a New York Times article reporting on hospitals seeing a resurgence in vaccine-preventable illnesses, with doctors telling the outlet they’re frequently seeing illnesses they used to rarely encounter.
“A terrible outcome from RFK and others promoting vaccine skepticism,” wrote Cassidy.
This has to be one of the most tone-deaf things a sitting senator has ever uttered. And for several reasons. Chief among them is that Cassidy is the one who helped promote vaccine skepticism by literally promoting a brain-addled anti-vaxxer into a cabinet position in charge of Americans’ health. To crow about the consequences of the very HHS administration Cassidy helped to put in place is befuddling in the extreme. Cassidy has ownership of this, whether he wants to admit it or not.
And, again, Cassidy had every opportunity to try to do something to correct his own mistake before he fumbled his incumbency so badly. There were impeachment efforts around Kennedy that he could have helped bolster. He could have crafted legislation to try to mitigate Kennedy’s worst actions in his role. He could have done literally anything other than complain publicly that Kennedy lied to him during his confirmation hearings and then just leaving it at that.
Cassidy has a few months left in office and then he will disappear into the vapor. If he wants to do something, then he should do something. This very much isn’t that and the fact that it’s coming in the wake of his no longer having any stakes in electoral politics is pathetic.
Just a few days ago, I wrote a post about how Bill Cassidy had been primaried out of returning as a senator for Louisiana and how all of this bootlicking of the Trump administration obviously didn’t do the job he hoped it would do. As a result, he has been left as a lame duck senator with a legacy that will be primarily about his decision to belay his own moral stances generally and his heavy hand in RFK Jr. leading HHS under Trump 2.0.
The point of that post was two-fold. First, I wanted to highlight just how damning to his legacy the appointment of Kennedy to HHS has become to his legacy. Second, I wanted to highlight that this supposedly serious senator was perfectly willing to give up on his principles the moment he thought, incorrectly as it turns out, that it would be politically expedient to do so.
And if you need a bow to put on that second point, you can get it now that Cassidy has flipped his vote on the Senate bill to end America’s involvement in the war with Iran until the Trump administration gets authorization from Congress.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who just lost his primary for renomination over the weekend after he faced opposition from Trump, voted “yes” to advance the measure, the first time he has done so after having repeatedly voted “no.”
“While I support the administration’s efforts to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, the White House and Pentagon have left Congress in the dark on Operation Epic Fury,” Cassidy said in a statement. “In Louisiana, I’ve heard from people, including President Trump’s supporters, who are concerned about this war. Until the administration provides clarity, no congressional authorization or extension can be justified.”
It’s amazing how post-election-loss clarity can assist someone in rediscovering their own spinal cord. Now, you can read Cassidy’s comments about how Congress has been left in the dark and that he’s hearing from people worried that maybe this whole warlord routine by Trump isn’t so great and believe that Cassidy came to all of these epiphanies in the last couple of days… if you want. But I’m going to point at you and laugh in your face if you do.
Now that Cassidy has nothing to lose, he’s decided to do the right thing. That isn’t some feather in his cap. It’s a self-indictment of all of his actions leading all the way up to his primary loss. If Cassidy thought this vote was the right thing to do today, what made it the wrong thing to do a week ago? The answer is nothing.
Even if a vote is taken and the bill passes, it would still need to get through the Republican House and survive a presidential veto. There is little chance of either happening. But that isn’t the point.
The point is that Bill Cassidy could have been a patriot over the past year and a half since Trump’s reelection, but he chose not to until he didn’t have a Senate seat to defend. And that makes him a coward.
Senator Bill Cassidy just lost his campaign for reelection to his Senate seat in Louisiana. With that, his career in federal government is likely over. It’s no secret as to why this happened. In early 2021, Cassidy suffered from a spasm of patriotism and voted to convict Donald Trump during his impeachment trial after the latter spurred on an attempted insurrection in the capitol that left several people dead, scores injured, and became the most famous stain on American democracy since the Bill Clinton era. Trump turned his retribution cannons on Cassidy, pumped the primary cycle full of vitriol for Cassidy, and managed to shove him from office.
But here’s the thing: fuck Bill Cassidy.
In the years since Trump’s second impeachment trial, Cassidy did his absolute best to throw as much unrequited love at Donald Trump as he possibly could. The moment the political realities became evident, Cassidy’s principles melted away. He spoke glowingly of Trump in his second term. He touted how well he and Trump work together, even as he acknowledged that Trump hates him. He was a reliable pro-Trump vote on nearly everything.
And he was the most important vote in confirming RFK Jr. to his current role as Secretary of HHS. And given how his vote to confirm Kennedy gave his colleagues cover to do so means that he may be the man most singularly responsible for Kennedy’s appointment other than Donald Trump.
Bill Cassidy is more at fault, because he actually knows better. RFK Jr. is an idiot with a brainworm, whereas Bill Cassidy is a doctor. A real doctor who worked in a charity hospital for the uninsured in Louisiana and, to his own testimony, has seen what happens when children don’t get vaccinated. He knew better, and yet he still provided the deciding vote to confirm Kennedy, almost definitely because he saw it as a way back into Trump’s good graces. Clearly, that didn’t happen.
And while he swore up and down that he had given Kennedy a real good talking-to and got all of the assurances that he would not screw with vaccines or change the CDC’s page stating that vaccines do not cause autism, that did not happen either.
He fucked us all to save his own skin, and ended up bloody and skinless anyway. He claimed it would be okay because of said “assurances” and because of his promise to monitor everything Kennedy did.
Monitor Kennedy he did, perhaps, but it certainly didn’t go beyond that. Save for a few contentious congressional hearings and Cassidy occasionally complaining to local news media about Kennedy’s actions at HHS, the man simply didn’t do anything to try to fix the mess he had a heavy hand in creating. He didn’t sign up to help the impeachment effort against Kennedy. He didn’t call for any new legislation to curb the chaos that is happening at HHS and its child agencies right now. He even had kind words to say about Kennedy’s approach to processed foods in the past few weeks.
Taking a moral stand is not a one-time project. Cassidy’s vote to convict Trump in 2021 was the right vote. Nearly everything he’s done since negates that moral stance, as he engaged in the most pathetic forms of boot-licking in an attempt to save his political career.
It didn’t work. Trump doesn’t work that way. Neither does Kennedy. Once you’re on the enemies hit list, you’re never coming off. The Senate will probably be worse for losing Cassidy generally. The Senate Health Committee certainly will be. And that’s too bad.
But fuck Bill Cassidy for foisting RFK Jr. as HHS boss on this country.
A quick reminder: America has not had a confirmed Surgeon General at the federal level since January of 2025. Yes, that’s over a year ago. How we got here is a microcosm of the Trump administration generally: chaos, misfires, and the wrong people at the very top. Janette Nesheiwat was Trump’s first nominee. MAGA gremlin Laura Loomer complained about her very loudly, leading Trump to obediently pull back the nomination.
In her place, he then nominated Casey Means in May of 2025. Means has been described as RFK Jr.’s “favorite wellness influencer”, which is a more subtle way of saying that she’s not a licensed doctor. That fact generated a lot of pushback in Congress, not only from Democrats, but Republicans too. Then, during her confirmation hearing in March of this year, Means dodged questions about vaccines as much as she possibly could, leading Senators like Bill Cassidy and others to question what her actual belief structure on vaccines is, and how much it aligns with RFK Jr.’s. Ultimately, few people thought her nomination was in a good place when it comes to confirmation.
Trump finally woke up to that fact, angrily of course, and has now pulled the Means nomination as well. In her place, he has now nominated radiologist Nicole Saphier, who also moonlights as a health commentator for Fox News. In many ways, Saphier is merely Casey Means wearing sunglasses and a false mustache.
In some ways she’s different. For instance, she’s an actual practicing doctor. On the other hand, she’s caked in the same wellness industry nonsense as Casey Means.
Saphier got her medical degree from Ross University School of Medicine in Barbados, according to her LinkedIn profile. She then completed a radiology residency through Creighton University School of Medicine. She joined Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2016 and has been a Fox News contributor since 2018. She is also the founder of Drop Rx, a herbal supplement business that develops “clean, thoughtfully crafted tinctures that support focus, calm, balance, and overall wellness.”
As for the topic of vaccines, her commentary rings as though she has a similar belief structure to Means, but knows how to hide it better.
On this front, she appears to walk a fine line—being skeptical of vaccines and critical of vaccination recommendations, while avoiding overt opposition to them. In 2022, she falsely claimed on social media that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was set to mandate COVID-19 vaccines for schoolchildren—something the CDC does not have the power to do; school vaccination requirements are set by the states. Despite being wrong, her claim sparked outrage among right-wing media.
In August, she posted a video criticizing the American Academy of Pediatrics for continuing to recommend COVID-19 vaccines for children—after Kennedy had unilaterally dropped the recommendation in line with his anti-vaccine views.
Oh, and she was more than a little careless when it came to COVID.
In Dec 2021, Nicole Saphier — a Fox contributor now tapped as Trump's surgeon general nominee — argued that "it is time to move forward and allow this mild infection to circulate so we can continue to build that hybrid immunity."250,000 Americans died of covid in 2022.
This administration keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. The dual facts that we’ve been without a confirmed AG for over a year into this administration and that we can’t get a vanilla nominee that can pass through to confirmation without generating headlines is both crazy and a complete failure of this administration.
Trump has been on a tirade blaming Cassidy for all of this. But Cassidy isn’t the problem here. Trump and Kennedy keep stepping on rake after rake by nominating the wrong people for important jobs. I doubt that anyone that was skeptical of Means won’t have the same concerns about Saphier, so we may be back at this all over again months from now.
We discussed RFK Jr.’s recent appearance before Congress, where he bravely declared that the current measles outbreak in America has absolutely nothing to do with him, despite that definitely not being true. But, unsurprisingly, that wasn’t the only craziness that Kennedy put on display in the hearing.
The Secretary of HHS doesn’t believe in the foundational theory that powers modern medicine.
Read that again. It’s an insane sentence, the sort that should be fiction. What we’re talking about here is the germ theory of disease, which is the accepted science when it comes to how many diseases infect and spread through pathogens. We mentioned in a post last year, which was chiefly about how Kennedy decided to take his grandkids swimming in a creek filled with poop, that he had also written in a 2021 book that he doesn’t believe in germ theory, and instead believes in what he incorrectly labels “miasma theory”.
It’s one thing to write something in a book as we were mired in a global pandemic. But Kennedy both admitted that he doesn’t believe in germ theory, and defended that belief, before Congress.
In the hearing on Wednesday, Sanders called attention to Kennedy’s denial of germ theory while raising one of Kennedy’s shaky arguments for debunking. In opening statements, Sanders warned Kennedy that he wanted to question the “things that you have written which call in doubt the very existence of the germ theory.”
Sanders pointed out a 2024 study led by the World Health Organization and published in The Lancet that found that since 1974, vaccines had saved an estimated 154 million lives, including 146 million children under the age of 5—or, as WHO put it, vaccines saved the equivalent of six lives every minute of every year over the past 50 years.
“My question is a simple one,” Sanders said, “do you still believe that one of the central tenets of the germ theory, that vaccines sharply reduce infant mortality, is quote-unquote simply untrue?”
Kennedy first did what he always does: try to tell you that the experts and studies have no idea what they’re talking about, or are hopelessly corrupted tools of industry. He does this so often that you can set your watch by it. If a study agrees with him, it’s a good study. If it doesn’t, it’s bad. He’s more like Trump than any of us realized.
Then he launched into his own justification and offered up a 2000 study that he claimed demonstrated that it was improved nutrition and sanitation that reduced childhood deaths this century, and explicitly not medicines like vaccines. Unfortunately for Kennedy, Bill Cassidy piped up with a, oh, let’s call it a minor correction.
The study by Guyer notes that sanitation, among other public health strategies introduced in the first half of the 20th century, drove major declines in mortality. But, as Cassidy noted during the hearing, it’s not all that the study found. Cassidy looked up the studies Kennedy raised and read through them during the hearing.
The Guyer study highlighted that vaccination did not become widely used until after the middle of the century, thus it cannot account for mortality declines prior to that. But it concluded, as Cassidy read out loud at the hearing:
The reductions in vaccine-preventable diseases, however, are impressive. In the early 1920s, diphtheria accounted for about 175,000 cases annually and pertussis for nearly 150,000 cases; measles accounted for about half a million annual cases before the introduction of vaccine in the 1960s. Deaths from these diseases have been virtually eliminated, as have deaths from Haemophilus influenzae, tetanus, and poliomyelitis.
Kennedy tried again, with another study, but Cassidy pointed out that it had the same issue as Kennedy’s first: it measured data from the beginning of the century to the early 1970s. Many of the vaccines Kennedy rails against had barely been out during the period the study analyzed, or in many cases hadn’t come out at all. Speaking specifically to the measles vaccine, released in 1963, Cassidy said:
“There’s 3.5 million cases of measles per year before the vaccine came along and about 550 deaths, and then the vaccine took those to less than 100 [cases] and like zero deaths,” Cassidy said. “So a tremendous impact of the vaccination.”
The problem with Cassidy is that he’s acting like he’s trying to convince Kennedy to change his mind on this. He’s not going to. Not ever. He’s made that clear.
So impeach him or convince Trump to make Kennedy his next cabinet firing. That’s all that’s left to do. Because we certainly cannot continue having someone run HHS who doesn’t believe in the very baseline theory for medicine.
It’s somewhat stunning to realize that the United States has been operating with Surgeon Generals that are merely “acting” in the role or “performing the duties of” since January 20th of 2025. The last Senate-confirmed SG was Dr. Vivek Murthy. The current nominee from the Trump/Kennedy team is Dr. Casey Means. This nomination has been languishing since May of last year. There has been plenty of pushback on her, due largely to her current profession as “wellness influencer” and the fact that she didn’t complete her residency and doesn’t have a license to practice in any of our 50 states.
She recently went before the Senate for her confirmation hearing and it, um, didn’t go all that well. As a result, it appears her nomination is very much in trouble. There are several GOP senators who are publicly expressing doubts about her, perhaps none more important then Bill Cassidy.
Senators Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) all expressed concern in a confirmation hearing last month about her potential role and appear to remain doubtful. Just one of those senators may be enough to block her nomination from advancing beyond the Senate Health Committee.
Afterward, Senators Collins and Murkowski both said they still had questions. Murkowski also said she had “strong reservations” about Means’ nomination and that, as of last week, that opinion hadn’t changed, according to the Post.
So why did the confirmation hearing go so poorly? For some reasons you’d expect, and some you probably didn’t. Means mostly ducked questions about vaccines, giving interested senators no idea where she actually lands on the issue. There were also perfectly reasonable questions about her qualifications, given that she is not currently a practicing doctor of any kind. In her influencer career, she has mirrored much of what RFK Jr. has claimed about diet and exercise being the cure to most health issues, all while hocking your stereotypical supplements and magic potions.
But then there are the drugs and the lunar-worship.
A book that she co-authored with her brother, titled Good Energy, considered by some to be the “MAHA bible,” contains a chapter titled, “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor.” She has also drawn criticism for writing about taking magic mushrooms, consulting a “spiritual medium,” and participating in “full moon ceremonies.”
I won’t say I’m against the use of psychedelics generally, but I typically don’t love hearing about how great they are from my doctor.
As we’ve talked about before, it has become very clear that Kennedy simply lied a whole bunch in his own confirmation hearings as to what he would do as Secretary at HHS, particularly when it comes to vaccines. The thing about lying to people like Bill Cassidy, though, is now Kennedy needs him to confirm his hand-picked ally for Surgeon General.
And unless Cassidy is far stupider than I think he is, you have to believe he isn’t going to let Lucy pull the football away at the last moment for a second time.
Rinse, lather, repeat. That is supposed to be the self-serving message on the back of a shampoo bottle, but it can easily be applied to Senator Bill Cassidy’s response to all the bullshit RFK Jr. continues to pull when it comes to vaccines.
The last time we saw this was back in October of last year. In the wake of an absolutely insane press conference in which Kennedy and Trump decided to point the finger at Tylenol, of all things, as a major cause of autism spectrum disorder, Cassidy bravely took to social media and the radio to criticize the HHS Secretary for essentially not having a single fucking idea about which he was speaking… and then he did absolutely fuck all about it. And now, days after Kennedy’s CDC altered the agency’s childhood vaccine schedule recommendations, he’s once more out in public spilling all kinds of words in response.
Cassidy, a physician and longtime proponent of vaccinations, said this move will “make America sicker.”
“As a doctor who treated patients for decades, my top priority is protecting children and families. Multiple children have died or were hospitalized from measles, and South Carolina continues to face a growing outbreak. Two children have died in my state from whooping cough. All of this was preventable with safe and effective vaccines,” Cassidy wrote on the social media platform X.
“The vaccine schedule IS NOT A MANDATE. It’s a recommendation giving parents the power. Changing the pediatric vaccine schedule based on no scientific input on safety risks and little transparency will cause unnecessary fear for patients and doctors, and will make America sicker,” he added.
Well, gosh golly gee, Senator, if only there was someone in some kind of position of power that could actually do something about it. Maybe a respected figure in the Republican majority, one who is a doctor by background and who cast and whipped up critical votes to confirm Kennedy’s appointment, who could do more than offer stern warnings about how horrible this is all going to be. I’d like to find someone like that and implore them to take action. Like… any action. Do literally anything other than flap their lips, as though that were accomplishing anything.
The incredible part of all of this is the context in which Kennedy’s betrayal of Cassidy has occurred. According to Cassidy, Kennedy committed to the following, either in confirmation hearings or to him personally:
Not changing vaccine review processes or slowing down vaccine approvals
Leave the CDC’s ACIP committee unchanged
Not changing the CDC website’s language debunking misinformation about vaccines and autism
Basing vaccine approvals and schedule recommendations on established and peer-reviewed science
Lie, lie, lie, and lie! It’s a superfecta of broken promises made to a sitting senator that has the stature, standing, and ability to do something about it. He could back the effort to impeach Kennedy, as he absolutely should. He could hit him in funding. He could haul him before Congress and demand answers, using his bully pulpit to expose the dangers further than some ExTwitter posts.
“Senator Cassidy put his personal political preservation above all by casting the deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr., even after raising many valid concerns over Kennedy’s pursuit of a dangerous anti-vaccine agenda,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Public Health Watch, a project of Protect Our Care. “It is obvious that Kennedy was always hellbent on pushing vaccine misinformation to AmericansAmericans no matter how much the data and science show them to be safe and effective. And now, with each new baseless attack on vaccine safety and efficacy that Secretary Kennedy carries out — like gutting the child vaccine schedule — more American lives are needlessly put in jeopardy. Dr. Cassidy knows this better than anyone, and it’s time he backs up his empty words of ‘concern’ with serious action.”
Instead, we have Cassidy’s mere words. Inaction is tacit endorsement, as far as I’m concerned. And every day that goes by in which Cassidy continues to not lift a single finger to protect his own constituents at a minimum, and all Americans more generally, is another violation of the Hippocratic Oath he once took.
I’ll start with this: I am certainly not fully politically aligned with Senator Bill Cassidy, but I have typically found him to be genuine and intelligent. Points of disagreement aside, he doesn’t strike me as a grifter or psychopath, which is unfortunately quite rare amongst government these days. He is a doctor, specifically a gastroenterologist, and typically pretty good on medical issues.
But come on, man: do something.
Cassidy was a key vote in confirming our own national embarrassment, RFK Jr., as head of HHS. Kennedy’s chaotic activity during these first nine months is well documented in that link above, but I’m going to reiterate what I said in a post about how polling is demonstrating that the American people are done with Kennedy’s bullshit.
But the context around this is that plenty of GOP members of Congress are looking ahead to the midterms and some percentage of those same people are in districts that are either swing districts or not solidly safe GOP districts. And every bit of chaos that comes out of this administration, and HHS has produced a ton of that chaos, makes the reelection chances of those House and Senate members that much worse.
Cassidy is one of those that are campaigning for reelection at the midterms. He last won in 2020 with 59% of the vote, which wouldn’t strike you as a particularly risky place to be, except he’s getting attacked from both the right and the left. His fellow senators have made it quite clear that they look to his guidance on matters of healthcare, and specifically on how he views and handles RFK Jr. During Kennedy’s most recent congressional hearing, he said many strong and tough things directly to and about Kennedy.
But come on, man: do something.
All we have gotten is words. There has been no public whipping of support to pushback on Kennedy and the disastrous things he’s done for nine months. No public followups from the hearing. No real oversight of any kind. I know this, because Kennedy and Trump recently came out and made the scientifically illiterate claim that pregnant mothers ingesting Tylenol is responsible for the uptick in rates of autism.
Cassidy first addressed the president’s words on X, saying studies don’t back up the claims he made at a clunky press conference on Monday.
“The preponderance of evidence shows that this is not the case,” Cassidy wrote. “The concern is that women will be left with no options to manage pain in pregnancy. We must be compassionate to this problem.” He added that HHS, helmed by vocal health conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “should release the new data that it has to support this claim.”
We already know there is no “new data.” The studies cited by Kennedy and Trump were old studies. The new study that they used to push this unfounded claim didn’t do any new research itself, but rather analyzed a bunch of existing research instead. Oh, and that study’s own authors disagreed with the conclusions Kennedy and Trump drew from it. The data isn’t new, so Cassidy’s request is moot.
Cassidy expanded on all of this on local radio.
The “best” study on Tylenol usage during pregnancy and autism doesn’t back up Trump, he told Talk 107.3 host Brian Haldane.
“There is an article out of Sweden ― two million people followed ― and what they did is they looked at someone who had autism and they compared them to a sibling who did not have autism, and they found no association, effectively, between taking Tylenol or not,” Cassidy pointed out, calling it the “highest quality” and “best controlled” study on the subject.
The findings Trump was referencing Monday appeared to be from “a study which found an association,” he said. “Now that’s the key thing: an association. That doesn’t mean it causes it; it just means that it’s associated.”
Yes, exactly right! Kennedy and the Mad King are going to harm mothers and the unborn with this nonsense. Cassidy is correct that the advice coming from HHS and the goddamned President is not trustworthy, nor based in good science.
But come on, man: do something.
Do something more than words. Back the folks in the House that are seeking to impeach Kennedy. Break with him publicly. Demand more accountability. Haul him before Congress as often as it takes to expose the very real harm that is being done to the health of the American people.
Do no harm, Senator. That’s an oath you once took, before you entered the pretzel-twisted world of federal politics. Your inaction is doing harm.
Well, that was certainly a thing. We mentioned yesterday that RFK Jr. was scheduled to go before the Senate Finance committee to answer all kinds of questions as to just what in the holy hell is happening at HHS. As we said, this was always going to be a contentious hearing, given that the Democrat Senators are aligned, and in fact demanded his resignation before the hearing, while even GOP members such as Bill Cassidy have begun signaling wavering support for Kennedy.
But this wasn’t just contentious; it was a disaster. USA Today has one of many live update pages where you can go back and relive the timeline, but the topline summary is that Kennedy shouted over the Senators questions, often asked them questions instead of answering the questions he was asked, dissembled all over the place when asked direct and honest questions, and otherwise spouted conspiracy theories without a scintilla of evidence to back them up. And while it’s certainly true that questions from Democracts were done in a more hostile tone than those from the GOP, the open disdain, or at least concern, about Kennedy’s actions as of recent was entirely bipartisan.
I’ll give you some highlights, for lack of a better term, along with a summary of the key thing we learned in each highlight.
Mark Warner (D):
Kennedy claims neither he, nor anyone else, has any idea how many Americans died from COVID-19
Kennedy is unwilling to state that COVID vaccines did “anything” to prevent deaths from COVID-19
Kennedy was unaware of some specific implications of the latest budget bill on American healthcare
John Barrasso (R):
Barrasso points out all the chaos and failure that has happened under Kennedy, including the largest measles outbreak in decades.
Kennedy claims that CDC vaccine guidance has never before, in the history of the agency, been “clear, evidence based, and trustworthy.” He claims his leadership is the first time this will ever have happened.
This, by the way, is precisely how you get situations like unhinged people shooting up the CDC’s Atlanta campus. The CDC was born in 1946, initially to combat malaria. But, according to Kennedy, it has never in its entire history been trustworthy on the topic of vaccines. It’s a lie, of course, but those that believe it would logically be very, very pissed off.
Thom Tillis (R):
Tillis starts off by saying he’s going to make a statement and essentially begs Kennedy to not respond in the moment, but to go and gather his answers after the hearing and present them. Kennedy repeatedly attempts to answer those questions anyway.
Tillis points out that based on the myriad of conflicting statements Kennedy made within the hearing, he has no idea whether Kennedy thinks Operation Warp Speed was a good thing or not. On the one hand, Kennedy agrees with Tillis and others that Trump should be a Nobel prize for the government’s efforts in creating the mRNA vaccines. On the other, Kennedy claims the vaccines were deadly and can’t account for them being effective at all.
Tillis asks how a CDC Director can be lauded a month ago and fired four weeks later.
Tillis asks for evidence that Kennedy has kept any of the promises he’s made to Congress in the past.
Tillis points out that all he can get out of Kennedy’s HHS to a question about the economic impact of the budget bill that was passed amount to “word salad.”
Kennedy affirms his position that the COVID vaccines cause “serious harm” and “death”.
Folks, that’s as polite a way for a GOP Senator to state publicly that they don’t trust Kennedy as is possible.
Bernie Sanders (I):
This one takes a brief bit of preamble. When Senator Warren was questioning Kennedy about his decision to fire Dr. Susan Monarez as Director of CDC, she asked Kennedy about Monarez’s public claim in a WSJ editorial that he demanded she sign off on what ACIP would recommend prior to them even meeting and insisted she fire a slew of senior staffers at CDC for who knows what reason. Kennedy told Warren that was not true and, when she asked what was the reason he fired her, got this in response.
That is obviously not a believable story. I mean, to make light of it, why would an untrustworthy person tell their boss they were not trustworthy instead of lying?
In any case, with that context, we move on to the takeaways from the back and forth with Bernie Sanders.
Kennedy reiterates his claim that Monarez lied about why she was fired and that, again, he did so because she told him she was not trustworthy.
Kennedy calls a net -$100 million investment in rural healthcare “the largest infusion of public money” into rural healthcare.
Kennedy affirms the COVID vaccines are the deadliest vaccines in history and that Trump should get a Nobel prize for helping develop them.
Kennedy launches into a conspiracy theory in which the largest NGOs and others that disagree with him have all been corrupted by the pharma industry.
Bill Cassidy (R):
Cassidy is the one many of us were waiting to see in this hearing, for multiple reasons. He’s a doctor, for instance. He was a pivotal vote in Kennedy’s confirmation hearings and extracted several promises about vaccines and policy during those hearings. And, finally, several other Republican Senators have pointed to him as the one they trust on healthcare and medicine issues.
Kennedy again affirms that Trump deserves a Nobel prize for Operation Warp Speed, despite saying those vaccines killed people. Cassidy then points out that Kennedy sued to limit access to COVID vaccines before his time in government.
Cassidy points out that the ACIP conflicts of interests data that Kennedy has claimed was wildly inaccurate. Kennedy attempts to argue the point, but fails.
Cassidy points out that several current ACIP members, which Kennedy hand-picked, serve as paid witnesses in vaccine injury trials and asks Kennedy if that is a conflict of interests. Kennedy responds it may be a bias, but not a financial conflict of interest, which makes zero sense.
Stick around for the end in which Cassidy shares some personal interactions he’s had with constituents demonstrating precisely how Kennedy’s policy actions have introduced a limitation of vaccine access and chaos and confusion among doctors as to what they can prescribe or not, which is exactly what we indicated would happen.
There was much, much more. More dissembling. More conspiracy theories. More lies. By any honest viewing of the hearing, it was a bipartisan verbal indication of no confidence in Kennedy, with some Senators choosing to be more polite about it than others. This was a more pointed and thorough takedown of Kennedy from both sides of the aisle than even I had hoped for.
So of course the White House is pretending this is all a partisan hitjob because Kennedy is so awesome.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended Kennedy after he faced tense questioning by both Democratic and Republican senators.
The Health secretary “is taking flak because he’s over the target,” she said on X several hours after the hearing concluded. “The Trump Administration is addressing root causes of chronic disease, embracing transparency in government, and championing gold-standard science.”
Although she blamed Democrats for attacking “that commonsense effort,” Republican senators such as Cassidy and Barrasso had also expressed disapproval during the hearing with some of Kennedy’s most recent actions concerning vaccines.
As I said in a previous post, this is by no means the end of Kennedy’s tenure at HHS. But it just might be the beginning of that end. No amount of White House gaslighting is going to be able to counter rising illnesses, full hospitals, or explosive growth in the casket manufacturing business.
It’s a bit jarring to be reminded that it was only on June 10th that RFK Jr. decided to fire every member of ACIP, the CDC’s immunization advisory panel. Those 14 experts had a variety of backgrounds all related to and demonstrating industry experience specifically dealing with vaccination science and policy. They were replaced by an 8 member panel, handpicked by Kennedy and chockablock with vaccine deniers/skeptics and folks whose credentials don’t exactly match Kennedy’s description when he announced the new panel.
Now, it’s one thing when someone like me, who has been quite out in the open about my distaste for this administration and for Kennedy specifically, to talk about how bad this all is. And it is! ACIP recommendations effect everything from the availability and recommendations of vaccine schedules among doctors to whether and what coverage insurance companies are mandated to provide for them.
But when a staunch GOP Senator who voted to confirm Kennedy’s appointment as Secretary of HHS says that Kennedy’s choices for ACIP were so bad that he’d rather they not meet at all? Well, that should be indicative of just how absurd Kennedy’s behavior has become.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) called for the delay of this week’s meeting of a federal vaccine advisory panel handpicked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, citing concerns about members’ lack of experience and potential bias towards vaccines.
“Wednesday’s meeting should not proceed with a relatively small panel, and no CDC Director in place to approve the panel’s recommendations,” Cassidy wrote in a post on X late Monday evening.
He noted that members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices “do not have significant experience studying microbiology, epidemiology or immunology,” and some may even have a “preconceived bias against” mRNA vaccines.
The Hill, which I generally like, has presented this quote in such a way that I don’t think it really provides the full impact of Cassidy’s statement. It almost sounds like just your run of the mill reaction from a politician on social media.
It’s not. This is Cassidy saying that Kennedy’s ACIP advisors are so ill-equipped to perform the role they’ve been assigned by RFK Jr. that they simply shouldn’t perform their jobs at all. Cassidy further couched his statements by saying that failing to at least delay the meeting, given how the panel is currently viewed, would create distrust of its recommendations. But that’s just saying the same thing again: the public would distrust ACIP’s recommendations because the ACIP panel members are largely completely unqualified for the role and some are actively hostile towards good public health policy.
ACIP is set to meet today and tomorrow. I somehow doubt that Kennedy’s arrogance, nevermind that of his boss, will allow him to delay the meeting as Cassidy requests. And, when that ends up being the case, the only remaining question is the one that we’ve been asking for some time: when is Congress going to put an end to RFK Jr.’s tenure at HHS?
