Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who lost his primary race earlier this year, claimed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was building public health policy “upon a foundation of lies.”
Partial transcript as follows:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, I mean, the current CDC autism and vaccines page has a heading that says vaccines do not cause autism. Very clearly, but there’s an asterisk next to it, and it says it’s up there due to an agreement with you, the chair of the committee, you go to lower down on the page, and there are some confusing things said there, including that there’s no scientific foundation to rule out a linkage, a linkage. Do you think there will be strong oversight after January? Do statements like that disappear?
CASSIDY: I cannot tell you that it’s going to disappear. I can tell you that that broken agreement that I had with the secretary, that that was not supposed to happen. So, once you lose trust in somebody, you’re not quite sure what to trust going forward. In fact, you don’t trust anything. It should go away, because the evidence is that that is not the case. That is a prejudice being brought. And by the way, if you build public health upon a foundation of lies, then you’re going to have the absence of adequate public health. You need to build everything in life on truth. I go back to being a doctor. You got to search for the truth and use the truth for your solutions. That sounds kind of, oh my gosh. No. That’s the only way you make the correct diagnosis and the correct this is not truth, and there’ll be a consequence of it, and that consequence, unfortunately, will be borne by those who actually are influenced by it. I will say, except for news anchors, very few people read the CDC website. And so I’m not sure how much influence that has, how much negative influence that has.
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