In his appearance Thursday before the Senate Finance Committee, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a series of extreme statements that exposed the fascist character of his assault on vaccines, science and public health. Throughout the three-hour hearing, Kennedy repeatedly told senators they were “making stuff up,” dismissed basic scientific evidence as “confusion” and doubled down on his campaign to eliminate vaccine protections for American children.
When questioned by Senator Maggie Hassan about whether COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of American lives, Kennedy responded with a total dismissal of scientific consensus: “The only confusion I’ve expressed is how many they saved. I don’t think anybody knows.” This statement flies in the face of overwhelming evidence, including research published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases estimating that nearly 20 million lives were preserved globally during the first year of vaccination alone.
Kennedy’s most revealing statement came when defending his firing of CDC officials involved in the pandemic response: “The people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving. And that’s why we need bold, competent and creative new leadership at CDC, people able and willing to chart a new course.”
This declaration makes clear that Kennedy’s attacks on science flow directly from the far-right opposition to all public health measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. Any semblance of public health must be replaced by “a new course” predicated on opposition to all efforts to save lives.
The Democratic senators’ theatrical outrage represents nothing but hot air from a party that has refused to organize workers in defense of public health, let alone Trump’s ongoing coup and efforts to establish a military dictatorship in the United States. These are the same Democrats who sat silently as the Biden administration dismantled COVID-19 protections, ended the Public Health Emergency and denigrated masking, policies that laid the political foundations for Kennedy’s far more extreme assault today.