Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. turned the tables on Democrats on Thursday during a fiery Senate hearing in the wake of the recent firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez.
As the hearing commenced, Democrats held a rally outside the Capitol, demanding that he resign his post.
But inside, they struggled to land a punch.
After Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) almost hysterically claimed that Kennedy was putting children in danger, Kennedy called out the Senator for doing nothing to prevent the rise of chronic disease in American children.
Kennedy delivered straightforward answers — and, at one point, demanded that they answer his questions. When Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) objected to Kennedy firing the government’s panel of vaccine experts, Kennedy noted “and you were never there, complaining,” when the pharmaceutical industry backed its own candidates.
As Bennet claimed that Kennedy had lied about the safety of vaccines, Kennedy countered:
“Are you saying, Senator — that the mRNA has never been associated with myocarditis or pericarditis?”
Bennet refused to answer.
“You’re evading the question,” Kennedy said.
“No, I’m asking the questions here, Mr. Kennedy,” Bennet replied.
That was the tone for the entire two-hour proceeding. Democrats referred repeatedly to an op-ed published Thursday by Monarez in the Wall Street Journal in which she claimed he had fired her for refusing, in advance, to approve the conclusions of the new vaccine panel.
Kennedy denied her accusations and answered “yes” when Democrats demanded to know if he was calling her a liar. Kennedy also said that he had never met privately with her, and said that he could call on witnesses to every one of his meetings while in office.
(His story: he had fired her because he had asked her if she was trustworthy, and she had said she was not.)
Throughout the hearing, Democrats shouted at Kennedy and interrupted him, refusing to allow him to answer their questions even as they made incendiary accusations that he was “corrupt” and a “charlatan.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) attacked Kennedy for removing the recommendation for COVID-19 vaccines for otherwise healthy people, saying he had broken his promise to keep vaccines available to everyone who wanted them.
Kennedy said they were still available, and free for most people. Warren said that because in some states, people would now have to pay for them out of pocket, Kennedy had broken his promise.
He then pointed out that she had taken “$855,000 from pharmaceutical companies,” and said that she was asking him to recommend vaccines for which there was no clinical indication.
Warren then defended ousted CDC director Monarez, and Kennedy countered that Warren herself had recently voted against confirming her.
There were some newsworthy revelations, such as Kennedy’s report that the Biden administration had manipulated the public presentation of data about the controversial abortion drug mifepristone.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and others challenged Kennedy over whether he supported Operation Warp Speed, which the first Trump administration had used to accelerate the coronavirus vaccine’s development. Kennedy said that “that particular vaccine perfectly matched” the virus as it was at the time, and that it had also likely saved lives, but also noted that the virus had mutated, and that the vaccine had not stopped its later spread.
Several times, Kennedy noted that Democrats were simply “making stuff up,” attributing remarks to him that he had not actually said, or views that he did not actually hold.
He declined to resign his position.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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