RFK Jr. faces Senate hearings for HHS Secretary this week. 7 issues to look at : Pictures

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will seem earlier than two Senate committees this week, the following steps in his bid to steer the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Providers.

There’s a lot for senators to dig into. HHS secretary is a consequential job that oversees all of America’s well being businesses, together with the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, the Meals and Drug Administration, the Nationwide Institutes of Well being, Medicare, Medicaid and extra. HHS employs about 90,000 folks and has a finances of $1.7 trillion yearly, which is in regards to the dimension of Australia’s GDP.

Kennedy has been within the public eye his entire life as a member of the Democratic political household that features President John F. Kennedy. For many of his 71 years, he is been a authorities outsider, and he has constructed his fortune and popularity disparaging the scientists and establishments he is now in line to steer. He is additionally made wild and unfaithful claims, together with that Wi-Fi causes most cancers and that antidepressants are in charge for varsity shootings.

The opposition to Kennedy’s affirmation has been fierce. An advocacy group known as Shield Our Care is financing an advert marketing campaign in eight Republican Senators’ states, urging them to reject him.

Kennedy’s allies and supporters stay assured he will probably be confirmed. “Bobby Kennedy has met with over 60 United States senators” forward of the affirmation hearings, White Home staffer Katie Miller instructed NPR. “He is ready and excited.”

As Congress prepares to grill him this week, this is a refresher on a few of his said plans, his document and his troublingly counterfactual concepts.

1. For many years, he is unfold misinformation about childhood vaccines

Kennedy has tried to downplay his anti-vaccine views in latest months and years, however he has a document of attacking vaccines, together with routine childhood vaccinations. For a lot of his profession, he was chairman of Youngsters’s Well being Protection, which advocates towards vaccines and spreads deceptive and inaccurate claims about their security, together with the totally debunked declare they trigger autism.

That work has had actual world influence, most strikingly in Samoa, a small island nation within the Pacific. Simply earlier than a measles outbreak in 2019 during which 83 folks died, Kennedy toured the nation and later wrote to the prime minister falsely blaming the vaccine for the deaths as an alternative of measles.

As the pinnacle of HHS, there is a entire host of the way that Kennedy might change the panorama of childhood vaccines within the U.S., which infectious illness specialists say might result in a resurgence of infectious illnesses amongst kids, together with meningitis and polio.

“It’s a fantasy to suppose we are able to decrease vaccination charges and herd immunity within the U.S. and never endure recurrence of those illnesses,” Gregory Poland, a vaccine researcher on the Mayo Clinic instructed KFF Well being Information in December. “One in 3,000 youngsters who will get measles goes to die. There is not any therapy for it. They will die.” (Kennedy has mentioned the therapy for measles is rooster soup.)

Kennedy’s obvious incapacity to tell apart fact from fable is alarming, says Elizabeth Jacobs, emerita professor of epidemiology from the College of Arizona. “Kennedy has been instructed repeatedly by specialists within the area that his positions on vaccines are improper and never supported by scientific proof, and he refuses to hear,” she says. “I feel that that could be a very harmful place for the Secretary of Well being and Human Providers to have.”

2. Scientists fear he will not put together the U.S. for the danger of chook flu

Through the COVID-19 pandemic, Kennedy railed towards the federal authorities’s actions, together with vaccine and masks necessities. He continuously mentioned pandemic public well being measures have been extra restrictive than Hitler’s Germany, saying as soon as that not less than “you possibly can cover in an attic like Anne Frank did.”

How would Kennedy use his broad energy as secretary if he is confronted with a public well being emergency? Kennedy and his allies have not publicly addressed the problem. In the meantime, as there have been a number of severe circumstances of chook flu amongst People, together with the primary dying, and there may be proof the virus is spreading extensively amongst poultry and cattle, intensifying issues about one other pandemic disaster.

Kennedy has already begun to discredit public well being measures to counter chook flu. In an on-line submit final summer time, he claimed there’s “no proof” the chook flu vaccines within the nationwide stockpile will work and that they “seem harmful.” He recommended in one other submit that “somebody” may bioengineer a harmful type of the virus to revenue off the vaccine.

The thought is “preposterous,” Dr. Andrew Pekosz, a professor of microbiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Faculty of Public Well being instructed NPR. The present chook flu vaccines “have proven a security document,” he says. “They don’t seem to be harmful.”

Though the risk chook flu poses to people stays small now, “that is like some brush burning round your home — you higher listen as a result of it might flip into one thing else,” Dr. Jesse Goodman, an infectious illness doctor at Georgetown College and a former FDA official, instructed NPR.

3. His monetary conflicts are elevating eyebrows

Kennedy has made many thousands and thousands of {dollars} from anti-vaccine authorized actions. New public filings present that, if and when he is confirmed, he might nonetheless financially profit from lawsuits towards Merck’s vaccine that protects towards HPV and cervical most cancers.

In different phrases, Kennedy could be ready to probably revenue from vaccine litigation whereas regulating drugmakers and overseeing federal vaccine coverage as the pinnacle of HHS.

“RFK Jr’s ethics settlement is insufficient,” Kathleen Clark, a legislation professor at Washington College in St. Louis, who focuses on authorities ethics, wrote to NPR. “It would not deal with the bias created by his persevering with monetary curiosity within the litigation towards Merck.”

4. He needs a significant shakeup in scientific analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified mistrust of federal science analysis and public well being efforts, particularly amongst Republicans. The conservative Heritage Basis and Republican lawmakers have been floating lengthy to-do lists for altering the NIH, together with dramatically reorganizing the facilities and institutes that represent the company.

Kennedy has mentioned he’d wish to “instantly change” a whole lot of federal scientists and reorient their work away from infectious illnesses.

Through the first weeks of the Trump administration, scientists across the nation sounded alarm bells about scientific conferences that have been canceled with little discover or clarification. These cancellations have already disrupted analysis funding and delayed scheduled updates to infectious illness dashboards.

Well being company spokespeople issued a press release final week explaining that these have been momentary interruptions designed to permit the Trump workforce to rise up and operating. However many scientists fear it is a signal that political appointees intend to exert a brand new stage of management on the federal well being and analysis businesses. Kennedy’s said plans to reshape the well being businesses and his lifetime of questioning the integrity of federal scientists might intensify these issues.

5. His long-held abortion views are polar reverse of GOP

In an interview final spring, Kennedy mentioned on abortion: “My perception is we should always go away it to the lady, we should not have authorities concerned,” he defined. Additional, he mentioned abortion must be authorized at any level in being pregnant. He later tempered that place, saying on Fb that an “rising consensus” was that “abortion must be authorized up till a sure variety of weeks and restricted thereafter.”

Republicans are desirous to curtail abortion entry now that they’ve retaken energy in Washington, together with by probably reviving a Victorian-era obscenity legislation or curbing entry to abortion remedy. A well being secretary who favors abortion entry might intervene with these plans to limit entry. Former Vice President Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom group has launched a six-figure advert marketing campaign opposing Kennedy based mostly on his abortion views, writing on social media, “We want management that defends life and protects probably the most weak—not radical insurance policies that undermine our values.”

Many different anti-abortion rights teams have remained silent on his nomination. And in latest conferences with Kennedy, anti-abortion rights senators say they got here away reassured. “He is gonna align himself, by selection, with President Trump on pro-life insurance policies,” Sen. Ted Budd of North Carolina instructed NPR not too long ago.

Teams that help abortion rights largely oppose Kennedy. “RFK Jr. is an unfit, unqualified extremist who can’t be trusted to guard the well being, security, and reproductive freedom of American households,” Reproductive Freedom for All wrote quickly after he was nominated.

6. He will not settle for the truth that HIV causes AIDS

It’s effectively established science that AIDS is brought on by a virus often known as HIV, nevertheless it’s a incontrovertible fact that Kennedy doesn’t settle for. As a substitute, he has claimed AIDS is brought on by leisure drug use and that scientists, together with Dr. Anthony Fauci previously of NIH, conspired to make up an infectious illness liable for AIDS so they may “take management of it.”

“They have been doing phony, crooked research to develop a treatment that killed folks with out actually having the ability to perceive what HIV was, and pumping up concern about it continuously, probably not understanding whether or not it was inflicting AIDS,” Kennedy instructed New York Journal final yr.

This isn’t true, and Kennedy’s insistence on this level has HIV advocates calling his nomination harmful. The federal authorities pays for the therapy of practically half of all HIV-positive People by the Ryan White Program. And through President Trump’s first time period, the federal authorities launched an bold effort to finish the HIV epidemic by 2030. If HHS is led by Kennedy, an HIV denialist, these initiatives may very well be in jeopardy, advocates say.

7. He needs give attention to life-style and continual illness, however hasn’t detailed how

Kennedy talks quite a bit about shifting the main focus of the federal well being businesses in direction of promotion of a wholesome life-style and the foundation causes of continual illnesses. That is the uncommon space during which his views garner some bipartisan help.

Kennedy has mentioned he’d wish to overhaul dietary pointers, reform federal packages that pay for ultra-processed meals, tackle crop subsidies, and different initiatives. It is unclear how he might accomplish these objectives with out new laws on the meals and agriculture industries. “An actual litmus check about whether or not or not they’re severe is whether or not they tackle among the financial pursuits which might be inflicting our continual illness epidemic,” former CDC director Tom Frieden instructed NPR in November.

Jacobs of the College of Arizona bristles on the approach Kennedy talks about continual illness and diet as if scientists have been ignoring them. “To faux like these are his concepts alone is outrageous,” she says. “You possibly can see for your self simply by a cursory search of PubMed,” a public database of medical and scientific analysis, she factors out. “These are usually not novel concepts. These are usually not concepts which might be unique to Mr. Kennedy. They’re concepts which were the results of 1000’s of hours of scientific analysis.”

Will Stone contributed to this report.