By Carole Tanzer Miller HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, Feb. 13, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal vaccine skeptic and activist lawyer, was confirmed Thursday as the nation’s new health secretary.
The Senate voted largely along party lines to put Kennedy at the helm of the $1.7 trillion U.S. Health and Human Services Agency.
In his new role, Kennedy will oversee 11 agencies including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as Medicare and Medicaid.
Former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, was the only Republican who voted against Kennedy, whose nomination was confirmed by a 52-48 vote.
McConnell, who had polio as a child, had also voted against President Donald Trump’s picks for Pentagon chief and director of national intelligence. All Democrats opposed Kennedy.
The 71-year-old takes over Health and Human Services in the midst of a federal government shakeup led by billionaire Elon Musk.
In less than a month, it has shut off billions of taxpayer dollars in public health funding and left thousands of federal workers unsure about their jobs.
Kennedy himself has called for a staffing overhaul at the NIH, FDA and CDC, the Associated Press noted.
Last year, he vowed to fire 600 workers at the NIH, which is the nation’s largest funder of biomedical research.
His confirmation came less than two weeks after the Republican-controlled Senate Finance Committee advanced his nomination on a 14-13 vote.
All of the Democrats on the committee had opposed sending his bid to the Senate floor. They cited Kennedy’s work to sow doubt around vaccine safety and his potential profit from pharmaceutical industry lawsuits.
His family name had been synonymous with the Democratic party for generations until he aligned with Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign.
His nomination moved forward Feb. 4 after Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, a doctor who had questioned his bid, said Kennedy had assured him he would not topple the nation’s childhood vaccination program.
“Your past, undermining confidence in vaccines with unfounded or misleading arguments concerns me,” Cassidy told Kennedy during his confirmation hearings.
Cassidy said later in a speech on the Senate floor that, in return for his support, Kennedy had promised not to change existing vaccination recommendations from a federal advisory committee.
Cassidy also said Kennedy had agreed not to remove statements from the CDC website, which clarify that vaccines do not cause autism.
During his confirmation hearing, Democrats raised alarms about his potential to benefit financially from changing vaccine guidelines or weakening federal lawsuit protections against vaccine makers.
After initially saying he would continue to accept referral fees in legal cases that do not involve the federal government, Kennedy said during the confirmation process that he would not collect fees from litigation against drugmakers of a cervical cancer vaccine.
SOURCE: The Associated Press, Jan. 31, Feb. 4, Feb. 13, 2025
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