Senate Confirms Vaccine Skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As Top U.S. Health Official, Resolves Long-Standing Concern Federal Vaccine Policy Was Being Set By People Who Believe In Vaccines
WASHINGTON. The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted 52 to 48 to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, installing at the head of the nation's $1.7 trillion public health apparatus a former environmental lawyer who has spent the past twenty years publicly accusing that apparatus of crimes against the American public.
The confirmation, which followed a sustained personal lobbying campaign from President Donald J. Trump and which prompted only one Republican defection (Senator Mitch McConnell, a polio survivor), places Mr. Kennedy in charge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Indian Health Service, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the federal vaccine recommendation infrastructure that Mr. Kennedy has previously described in interviews as a system that has "injured" or killed an enormous number of children. Mr. Kennedy, asked at his confirmation hearing whether vaccines cause autism, declined to say no.
Within hours of being sworn in by Justice Neil Gorsuch in a private ceremony, Mr. Kennedy began assembling a transition team that included several individuals who had spent the prior decade publicly questioning the safety of the routine childhood immunization schedule, the polio vaccine, and water fluoridation. White House officials, asked Friday whether the administration anticipated any tension between Mr. Kennedy's stated views and the operational mandates of the agencies he now oversees, said only that the new Secretary was, in their words, "going to do incredible things" and confirmed that the Department's existing scientific advisory committees would be reviewed for potential disbanding.
Mr. Trump, asked whether he had vetted Mr. Kennedy's views on infectious disease prior to selecting him, told reporters he had not gone into great detail. "Bobby's a great guy. Tremendous guy. We agree on a lot of things. He's a Kennedy," the President said, in a statement the White House Press Office subsequently distributed without alteration. Senator JD Vance, asked the same question, said the administration's commitment to "Make America Healthy Again" required, in his words, a willingness to question things that the experts had pretended were settled.
The vote concluded a confirmation process during which Mr. Kennedy assured wavering Republican senators that he would not alter the existing vaccine recommendation schedule, a representation he was not asked to put in writing and which his initial personnel decisions had begun calling into question by Friday afternoon. Public health officials in two state health departments, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they had begun briefing local pediatricians on contingency plans for what one official described as a federal vaccine recommendation environment that may shortly cease to function.
At press time, the new Secretary had begun assembling a list of members of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to be replaced.