Thread 1431973

https://apnews.com/article/kennedy-senate-cdc-3a5a090fc9d9f547377203fe5c61ffa2

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., facing pointed bipartisan questioning at a rancorous three-hour Senate committee hearing on Thursday, tried to defend his efforts to pull back COVID-19 vaccine recommendations and explain the turmoil he has created at federal health agencies.

Kennedy said the fired CDC director was untrustworthy, stood by his past anti-vaccine rhetoric, and disputed reports of people saying they have had difficulty getting COVID-19 shots.

Medical groups and several Democrats in Congress have called for Kennedy to be fired, and his exchanges with Democratic senators on the panel repeatedly devolved into shouting, from both sides.

But some Republican senators also expressed unease with his changes to COVID-19 policies.

The GOP senators noted that Kennedy said President Donald Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for the 2020 Operation Warp Speed initiative to quickly develop mRNA COVID-19 vaccines — and that he also had attacked the safety and continued use of those very shots.

“I can’t tell where you are on Operation Warp Speed,” said Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis.

Tillis and others asked him why the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was fired last week, less than a month into her tenure.

Kennedy said she was dishonest, and that CDC leaders who left the agency last week in support of her deserved to be fired.

He also criticized CDC recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic tied to lockdowns and masking policies, and claimed — wrongly — that they “failed to do anything about the disease itself.”

“The people who at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving,” Kennedy said. He later said they deserved to be fired for not doing enough to control chronic disease.

Democrats express hostility from the start

The Senate Finance Committee had called Kennedy to a hearing about his plans to “Make America Healthy Again,” but Democratic senators pressed Kennedy on his actions around vaccines.

At the start of the hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon tried to have Kennedy formally sworn in as a witness, saying the HHS secretary has a history of lying to the committee. The committee’s chair, Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho, denied the Democrat’s request, saying “the bottom line is we will let the secretary make his own case.”

Wyden went on to attack Kennedy, saying he had “stacked the deck” of a vaccines advisory committee by replacing scientists with “skeptics and conspiracy theorists.”

Last week, the Trump administration fired the CDC’s director less than a month into her tenure. Several top CDC leaders resigned in protest, leaving the agency in turmoil.

The ousted director, Susan Monarez, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that Kennedy was trying to weaken public health protections.

“I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric,” Monarez wrote. “It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected.”

Kennedy told senators he didn’t make such an ultimatum, though he did concede that he had ordered Monarez to fire career CDC scientists.

Kennedy pushed back on concerns raised by multiple Republican senators, including Tillis and Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Both Barrasso and Cassidy are physicians.

Shouting matches and hot comebacks

And the health secretary had animated comebacks as Democratic senators pressed him on the effects of his words and actions.

>senators demand why Pfizer profits have not increased exponentially
Their true constituency.

When Sen. Raphael Warnock, of Georgia, questioned Kennedy about his disparaging rhetoric about CDC employees before a deadly shooting at the agency this summer, Kennedy shot back: “Are you complicit in the assassination attempts on President Trump?”

Kennedy called Sen. Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico “ridiculous,” said he was “talking gibberish” and accused him of “not understanding how the world works” when Lujan asked Kennedy to pledge to share protocols of any research Kennedy was commissioning into autism and vaccines.

He also engaged in a heated, loud exchanges with Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tina Smith of Minnesota.

“I didn’t even hear your question,” Kennedy replied to Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto as the Nevada Democrat repeatedly asked what the agency was doing to lower drug costs for seniors.

He also told Sen. Bernie Sanders that the Vermont independent was not “making any sense.”

Kennedy disputes COVID-19 data

In May, Kennedy — a longtime leader in the anti-vaccine movement — announced COVID-19 vaccines would no longer be recommended for healthy children and pregnant women, a move opposed by medical and public health groups.

In June, he abruptly fired a panel of experts that had been advising the government on vaccine policy. He replaced them with a handpicked group that included several vaccine skeptics, and then shut the door to several doctors groups that had long helped form the committee’s recommendations.

Kennedy has voiced distrust of research that showed the COVID-19 vaccines saved lives, and at Thursday’s hearing even cast doubt on statistics about how people died during the pandemic and on estimates about how many deaths were averted — statistics produced by the agencies he oversees.

He said federal health policy would be based on gold standard science, but confessed that he wouldn’t necessarily wait for studies to be completed before taking action against, for example, potential causes of chronic illness.

“We are not waiting for everything to come in. We are starting now,” he said.

A number of medical groups say Kennedy can’t be counted on to make decisions based on robust medical evidence. In a statement Wednesday, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and 20 other medical and public health organizations issued a joint statement calling on him to resign.

“Our country needs leadership that will promote open, honest dialogue, not disregard decades of lifesaving science, spread misinformation, reverse medical progress and decimate programs that keep us safe,” the statement said.

Many of the nation’s leading public health and medical societies, including the American Medical Association, American Public Health Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have decried Kennedy’s policies and warn they will drive up rates of vaccine-preventable diseases.

---END OF STORY---
I would walk 500 miles
And I would walk 500 more
Just to see all of the unedited Epstein files.
Fall down at everybody's door.

>>1431973 (OP)
>at a rancorous three-hour Senate committee hearing
Jesus I wouldn't be able to listen to his broken Katharine Hepburn voice for 3 hours

>>1431976
>Senators demand why head of health doesn't know who he employs and flip flops on his beliefs depending on the question
ftfy.

>>1431973 (OP)
I think the most embarrassing thing is when he got asked by Warren as to why he fired the CDC chief. Warren asks if it was because she refused to change childhood vaccine guidelines like he was demanding, as she herself testified. RFK responds no; according to him, it was because he fucking asked her directly if she was trustworthy AND SHE APPARENTLY SAID NO.

Like holy fucking shit. Why even lie about this? You could easily just go "We had a disagreement over where to go forward and I found it unbecoming of her position." But instead his brainrotted ass really tried to claim "Uh actually I asked if she was bad and she said yes so I fired her. And she's saying otherwise because she is bad". Jesus fucking christ.

>>1431978
>What evidence do you have to prove that vaccines cause autism? Show your work.
>...SHADDAP
That shitty "report" that's supposed to release this month is guaranteed to be an even bigger crock of shit than the one released earlier this year that used AI to cite nonexistent studies.
Hopefully, it'll be enough to make him resign in shame and subsequently relapse and overdose on heroin.

I say get the scientists out of government. What have they ever done for us except leach money away from hand working Americans!

>>1432077
MAGAs are not capable of feeling shame.

Watched the hearing yesterday and RFK was spitting facts. He makes every other human health guy look like a chump, especially that criminal Fauci. These people who were questioning him, how did they ever get elected? The lack of respect shown to RFK was staggering. 8th grade students have debates with more restraint than that hearing.

>>1432109
These so-called science believers (I refuse to use the term "scientist" because this is a religion to these people) are getting fired for the vaccine, medicines, and other fake beliefs that only exists to enrich the pharma companies. How much money have they pocketed? Anyone with a phd needs to be forced out of government. Government must be ruled by the people and for the people, not too smart for you liberal science believers.

>>1432282
Exactly!
Can any of these so called 'Qacks' (they don't care about u's) name the four humours?
Do any of them know the benefits of blood letting vs leeching?
My uncle cured his baldness by chopping up a pigeon, mixing it with honey, and wearing the mixture under his hat for a month. But do any of them publish that medical miracle?
BRING BACK REAL SCIENCE
TRUMP WILL BALANCE OUR NATIONS HUMOURS

>Based and redpilled on vaxxbloods and modern """"""medicine"""""
>Eats bears and whales
>Casually discards unwanted bears in Central Park so the homeless have something to eat
>Knows the dangers of artificial coloring, parasites, and other evils of the food industry
>Fitness king
>Environmentalist supreme
>Supports Donald Trump, who is equally based
RFK Jr. was the one good Dem and you lost him lmfao

Our secretary of health can do 100 pushups at age 70. The retard you all worshipped put an obese in charge. Working out keeps being associated with right wing ideologies because only righties lift and are healthy.

>>1432383
There is literally nothing healthy about being a Kennedy

>>1432385
He's jacked.

>>1432386
What do you think that means?

>>1432383
>righties lift and are healthy
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Therefore being pro-gun control, pro-vaxx and pro-choice is what righties must also be. After all, what letter is after Arnie's name, certainly when he was voted in as Governator of California: 'D' or 'R'?
And what was the letter of those who voted him in twice: 'D' or 'R'?

>>1432383
>>1432386
I really wouldn't take being jacked as an absolute sign of physical fitness. Bodybuilding is a profession that has a poor record of people growing old, and Kennedy's lifestyle of eating enough roadkill to have a worm die in his brain while also taking his family to bathe in a river filled with chemicals isn't something people should be doing. Not to mention the 18 year heroin addiction.