“I don’t want to give advice,” Kennedy said during his first testimony before Congress since becoming the nation’s top health official
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. runs the United States Department of Health and Human Services, but according to congressional testimony he gave on Wednesday, May 14, he shouldn’t be viewed as a medical expert.
During a House Appropriations Committee hearing, Kennedy was pressed on his past statements about vaccines by Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan, among others.
Just a few weeks after sharing false claims about the MMR vaccine — which protects against measles, mumps and rubella — RFK Jr. was asked if he would choose to have his children vaccinated today.
Kennedy, who has previously stated that he regrets vaccinating his six children, sidestepped the question, saying, “I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.”
When urged to provide an answer, he said he would “probably” choose to vaccinate his kids, but again noted, “My opinions about vaccines are irrelevant … I don’t want to give advice.”
A vocal anti-vaccine advocate prior to his HHS appointment, Kennedy has continued to promote unproven remedies amid an ongoing measles outbreak, which has reached over 1,000 cases, spread to 31 states and resulted in three deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He was chastised by members of Congress for refusing to take a stand on the matter.
In her closing remarks, ranking committee member Rep. Rosa DeLauro noted that Kennedy — as the head of HHS and top adviser to President Donald Trump on health-related matters — “makes medical decisions every day.”
“You’re the secretary of HHS. You have tremendous power over health policy,” she said. “[It’s] really horrifying that you will not encourage families to vaccinate their children, measles, chickenpox, polio. Vaccines are one of the foundations of public health. Vaccines, yes, save lives, and the fact that the secretary of health and human services refuses to encourage children to be vaccinated is a tragedy.”
Kennedy’s latest controversial comments come weeks after he was accused of fear-mongering by falsely claiming that the MMR vaccine contains “aborted fetus debris.”
“There are populations in our country like the Mennonites in Texas who are most afflicted, and they have religious objections to the vaccination because the MMR vaccine contains a lot of aborted fetus debris and DNA particles. So they don’t want to take it,” Kennedy told Chris Cuomo during a NewsNation town hall. “So we ought to be able to take care of those populations when they get sick and that’s one of the things that the CDC has not done.”
Numerous health experts quickly refuted Kennedy’s remarks and condemned the spreading of misinformation.
“The claim that the MMR vaccine contains ‘fetal debris’ is not only scientifically inaccurate, it’s dangerously misleading,” Dr. Tyler Evans, former chief medical officer for New York City, told The Independent. “The rubella component of the MMR vaccine was developed decades ago using a well-established human cell line, replicated countless times. There is no actual fetal tissue in the vaccine.”
Evans continued: “It’s time we stop politicizing science and return to evidence-based public health, because mistrust fueled by misinformation puts our most vulnerable communities at risk.”
“It is not true that the vaccines have fetal elements, debris, cells in them,” Dr. Shira Doron, chief infection control officer for Tufts Medicine and hospital epidemiologist at Tufts Medical Center, told Health. “But what is true is that the viruses that need to be grown to create vaccines are grown in cells. In some cases, human cells.”
Doron added that among all vaccines, “MMR vaccine is by far among the safest” because it has been used and studied “extensively.”
