ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified in the Senate today, and as expected, it was fiery.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROBERT F KENNEDY JR: You're making things up to scare people, and it's a lie.
MAGGIE HASSAN: I don't think...
KENNEDY: Anything to get...
HASSAN: I don't - with respect, I do not think I'm the one making the things up. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
KENNEDY: You are lying right now, senator.
SHAPIRO: That is just a taste of the nearly three-hour hearing. That exchange was with Senator Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire. NPR health policy correspondent Selena Simmons-Duffin watched the hearing closely. Hi, Selena.
SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: Hi, Ari.
SHAPIRO: There's been chaos recently at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including the firing of the recently confirmed CDC director. So what did we learn about that today?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Well, right as the hearing was beginning, Susan Monarez, the CDC director who was fired, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. And this is just a few days after Kennedy published his own op-ed there. Kennedy, in the hearing, confirmed that he asked her to fire career CDC scientists and Monarez refused, but he also contradicted her account. Here is Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat from Massachusetts.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KENNEDY: Medicaid...
ELIZABETH WARREN: Did you tell...
KENNEDY: ...Will still pay for them.
WARREN: ... The head of the CDC that if she refused to sign off on your changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, that she had to resign?
KENNEDY: No, I told her that she had to resign 'cause I asked her, are you a trustworthy person? And she said, no.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: You can hear Warren and others in the room respond to that with, what? He went on to accuse Monarez of lying. I asked Monarez's attorney if she had any response to this version of events, but I haven't heard back.
SHAPIRO: Vaccines came up a bit in that clip of tape you just played, and they were a major topic of the hearing. What was discussed?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Yeah, so one really interesting line of questioning from both sides of the aisle was about Operation Warp Speed. President Trump has described this as one of his greatest accomplishments. It involved the government and private companies working together to bring a new vaccine to market for this emerging virus in record time. Kennedy praised Trump throughout the hearing, but he struggled to square that praise with his recent actions as secretary.
SHAPIRO: Give us an example. What do you mean?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Well, this year, because the FDA's approval of the COVID-19 booster limits who can get it, there's all this confusion about how the fall rollout is going to go. Kennedy, in the hearing, refused to acknowledge that that does, in effect, limit who has access to the vaccines. And he also refused to concede that COVID vaccines saved millions of lives, which is something there's scientific consensus about. Here is an exchange with Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana. He's a physician, and he told Kennedy it surprised him that here he was praising Operation Warp Speed after working as an attorney to restrict access to that vaccine.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BILL CASSIDY: It also surprises me because you've canceled, or HHS did but apparently under your direction, $500 million in contracts using the mRNA vaccine platform that was critical to Operation Warp Speed; again, an accomplishment that I think President Trump should get a Nobel Prize for.
SHAPIRO: Now, Selena, that's striking because Senator Cassidy cast one of the key votes to confirm Kennedy as health secretary.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Yeah, that's right. But that's only after Kennedy made lots of promises not to drastically change federal vaccine policy. Cassidy supports vaccines. He's a physician. He said he's seen how they spare people suffering and save lives. But Kennedy has now gone and broken a lot of those promises, and Cassidy has been reticent to publicly hold him to account. Cassidy and several other Republican senators in this hearing were critical of Kennedy's anti-vaccine posture, but they didn't go so far as to join their Democratic colleagues in calling for him to resign.
SHAPIRO: But apart from Congress, we saw this letter yesterday signed by more than a thousand HHS employees and public health organizations calling for Kennedy's resignation. Any news on that front?
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: There are no signs that Kennedy plans to resign. The question is whether President Trump will continue to back him. So far, it seems like, yes, Trump still supports him and is giving him leeway to upend federal health policy in all sorts of different ways.
SHAPIRO: NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin, thank you.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
