RFK Jr tells Senate he doesn’t know how many Americans died of COVID

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appeared before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday in a hearing that made the Jerry Springer show look like an Oxford Union debate, but amid the pompous posturing from Democrats, an important truth came out.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., thought he scored major points by asking RFK Jr the gotcha question — “how many Americans died of COVID?” When the secretary said that he did not know, a giddy Warner thought he could spike the football.

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But here’s the thing: RFK Jr. is right. Nobody actually knows how many people have died of COVID, because we don’t really even know what dying of COVID means. 

Democrats and dim-witted fact-checkers will cry out that we have that data, that both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization say 1.2 million lives were lost to the Chinese virus.

However, we know that at the height of the pandemic some motorcycle accidents were listed as COVID deaths if the victim tested positive for it, and we know that thousands and thousands of Americans with myriad medical conditions died with, not of, COVID.

UNITED STATES – SEPTEMBER 4: Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies during the Senate Finance Committee hearing on “The President’s 2026 Health Care Agenda” in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Thursday, September 4, 2025. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

We also know that during the pandemic, both the CDC and the WHO were two of the worst and least reliable actors in the entire miserable fiasco. Everybody paying attention admits now that CDC guidance on masking and social distancing might as well have been magical incantations.

There was no data to back up these restrictions, and even when the CDC did collect data, they didn’t just do a bad job, they intentionally stacked the deck to make COVID look as deadly and terrifying as possible.

Meanwhile, the CDC and the medical establishment nationwide spent most of 2020, as COVID restrictions raged, not just refusing to listen to contrary voices like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Dr. Scott Atlas, but trying to destroy their lives and careers.

This led to another very telling moment in the hearing, this time involving Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who made one of the most hilariously comic appeals to authority in recent memory. 

The socialist senator told Kennedy, “We’ve got the entire medical community on one side, The AMA [American Medical Association] representing hundreds of thousands of doctors, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Health Association.” Then he asked Kennedy, what organizations does his side have?

Senate HELP Committee Chair Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Bernie Sanders formed an unlikely partnership to blast the turmoil rocking the CDC.  (Getty Images)

I’m going to be less polite than the secretary was and say, none of them, thank goodness, because these are the same lunatics who lied their way through COVID and affirm 87 genders.

Kennedy’s more politic answer was that he is backed up by and working with the very scientists, like Bhattacharya, who were right about COVID in the first place, while Bernie’s alphabet soup of medical incompetence was masking babies.

Democrats and the medical establishment are now like middle-school bullies who don’t have a high school growth spurt and are suddenly as harmless as a flower. President Donald Trump knows this, and it is exactly why he tapped the Kennedy scion to fix public health.

In a less cynical time, the coin of the Kennedy realm was public service. John F. Kennedy campaigning in West Virginia in 1960, looking up at the voters on their porch, knowing they were the boss, not him, asking for their trust, not demanding it.

So too, RFK Jr. is hellbent on serving the people, not the establishment. That’s why so many MAHA moms who know they have been lied to about what they feed their kids held their noses and voted for the orange man.

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The obvious elephant in the hearing on Thursday was pointed out by Sanders himself: Every single senator on the dais takes big bucks from big pharmaceutical companies, the same companies that fund all the “independent research” thrown at Kennedy.

The age of “just shut up and trust the science,” is well and truly over. As George W. Bush once put it, “fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice…well, you’re not gonna fool me again.” That’s where the American people are when it comes to the medical establishment.

Kennedy stood his ground in the contentious and cacophonous hearing. He gave as good as he got, and he is absolutely right that nobody knows how many died of COVID, or how many were saved by the vaccine.

The very people in the CDC tasked with tracking such data fumbled so badly that neither RFK Jr. nor the American people can rely on their bungled assessments.

This chaos of data, as the secretary called it, is exactly why he is cleaning house at HHS, and that is exactly what President Trump and the voters want and expect from him. 

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