United States Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr sparred with US senators over his management of health agencies and past comments about COVID-19 vaccines and antidepressants. At several points during the hours-long Senate Finance Committee hearing on Thursday, Kennedy said senators were making up information or distorting his record.
“You are being dishonest right now,” he told Democrat Senator Tina Smith after she said he had blamed antidepressants on a recent school shooting in her home state of Minnesota.
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When Republican Senator Bill Cassidy from Louisiana said the government was “effectively” denying people vaccines, Kennedy retorted, “You’re wrong.
“You’re just making stuff up to scare people, and it’s a lie,” he said to Senator Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat who said Kennedy was limiting access to COVID-19 vaccines.
PolitiFact fact-checked some of the most notable back-and-forth moments from Kennedy’s testimony.
How many Americans died from COVID?
Senator Mark Warner asked Kennedy whether he accepts that “a million Americans died from COVID.”
“I don’t know how many died,” Kennedy said.
“You’re the secretary of Health and Human Services,” Warner said. “You don’t have any idea how many Americans died from COVID?”
“I don’t think anybody knows that because there was so much data chaos coming out of the CDC,” Kennedy said.
More than 1 million Americans have died from COVID-19, according to multiple statistical estimates.
Many patients who died had comorbidities, including hypertension, cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Researchers say that identifying causal relationships between comorbidities and outcomes in COVID-19 is methodologically difficult.
Kennedy changes tune on 2020 COVID vaccine initiative
Cassidy asked Kennedy if he agreed that President Donald Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed, Trump’s 2020 initiative that resulted in the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines.
“Absolutely,” Kennedy said.
Cassidy said Kennedy’s support surprised him, because of Kennedy’s COVID-19 vaccine criticisms and actions. Kennedy cancelled funding for mRNA vaccine research, the science that led to the rapid development of the vaccine.
In 2021, Kennedy falsely said the COVID-19 vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made”.
In the September 4 hearing, Kennedy said that Operation Warp Speed was “genius” because “it got the vaccine to market that was perfectly matched to the virus at that time, when it was badly needed because there was low natural immunity and or people getting very badly injured by COVID.”
‘Everybody’ can’t get COVID-19 vaccines
Hassan said Kennedy was limiting people’s access to the COVID-19 vaccine.
“People who want to exercise their freedom of choice are being denied that because you are citing data that you won’t produce to the public,” Hassan said.
Kennedy pushed back.
“Everybody can get the vaccine,” Kennedy said. “You’re just making things up to scare people, and it’s a lie.”
The Food and Drug Administration has limited the groups of people who are approved to get the most updated COVID-19 vaccine. Anyone age 65 and older and any person 6 months and older who has at least one underlying health condition that increases their risk of severe COVID-19 infection are approved to get the 2025-26 COVID-19 vaccine, according to August 27 guidance.
People who don’t fit into those categories aren’t banned from getting a COVID-19 vaccine. But getting one might require doctors to prescribe the vaccine “off-label”, making the process more challenging and potentially more costly.
Kennedy’s unsupported tie of violent crime, antidepressants
Smith said Kennedy blamed school shootings on antidepressants after the August 27 shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis that killed two children and injured 21 people. Kennedy said Smith was “just making stuff up” and he had not said that.
During an August 28 interview, a “Fox & Friends” host asked Kennedy if the government was investigating whether gender dysphoria medications play a role in violent crimes. Robin Westman, the 23-year-old who fired through the windows of the Minneapolis church during a morning Mass, was assigned male at birth and later changed names to reflect a female identity.
Kennedy said that the Health and Human Services Department is “launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence”. SSRI drugs – selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors – are a class of antidepressant.
Kennedy previously has linked antidepressants to violent crime.
Psychiatry experts have told PolitiFact and other fact-checkers there isn’t a causal relationship between antidepressants and shootings. About 11 percent of the nation’s adult population uses antidepressants, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Experts say if there were a link between violence and the medications, they would expect higher rates of violence.
Senator Ben Ray Luján and RFK Jr spar over the role of vaccine skeptic David Geier at HHS
Senator Ben Ray Luján and Kennedy had a back and forth over Kennedy’s hiring of David Geier, a longtime vaccine critic.
In March, the Washington Post reported that Kennedy hired Geier to conduct a study of links between vaccines and autism.
Kennedy told Luján that Geier, who is working as a contractor, is not conducting a study. Instead, Kennedy said Geier had access to the Vaccine Safety Datalink, “the biggest repository for vaccine information”.
Kennedy didn’t specify what Geier would do with that information. However, at an August 26 White House Cabinet meeting, Kennedy said his department would have announcements “finding interventions, certain interventions, now that are clearly, almost certainly, causing autism”.
Autism researchers and people on the autism spectrum have told PolitiFact that more people have been diagnosed with autism as its definition and diagnostic criteria expanded over time; autism has no identified single cause.
Shooter who targeted CDC Atlanta headquarters had mental health issues, motivated by anger over COVID-19 vaccines
Senator Raphael Warnock brought up the deadly August 8 shooting at the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta, asking Kennedy if he had been to the campus as health secretary before the shooting.
“No,” Kennedy responded. Kennedy did visit the campus after the shooting, but no employees were there.
Patrick Joseph White, 30, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he fired nearly 200 rounds of ammunition, killing responding DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose.
Officials with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said they recovered “written documentation” showing that White distrusted the COVID-19 vaccine and blamed it for making him depressed and suicidal.
Senator Bill Cassidy fact-checks RFK Jr’s statistics about conflicts of interest on vaccine panel
While speaking about a need for new CDC leadership, Kennedy said it’s “imperative that we remove officials with conflicts of interest and catastrophically bad judgment and political agendas”.
Later in the hearing, Senator Bill Cassidy told Kennedy he was wrong about the level of conflict of interest in the vaccine panel whose 17 members Kennedy recently fired.
“It was not 97 percent as alleged, rather, it was 6.9 percent,” Cassidy said.
To be on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunisation Practices, members are required to declare conflicts of interest. At each meeting and prior to every vote, members are again asked to disclose conflicts of interest and to abstain from voting if they have one.
The CDC has published the conflicts of interest disclosed by each member at every meeting from 2000 to 2024.
An August 18 research report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association analysed conflicts of interest in the ACIP and the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee over the past 20 years. Researchers found conflicts of interest have dropped. Conflicts of interest in the ACIP fell to 5 percent in 2024.
Teacher’s union did not write an order to close schools.
Kennedy said “the CDC allowed the teachers union to write the order to close schools” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is misleading.
The American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teacher’s union in the US, consulted with the CDC in 2021 on its school reopening guidance, but it did not “write” the order to close down schools at the start of the pandemic.
A House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, spearheaded by Republicans, investigated whether the union had influenced the CDC’s school reopening policy.
According to the committee, the CDC in February 2021 shared a draft copy of its school reopening guidance with the teacher’s union and added a union-requested trigger that called for closing schools if COVID-19 cases reached a certain threshold.
According to a Democratic memo that Politico reported on in 2023, the CDC consulted multiple stakeholders before the union was aware of the guidance.
The CDC consulted about 50 organisations while developing its guidance, according to the memo, did not invite the teacher’s union to a forum to help preview the guidance, and the union received the draft days after the CDC sent it to several other groups for feedback. The union testified, Politico reported, that it learned about the draft guidance from The New York Times.
Research shows fluoride in water at recommended levels is safe
Kennedy touted his actions on “fluoride in our drinking water” during his opening statement. In April, Kennedy said he would advise the CDC to stop recommending fluoridated drinking water after misleadingly linking it to cancer and other health risks.
The CDC has long touted fluoridated drinking water as one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. Research shows that drinking fluoridated water at the United States’ recommended levels – 0.7 milligrams per litre – is safe and prevents cavities and tooth decay. Health risks associated with fluoride are tied to higher levels of exposure than what is permitted in US drinking water.
A new Florida law removed fluoride from drinking water, overriding local policies, this summer.