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We are meeting today to consider the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
to be Secretary of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services.
We are still waiting to get all of our members here, and while we wait for that to occur, we will proceed with statements.
And I will proceed first, then Senator Wyden, and then we will rotate from one side to the other until we are at a point where we are prepared for the vote.
Mr. Kennedy if confirmed will have the opportunity to deliver much-needed change to our nation's health care system.
He has spent his career fighting to end America's chronic illness epidemic and has been a leading advocate for health care transparency both for patients and for taxpayers.
Mr. Kennedy has also clearly responded to our questions during the rigorous due diligence process in his hearing also and in the course of answering over 900 questions for the record that were asked by members of this committee.
In response to members of the committee, Mr. Kennedy has even amended his ethics agreement going beyond what is required by the Government Office of Ethics.
Mr. Kennedy has proven his commitment to the role of Secretary of the HHS, and I will vote in favor of his nomination.
I strongly encourage my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to do the same.
And with that, I recognize our Ranking Member, Senator Wyden, for his remarks.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I'll have a brief statement and then several of my colleagues on our side are also going to
make brief statements.
This morning, we're going to vote on Robert Kennedy's nomination to serve as our nation's chief health care officer.
Before we get to Mr. Kennedy and why I believe he is singularly unfit to serve as HHS secretary, I'd like to say this.
The last several days, we've witnessed an authoritarian takeover of our federal government by Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
They have set their sights on a full purge of anyone in government that doesn't bend the knee and follow their orders.
They've taken over the Treasury Department's payment system.
And colleagues, that has a direct effect on major programs within our committee's jurisdiction that includes Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
For example, this committee voted for a major reform of pharmacy benefit manager legislation.
We passed it 26 to nothing, but Trump and Musk killed it.
think what they could do with abuse of the payment system.
Now, in my view, much of this is of dubious legality and constitutional authority and certainly flies in face of congressional responsibilities.
I'll wrap up on this point by saying I hope our colleagues on the other side of the aisle will not sit by while Musk and Trump make a mockery of the power Republicans hold in their congressional majority.
Now more than ever, the American people need leaders that will stand up to these abuses.
That brings me to Mr. Kennedy.
A recent analysis showed that Mr. Kennedy has made 114 separate appearances in just the last four years where he has espoused anti-vaccine views or spread information about the efficacy of vaccines.
Misinformation, specifically.
In 36 of those instances, Mr. Kennedy directly linked vaccines to autism.
Last week, Mr. Kennedy was given ample authority on a bipartisan basis to recant his decades-long career peddling anti-vaccine conspiracies.
Instead, he spent his time with us dodging and weaving and gave no indication that if confirmed as HHS Secretary, he would stand by the long-settled science surrounding routine vaccinations.
Just take the Samoa measles outbreak as an example.
Mr. Kennedy told me, and I quote, we don't know what was killing them.
Speaking about the 83 measles deaths during an outbreak of the disease in 2019.
Just yesterday, colleagues, the Director General of Health from Samoa called this claim a total fabrication.
peddling these conspiracy theories as the nation's chief health officer is going to be deadly for kids across the country.
On abortion, Mr. Kennedy's answers once again raise still more questions.
He refused to tell us whether he would blindly follow a directive from Donald Trump to break the law and end access to Mifepristone.
And he seemed to have no understanding of his role in enforcing existing federal laws that guarantee women the right to life-saving abortion care.
Mr. Kennedy also failed on several occasions to show a basic understanding of the Medicare and Medicaid programs he would be tasked with overseeing.
Colleagues, that alone should be disqualifying.
Mr. Kennedy has given us no reason to believe he'll be anything other than a rubber stamp for plans to gut Medicaid and rip health care away from the American people and be a yes man if ordered by Musk or Trump to take an illegal action.
I close with this, colleagues.
Today, we're going to make a judgment about the future of science in this country.
We're going to make decisions that are going to impact the health and well-being of Americans for years to come.
I agree, and I say this to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, that the healthcare status quo needs substantial changes so we get better, more affordable care to patients.
And that leaves, given my statement, the question in front of us now that's pretty simple.
Do senators want their legacy to include disregarding basic health science and instead elevate conspiracy theorists?
Making Robert Kennedy Secretary of Health and Human Services, in my view, colleagues, would be a grave threat to the health of the American people.
And I urge my colleagues this morning to vote no.
So Senator Wyden, we have all of our members here.
Senator Wyden and I have agreed that we will have two or three on each side who wanted to make statements, do so before the vote.
So please everyone hold with us while we have those statements made and then we will proceed to the vote.
I know we've got a lot of folks here pushing on some... Do you want to vote now?
Mr. Chairman?
Mr. Chairman, I've got several colleagues who were under the impression after we talked that we would have two or three and I'm happy for both sides to make brief remarks and I'd still like to stay with that.
I did make that commitment and so
I could say to my colleagues on my side, I would appreciate it if you would hold your remarks until after the vote.
We will let a couple on your side have their remarks, and then we will proceed to the vote.
Great, thank you.
And who would be next?
Senator Cantwell.
Mr. Chairman, thank you.
I didn't, you know, when you said two or three people, I didn't know who you had in mind, but being next in seniority, I appreciate the opportunity.
Today is very concerning to me.
because of the future of what I think our nation faces.
When I think of this issue, I think of my Pacific Northwest leadership, how Paul Allen, on his own, invested $100 million to fight Ebola.
I think of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, not just trying to eradicate polio and work on these issues, but to think of a regime that helps not just our nation's health, but global health.
So with the UW, the University of Washington, the Cancer Research Center, all of these entities are a collaboration of saying we have to go faster in solving these threats to our nation as it relates to health.
Now, we can have a big discussion, which I think you guys all want to have a big discussion about whether and when what happened in the Wuhan province.
But I can tell you, we were the first city.
We had the first patient.
We had the first people who died in nursing homes.
We had an emergency room at a hospital who basically was just begging for any equipment we could get them.
The whole community stood up and moved as fast as we possibly could and broke down barriers to save lives.
And that is what we have to continue to do on innovation.
We cannot let another country get ahead of us on some sort of warfare issue and not have a response when it comes to a vaccine.
So the innovation, innovation is what Mary Holland was arguing for on Steve Bannon the other day after the after the second hearing of Robert F. Kennedy, his father gave a famous speech.
I told him in my office, in my family, the Kennedys stood up.
But when he answered Senator Cassidy's question, and he couldn't even give him the answer that, yes, the data is there to support vaccines today.
I don't need any more data.
All of a sudden, I saw this world that we got affected by in Seattle.
not being stood up for.
I need someone at HHS who is going to say we're going to be a leader in medical, technology, science, vaccines.
We are going to fight foreign powers.
We are going to be there to provide global health.
And I don't want to recalcitrant.
I need a leader.
And that is why I'm voting no.
Thank you.
Senator Wyden and I have agreed that Senator Warnock will now speak.
Following Senator Warnock, we will proceed to the vote, and then anyone else who wants to make remarks will be allowed to make remarks.
Senator Warnock.
Thank you so very much, Mr. Chairman.
At a rally a few months ago, Donald Trump said that he was going to allow Mr. Robert Kennedy to, quote, go wild on health.
Go wild.
Of all the things that I can think of that I'd like to see a Secretary of Health and Human Services do, Go Wild is not on the list.
Mr. Robert Kennedy is manifestly unqualified for the job he seeks.
And in both my live and written questions for the record, he failed to commit to protecting access to affordable health care.
failed to commit to protecting the people who are protecting us.
The problem that the CDC has is that every day these noble civil servants and workers protect us from dangers that we don't see.
And often you don't get credit for protecting people from things that they don't see.
I simply do not trust him to oversee the CDC.
He's unqualified, and I dare say everybody here knows it.
We need a serious person at the helm of the HHS, an agency responsible for the health of about half of all Americans.
Mr. Kennedy appears more obsessed in chasing conspiracy theories than chasing solutions to lower healthcare costs for working families in Georgia and to make sure that we are protected.
The last thing we need is a dilettante.
dabbling in conspiracy theories at HHS.
I cannot vote for a nominee who is not going to lower healthcare costs for Georgians, who is going to undermine basic science in public health, who puts his own interests above the health and well-being of others.
The health and well-being of all of our families, the people who count on us to think about them in these rooms of power.
I urge all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to look past politics and think of country and to find the moral courage to do what's right.
Oppose this nomination.
Thank you, Senator Warnock.
We now have not only a quorum, but all members of the committee are present.
I move that the committee favorably report the nomination of the Honorable Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
of California to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Is there a second?
Second.
There is a second.
The clerk will call the roll.
Mr. Grassley.
Aye.
Mr. Grassley.
Aye.
Mr. Cornyn.
Aye.
Mr. Cornyn.
Aye.
Mr. Thune.
Aye.
Mr. Thune.
Aye.
Mr. Scott.
Aye.
Mr. Scott.
Aye.
Mr. Cassidy.
Aye.
Mr. Cassidy.
Aye.
Mr. Lankford.
Aye.
Mr. Lankford.
Aye.
Mr. Danes.
Aye.
Mr. Danes.
Aye.
Mr. Young.
Mr. Young?
Aye.
Mr. Barrasso?
Aye.
Mr. Johnson?
Aye.
Mr. Tillis?
Aye.
Mrs. Blackburn?
Aye.
Mr. Marshall?
Aye.
Mr. Wyden?
No.
Ms.
Cantwell?
No.
Mr. Bennett?
No.
Mr. Warner?
No.
Mr. Whitehouse?
No.
Ms.
Hassen?
No.
Ms.
Cortez Masto?
No.
Ms.
Warren?
No.
Mr. Sanders?
No.
Mr. Smith, no.
Mr. Lujan, no.
Mr. Warnock, no.
Mr. Welch, no.
Mr. Chairman?
Chairman votes aye.
Mr. Chairman, the final tally is 14 ayes, 13 nays.
The vote was, would the clerk please restate the vote?
Mr. Chairman, the final tally was 14 ayes, 13 nays.
The vote was 14-13.
The nomination is reported favorably.
We will now turn to other senators who would like to make a statement.
Since I asked my Republican colleagues to hold off at the outset, I'll go to the Republican side next.
First, Senator Tillis.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I voted aye today and I want to just briefly explain why.
I believe in my 65 years, I'll be 65 in August, that Mr. Kennedy will be one of the first people coming before who is in fact not a trained health care expert.
He views this through the lens of an attorney.
He's brought many lawsuits on food safety, vaccine safety, a number of other things.
But Mr. Chair,
I think it was Senator Warnock that said that the president said he was going to go wild in the Department of Health and Human Services.
I hope he does.
I hope he goes wild and actually finds a way to reduce the cost of health care.
I hope he goes wild and instead of having the discussions that we have had for the 10 years that I've been in the Senate of making Medicaid work and making people on Medicaid healthier, I hope he goes wild and figures out how to do it because the status quo has not achieved much in the way of gain.
I hope he goes wild on food safety discussions so that we can actually improve our food safety supply.
I hope he goes wild on the health care supply chains and in fact tries to make sure that drug prices go down instead of bludgeoning pharmaceutical companies get everybody in the room and make sure that we do this right.
reduce the cost of bringing a vaccine to market, reduce the cost of bringing drugs and therapeutics to market, look at the full supply chain, and somebody with a legal mind may do that.
He is no health professional.
In fact, he's the first, I believe, since I've been alive, who's not been a healthcare professional in a scientific sense.
But he is a professional in terms of carrying this forward and holding people accountable through the courts.
And also,
Mr. Chair, I'm not going to go much longer.
But I had a lot of people call me earlier.
I had people from the agriculture industry call me and express concerns.
But I'm not aware of any organized, credible group, the Farm Bureau, the Department of Ag Commissioners, or others.
I did not understand that this was the vote vote.
I thought they had to send it to the whole Senate.
Did he really just get conferred?
And yet I haven't seen any pro-life organizations score this vote or recommend that we should vote against it.
I heard him call the NRA a terrorist organization.
And yet the NRA is silent on his confirmation.
Let's buy the red book, right?
Buy it for your family and friends.
Give it away for birthday gifts.
This book needs to be on everybody's mantle and everybody's bookshelf.
It needs to be everywhere.
Oh my gosh.
Is it really?
He got confirmed?
That's it?
A different kind of disrupter there.
The only way that Senator Kennedy, I'm sorry, Senator Kennedy, the only way that Bobby Kennedy and I will get crosswise is if he does actually take a position against the safety of COVID vaccines.
Wow.
That will be a problem.
Wow.
He answered a very important question to me during the hearing.
No way.
I asked him specifically if it was his intent to let the scientists of the CDC, the NIH, BARDA, and other organizations to work independently.
He said to me under oath that he would.
If he fails to do that, that will be a concern for me and something I'll bring up in a future oversight hearing.
But Mr. Chair, we have not made appreciable progress in Medicaid and improving the health of the population on Medicaid.
We have a SNAP program that does have too much sugar and things that are eligible in that program that should be eliminated to make these people who are on free and reduced lunch.
So this is nuts.
I did not realize that this was the way it was going to be done.
I had no idea that it was just going to be the Finance Committee and then it was over.
Call me naive or whatever.
I just thought they had to go in front of the whole Senate.
And I thought actually what they said here was that they were going to confirm his nomination.
I didn't like, you know, OK, he's acceptable enough to vote on.
So this is really surprising.
This is moving very quickly.
So now on the radar, we should have Jay Bhattacharya, who also should need some kind of Senate hearing in order to be confirmed as NIH director, which would be.
a crazy two for two with regard to the gigaohm timeline and really positive developments because we can't just be swept off of the table, we can't just be dismissed if this is indeed the case.
And so I think we need to keep hammering, I think we need to keep the steady pressure on, and I think we need to keep
restating the incongruencies of the pandemic narrative, and especially those incongruencies that are found in 2020, 2021, and 2022, where all the murder took place.
Because I really think that we have only a few more years before this
truth can be successfully handed down to our children, to the recent graduates of college, to the ones that are currently in college in the next three or four years.
They can be given the real history of the pandemic by giving them this book and making sure that they understand it as the
as the chess piece that it is, as the puzzle piece that it is.
It's not all fake.
It's not all lies.
A lot of it is true.
And a lot of the documents and archiving that this represents is real.
It's just a question of what conclusions are drawn by the narrative that is tied around it.
But if you just took this book and shook all of the primary references out of it, one of the ones that would rise to the top is the Bavari Totoro paper.
It's in this book.
One of the things that would rise to the top is this guy from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Jonathan Cooey, who says at the end of the book that they wouldn't even need a virus.
That's what happens if you shake this book and just distill it down to its most important pieces.
and dismiss all of the other speculation and hypotheticals and worst case scenarios and just think about what you can rely on as true in this book.
And then you see something very real, very useful, something that could push the ball forward in the direction that we need it to go for our grandkids.
I can't help it, I wanna listen to Pocahontas, hold on a second.
out with his son and enrich his family.
The importance of this litigation cannot be overstated.
This is not only about a private company that gets sued and has to pay out.
Vaccine manufacturers often operate on very slim profit margins.
If they get sued repeatedly and successfully,
they simply move out of the vaccine space.
We've already seen this happen with vaccines in the past.
20 years ago, we watched vaccines just move away if they did not have protection from these kinds of lawsuits.
The consequence of Mr. Kennedy's ability to make those lawsuits easier is also the ability to shut down access and manufacturing for vaccines
for every one of us.
And I think that's a terrible mistake.
Thank you.
Senator Welch, did you wish to speak?
I did.
Yes, thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Ranking Member, and thank you, Mr. Ranking Member, for your statement.
I want a disruptor in the health care system and one leading it.
I don't want a destroyer.
And there's three issues before any nominee that we have to consider.
One is character.
Another is competence.
And a third is priorities.
We did not have Carolyn Kennedy here, but she gave a statement.
And she said that Bobby was able to attract people through the strength of his personality, his willingness to take risk and break the rules.
And those might be desirable qualities if it was accompanied by sober judgment and behavior.
Because the person who leads a major organization has to have the confidence of the people
that work for him.
And frankly, some of the things that he did that never explained, a chainsaw taken off the head of a whale, dumping a bear in Central Park for his own amusement.
These are just weird things.
And we never really got into the character issue of what is required for a person who runs such a major department.
The competence question, this is all on a wing and a prayer and a hope.
record of Mr. Kennedy having experience in managing a large organization in medicine, no experience with science, and none of the prior experiences required not only to run a major organization, Health and Human Services, but also the CDC, the NIH, and all the other organizations that are under the umbrella of health care.
And by the way, on the competence issue, let's be candid.
This was a deal where Mr. Kennedy was running for president as a Democrat.
He lost and he approached President Trump to make a deal and for political reasons the deal was made and the appointment was going to be that he's Health and Human Services.
The president has a right to make that deal.
Mr. Kennedy can seek it but it doesn't translate into confidence.
And the third is priorities.
The priority for Mr. Kennedy is about the vaccines and his theory of that.
And we need reliable vaccines and not conspiracy theorists on that.
But you know, the health care system is not working for the American people.
It is too costly.
Our employers who care deeply about providing employer-sponsored health care can't afford these premiums.
The folks who are getting their insurance on their own can't afford it.
Even Obamacare is getting so expensive because the prices are escalating constantly with pharma expenses, with the providers having it, with private equity getting into health care.
Mr. Kennedy's priority was about his view of vaccines.
It was not about making health care more affordable and accessible.
And in response to really a very direct and easy
open-ended question from Senator Cassidy, Mr. Kennedy showed a woeful ignorance even between the difference between Medicare and Medicaid.
So we have a health care system that is not serving, as it should, the interests of American citizens, of American businesses, and American taxpayers.
And I, after this hearing, did not have confidence that Mr. Kennedy would be the one to lead us to a better future.
Thank you.
Thank you, Senator Welch.
That concludes the remarks that senators have requested to make.
And hearing nothing further, I'd like to thank all of our members for attending.
This Finance Committee stands adjourned.
I think I'll be on again at 11.11 with a brief about Brett Weinstein and his last couple podcasts which have just been unmitigated disasters.
A real clown show.
And so I thought I would take the opportunity to archive some of those and to point out some of the highlights of that clown show and how much they are
directed missions of their role, witting or unwitting.
At this point it could be possible, at this point for me, it is possible that Brett Weinstein is actually an unwitting participant in this Scooby-Doo mystery solving exercise.
For the simple fact that these last couple podcasts, him and his wife, have sounded so
naive as they read their script from Heather's laptop.
It's actually, you can almost have pity for them.
One or both of them has no idea how badly they have been used, simply because I just don't think they're that sophisticated.
I don't think, despite their ability to claim their mastery over complex systems, I don't think they have any clue how magnificently they've been folded into this theater, and think it's all because they're smart, that they solved the mystery.
It's really, it's laughable to me at this stage.
Thanks very much for joining me.
I will see you again, probably at 11.11.
Let me get, I don't know, get another cup of coffee in me and see where I can...
If I can get started at 11.11, I've got a decent show for you.
It'll recap the pandemic as it always does and then we'll look at a couple recent videos from Brett Weinstein and kind of analyze what they're saying and what they're not saying and how magnificently they qualify as an admission either to being unwittingly duped
into the theater that they're currently performing, or they have been malevolent participants since the very beginning and now find themselves, you know, basically enacting like a Star Trek script or something like that, where they're just babbling about evolution and nonsense and evolution and nonsense.
And that's all they keep saying, like the beetle that's rolling the dung on their new desk.
It's an extraordinary time to be an American, an extraordinary time to be a patriot, because there are just so many fake patriots on the internet right now.
So many people pretending to be part of a MAGA movement, or a MAHA movement, or a unity movement, or a health freedom movement, or whatever else it is.
And none of these people have a clue what they're fighting for, and have no clue how badly
the military social control software that we have been duped into calling social media.
How, how badly their ability to process reality has been destroyed.
Let's try to help our neighbors.
Let's try to work together to get this information out.
Thank you very much for joining me.
I'll see you in about 45 minutes or so.