Got wrong

What RFK Jr. got wrong about vaccines during Senate hearing

The health secretary's statements came amid heated exchanges with some senators.

By Lauren Gardner

Under sharp questioning by Democrats — and some Republicans — at a Senate Finance Committee hearing Thursday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doubled down on his long-held beliefs about vaccine science and drug industry influence over federal regulators.

Many of his statements came during tense exchanges with senators over his view of vaccines as he defended his leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services and the turmoil that has ensued after he fired the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Here are some areas where Kennedy’s remarks contradicted scientific data or real-world experiences.

Covid vaccine access

Kennedy maintained that “anybody” who wants Covid shots this fall will be able to get them, despite the FDA narrowing its approved labeling for people under 65 to those with at least one underlying condition.

But that regulatory change — plus the delay in the CDC’s vaccine advisers formally recommending which Americans should get the updated formula — has sparked confusion nationwide over eligibility and liability, POLITICO reported last month and senators said Thursday. About 90 percent of Covid vaccine doses last season were given at pharmacies, but pharmacists’ legal ability to vaccinate varies by state; more than a dozen link that authority to immunizations recommended by the CDC or its independent advisers.

“If you don’t recommend, then the consequence of that in many states is that you can’t walk into a pharmacy and get one,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “It means insurance companies don’t have to cover the $200 or so cost.”

Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy, who’s come under fire from public health officials for supporting Kennedy’s nomination as the Senate health panel’s chair, read into the record two examples of access problems: Conservative commentator Erick Erickson’s recent X post about his wife, who has cancer, being unable to get the Covid vaccine at CVS; and an email from a doctor friend describing liability concerns and confusion around which people they can vaccinate if a patient requests one but doesn’t have a qualifying condition.

“Effectively, we are denying people vaccine,” said Cassidy, a gastroenterologist.

“You’re wrong,” Kennedy said.

Vaccine and death datapoints

Kennedy pushed back on Warren, claiming “there’s no clinical data” supporting Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy people.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and his top vaccine official, Vinay Prasad, have signaled they want to see randomized, placebo-controlled trials before approving Covid shots updated for new viral strains for healthy populations. They say those groups don’t have a clear picture of how much benefit they get from additional vaccine doses.

While some — including Biden-era FDA chief Robert Califf — have said they support such trials now that the pandemic emergency has abated, others have questioned whether it’s ethical to do so when a safe and effective vaccine already exists.

Kennedy also suggested he hadn’t seen data that showed the shots saved lives, blaming the Biden administration’s “data chaos.”

President Donald Trump on Monday called on pharmaceutical companies to “justify the success of their various Covid Drugs” and release data to that effect.

But that information has long been publicly available, with scientists independent of the vaccine makers conducting their own analyses affirming their safety and effectiveness.

In response to Trump, the three companies selling Covid vaccines in the U.S. — Moderna, Novavax and Pfizer — issued statements Wednesday linking to studies and past statements about their products’ safety and efficacy data.

Kennedy also suggested the number of U.S. Covid deaths is unknown due to shoddy data collection by the CDC. “I don’t know how many died,” he said.

The CDC website currently says 1,231,440 Americans have died of the disease since January 2020.

 Since the first shots became available in late 2020, the number of hospitalizations and deaths from Covid have decreased in the U.S. despite occasional spikes in transmission, due in part to Americans’ mix of natural and vaccine-induced immunity.

However, some respected scientists — including two former FDA officials Kennedy referenced during the hearing — pushed back on efforts to widely recommend Covid shots beyond the initial series to the public, arguing that while the risks were small, the benefits to healthy young people of more doses weren’t clear.

Kennedy, along with other Trump health officials and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), have alleged that federal officials under former President Joe Biden hid information about the risk of heart inflammation known as myocarditis in teenage and young adult males. The FDA, the CDC and their independent advisers began discussing myocarditis in June 2021, and the side effect influenced scientists’ public debates about the vaccines’ balance of benefits and risks to certain healthy people.

Operation Warp Speed

Cassidy pushed Kennedy to square his decision to cancel more than $500 million in contracts for mRNA vaccine development with Trump’s role shepherding Operation Warp Speed — the federal effort to rapidly develop, test and administer immunizations during the pandemic — during his first term.

“The reason that Operation Warp Speed was genius is … 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 there were people getting very badly injured by Covid,” Kennedy said. “But he also brought in therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and protocols for treatments, and there were no mandates.”

But by December 2020, when the first Pfizer shots began going into arms in the U.S., several variants of the virus had emerged globally. Both mRNA vaccines were shown to be effective against the mutations. Those first formulations of both vaccines were based on the original coronavirus identified in China in late 2019.

The FDA briefly made hydroxychloroquine available as a Covid treatment under an emergency use authorization but later revoked it over safety concerns. Clinical trials studying ivermectin, an antiparasitic commonly used in animals, as a treatment didn’t show benefit, and regulators cautioned Americans against taking it.