WASHINGTON — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rejected Sen. Bill Cassidy’s accusations that Kennedy broke vows that he made to secure the Lousiana Republican’s confirmation vote — insisting that “what he’s saying is not true.”
“I went through every promise that I made to them and I’ve kept them all,” Kennedy insisted to News Nation Monday.
“I won’t speculate as to why Senator Cassidy is saying those things. I think anybody can make that speculation. But what he’s saying is not true.”
Cassidy (R-La.), a trained gastroenterologist who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), claimed in an interview with CBS News’ “Face The Nation” broadcast Sunday it was “pretty clear” Kennedy flouted promises he made related to promoting the effectiveness of vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) website currently states: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
“I can tell you that that broken agreement that I had with the secretary, that that was not supposed to happen,” Cassidy told host Margaret Brennan. “So, once you lose trust in somebody, you’re not quite sure what to trust going forward. In fact, you don’t trust anything. [The statement] should go away, because the evidence is that that is not the case.”
Confusingly, the CDC webpage also has a header that says “Vaccines do not cause autism” but indicates in a footnote that the statement only remains online due to an agreement between Kennedy and Cassidy.
“By the way,” Cassidy added, “if you build public health upon a foundation of lies, then you’re going to have the absence of adequate public health. You need to build everything in life on truth.”
The Louisiana Republican voted both to advance Kennedy’s nomination out of committee and to confirm him on the Senate floor, despite RFK Jr.’s longstanding vaccine skepticism.
“Bobby Kennedy was going to have the ear of the president. The president seems to be fascinated with the Kennedys,” Cassidy explained his vote to Brennan. “So, either he was going to be in a position where there were guardrails, and I did have commitments made as to [the] kind of guardrails, or he was going to be appointed White House health czar, in which case he would have the president’s ear without the guardrails … That’s kind of my choice. And I chose, you can criticize it, but I chose to have the one with the guardrails.”
Among those guardrails was a commitment to working “within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems.” Last year, Kennedy fired the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with his own picks.
Cassidy was defeated in his bid for a third Senate term last month and will leave office in January.