WASHINGTON — U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. answered questions about his vaccine policy during a contentious U.S. Senate Finance Committee hearing on Thursday.
During an exchange with Sen. Michael Bennet, D.-Colo., asked about the new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisors whose views on the safety of vaccines were “completely outside the mainstream.”
Bennet, D.-Colo., asked Kennedy about Retsef Levi, who specializes in analytics, saying mRNA vaccines cause “serious harm, including death, especially among young people.”
Kennedy said, “I wasn’t aware he said it, but I agree with it.”
In June, Kennedy fired the CDC’s Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, the panel that guides decisions about vaccines that impact insurance coverage nationwide.
“No one in your job has ever fired every committee member all at once,” Bennet told Kennedy during the hearing.
Kennedy also defended the appointment of Dr. Robert Malone, who was involved in the early research on MRNA vaccines and was accused of spreading misinformation when he suggested a causal relationship with a form of AIDS, brain damage, and fertility.
“This is not a podcast. It’s the American people’s health that’s on the line here,” Bennet told Kennedy. “This is the last thing, by the way, our parents need when their kids are going back to school is to have the kind of confusion and expense and scarcity that you are creating as the result of your ideology.”
Kennedy also said Susan Monarez, the former director of the CDC, was lying about why she was ousted after 29 days on the job.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., entered Monarez’s op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday and claiming that she had refused to rubber-stamp reckless directives.
“Public health shouldn’t be partisan,” Monarez wrote. “Vaccines have saved millions of lives under administrations of both parties. Parents deserve a CDC they can trust to put children above politics, evidence above ideology and facts above fear.”
Related story: Florida school districts wait for ‘official guidance’ on childhood vaccines mandated by law
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