RFK Jr. Will Need Some Healthcare After Being Nearly Homicided By Senate Democrats

At least he died doing what he does best — wheezing, lying, and denying reality.

The first thing you should know about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s hearing today — aside from the fact that the man in charge of the nation’s health spent the first 40 minutes of the event heavily wheezing into his hot mic like Darth Vader with bronchitis — is that Sen. Ron Wyden’s request to put him under oath for the proceeding, so as to hold him legally accountable for any lies he might tell, was refused by Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike Crapo. So he was free to lie all he wanted, and he took every opportunity to do so, even when it resulted in making him look completely delusional.

Ron Wyden opened the hearing with a statement on the absolute garbage fire our health care policy has been since Kennedy took over the Department of Health and Human Services, how his constituents are confused and angry, and how Kennedy is endangering Americans with junk science and other nonsense. (We’ll put the full hearing at the end of this post.)

Kennedy opened with his own statement, first by acknowledging DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose, who was murdered last month when a man who shares Kennedy’s own “beliefs” about vaccines decided to go and shoot up the CDC. (Kennedy declined to mention that part.) He then summarized some of what he believes has been accomplished throughout his tenure at the CDC, congratulating himself on such bullshit as getting the CDC to stop recommending fluoride and “ending child mutilation” — by which he clearly meant barring teenagers from getting gender affirming care. He also congratulated himself and the administration on some things that were patently untrue, such as actually doing anything about “chronic illness” beyond whining that no one else has done anything about chronic illness, and “pouring a billion dollars into Head Start” when the administration was found to have illegally withheld funding from the program. He also repeated Trump’s lie about the Biden administration supposedly “losing” 300,000 migrant children (though in his telling it was 476,000).

He then claimed that a purge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was necessary, insisting that CDC policies were the reason why America did so poorly in comparison to other countries during the pandemic.

“America is home to 4.2 percent of the world's population. Yet, we had nearly 20 percent of the COVID deaths,” he said. “We literally did worse than any country in the world. And the people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving. And that's why we need bold, competent, and creative new leadership at CDC.”

Well, sure. We literally did worse than all other countries because of our Republicans. Post-vaccine, deaths from COVID were 30 percent higher in Republican states that did not follow the CDC’s recommendations. As much as people like Kennedy like to cry that they did nothing, every study available has shown that areas where people observed mask mandates, social distancing and other recommendations saw major decreases in mortality. Other countries had better outcomes than we did not because they didn’t have the same recommendations, but because those recommendations were uniform throughout the country and not done piecemeal on city and state levels.

I just want to note that, because, as great as our Democratic senators did — I mean it! and you know I don’t just go handing out cookies to them for nothing! — no one got around to pointing that out to him.

Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) kicked things off by having a good laugh about how all of the Democrats think that the One Big Beautiful Bill is going to hurt rural hospitals, when that’s already been a problem for a while. This gave the two of them an opportunity to “point out” that the bill allocates $10 billion a year for the next five years to help rural hospitals stay open.

Trust, Bernie Sanders got to this one later.

They also had a good laugh about how Democratic programs like the ACA or ideas like single payer healthcare are like “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” claiming that Democrats think the only solution to health care is to just randomly throw money at the problem — which is actually pretty funny given that single payer health care, which Kennedy’s uncle spent much of his life trying to make a reality in this country, would cost us all significantly less than what we are all paying now. It would be far more accurate to say that Democrats believe the solution is not throwing money at health care, but throwing health care at people. Which, yes, is a pretty good solution to people not having health care.

They also had the gall to discuss how much less people throughout the world pay for health care compared to the US, without acknowledging that people in other countries have the universal health care they both just laughed at. So cute!

Oh! And if that wasn’t enraging enough, they both had the gall to bring up the increase in infant mortality rates, somehow trying to blame that on Democratic policies and the CDC. Of course, as we all know, infant mortality rates are super high in red states, while the rates in blue states are comparable to the rates in Europe and other high-income nations. We also know that the only places where those rates have increased recently has been in states like Mississippi and Alabama, where abortion has been banned.

Thankfully, unlike the future of health care under the Trump administration, the hearing mostly just got better.

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When it was his chance to weigh in, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) tried his darndest to get Kennedy to say whether or not he agrees with his ACIP appointee Dr. Robert Malone that mRNA vaccines cause a form of AIDS when given to infants.

For some reason, Kennedy refused to answer!

Instead, he just kept looking as smug and exasperated as he could, which is pretty much how he spent the whole hearing.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), the pro-vaccine Republican (a medical doctor!) we were supposed to be able to count on to vote against Kennedy, grilled him a bit as well — pointing out that his colleagues in the medical community were sending him letters saying that they were entirely unclear as to whether they could give people the COVID vaccine or not.

Smartly, Cassidy told Kennedy that he believed Trump should get the Nobel prize (as he has obsessed over) for Operation Warp Speed (the miraculously fast development of the COVID vaccine, which saved millions of American lives), asking Kennedy if he believed he deserved it for that as well — and then also asking him, once he’d said yes, how he could reconcile that belief with his belief that the vaccine killed more people than COVID. Kennedy obviously agreed to the first part, because what else could he say, and … well, mostly failed to answer the other part of the question. He just kept saying that it got people back to work and was supposedly, somehow, only effective at the time that version of the vaccine was released, but at no other time.

For her part, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) straight up called Kennedy a charlatan, accusing him of pitting the need to fight chronic disease (which she noted he has done exactly nothing about) against the need for vaccines, as if we can only do one or the other.

She also had some pretty great signs demonstrating how many fewer people had died of diseases for which we now have vaccines, in comparison to the number that did before said vaccines.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) shared that he would love to do something about chronic disease — far more, in fact, than just focusing on “red dye and seed oils.” Burn! He also tried to get Kennedy to say how many people had died of COVID during the pandemic vs. how many had been saved by the vaccine … which he, of course, refused to answer.

Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire) pointed out that Kennedy had previously complained of the “devastating impact” of Operation Warp Speed and again asked him to explain why he would believe Trump should get the Nobel prize for something with a “devastating impact.”

It did not go well!

To his credit, Republican John Barrasso of Wyoming, a physician like Bill Cassidy, also tried to explain to RFK Jr. that vaccines are good, actually — and asked Kennedy what he planned to do to make Americans believe that his policies were based on science and not politics.

“Americans have lost faith in CDC, and we need to restore that faith, and we're going to do that by telling the truth and not through propaganda,” Kennedy said. “I'm making them understand that everything that we say is true.”

That doesn’t actually seem to be happening. Not sure if you’ve noticed!

Other Republicans, however, were not quite as helpful. Steve Daines (R-Montana) wanted to know more about how Kennedy would ban mifepristone; Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) wanted to know about over-prescribing “stimulants” to children, which resulted in Kennedy claiming that one in five children is on stimulants or anti-depressants, which is absolute nonsense; Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) had a giant sign that said “76 JABS!” so you can mostly figure how that one went.

I will, however, give some credit to the not-running-for-reelection Thom Tillis (R-Florida, who brought some criticism, re: the CDC firings.

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But back to the fun parts! Because as you probably figured, Elizabeth Warren was fucking fabulous.

Warren got into a whole ass argument with Kennedy over the fact that he had promised not to take vaccines away from anyone and then did just that, while he lied and insisted he did no such thing. She tried to explain to him that the CDC not recommending the COVID vaccine means that people can no longer just go and get it from the pharmacy and be assured that their healthcare will cover it.

Naturally, he responded to that by lying some more.

Warren then asked, “Did you tell 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?”

“No. I told her she had to resign because I asked her, 'Are you a trustworthy person?’ and she said no,” Kennedy explained. Boy, does that ever sound like a thing that happened in real life!

Kennedy also tried to suggest that Warren was receiving piles of money from “the pharmaceutical industry,” when in fact she only ever got individual small donations from people working in that industry — probably because they know how fucked it is.

Bernie Sanders was also very impressed by this exchange, and when it was his turn, even reenacted the conversation and asked him if that was how it went.

Sanders then pointed out that every single medical association in the United States, representing millions of doctors, is opposed to everything he is doing — while Kennedy tried to make it out like they were all owned by Big Pharma, just like noted shill Elizabeth Warren! Sanders also tried to explain individual donations vs. PAC donations like the ones Republicans get from pharmaceutical groups, but to no avail.

Still, I don’t think even Kennedy thinks he successfully sold “Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are shills for Big Pharma” to anyone.

There were a lot of other quality moments, and I highly suggest watching the whole thing, if you can get through the aforementioned 40 minutes of wheezing. It probably won’t result in Kennedy resigning, as so many have pleaded with him to do, but at least it gave us some good soundbites that will help us elect more people who just might prevent Kennedy from killing us all.

Here’s the whole thing.

And, FINALLY, it’s your OPEN THREAD!