Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s long and tumultuous road to Donald Trump’s Cabinet faced its toughest test on Wednesday, when the vaccine conspiracy theorist and former presidential candidate appeared before the Senate Finance Committee to defend his nomination as Health and Human Services secretary. 

Once a staunch critic of Trump, Kennedy ran a failed third party bid for the presidency that ended with an endorsement of Trump, and Trump pledging to let Kennedy oversee the health care policies of his administration. 

HHS has a budget of over 1.7 trillion and over 80,000 employees. It’s a monumental task, and many believe Kennedy is not up to the task. His nomination has been opposed by 75 Nobel Prize laureates, thousands of doctors, and medical groups. On Tuesday, former U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy wrote an open letter to senators urging them to oppose her cousin’s nomination, calling him an addict “to attention and power” who had endangered lives with his medical conspiracy mongering.

Ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, Kerry Kennedy Meltzer — Kennedy’s niece and a primary care physician — provided a trove of her emails with her uncle to Stat News. In the emails, covering much of the Covid-19 pandemic, the HHS nominee espoused skepticism about the disease’s severity and pushed conspiracies related to vaccines — including his long held insistence that childhood vaccinations may be linked to autism. 

Kennedy has no medical training, has never run a government agency (much less one mandated to safeguard public health on a national level), and has dedicated much of his career to peddling false medical information to the masses. Senators tasked with deciding whether to advance Kennedy’s nomination to the Senate for a full vote grilled him on his view on vaccines, his financial stake in lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies, and his lack of experience in the medical field. 

The hearing was peppered with pointed questions from lawmakers, disruptions by protesters, and Kennedy’s sloppy attempts to dispel his long record of medical misinformation. 

“It doesn’t matter what you come here and say that isn’t true, that’s not reflective of what you really believe,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) said in one confrontation with Kennedy. “Because unlike other jobs we’re confirming around this place this is a job where [it’s] life and death.”

Here are some of the most alarming moments of the hearing: 

He didn’t deny some insane things he’s said about diseases… 

Democratic senators on the committee dissected Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies in detail, and in one stunning moment, he openly admitted to one. 

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) drilled down on specific claims has made about common vaccinations and deadly diseases. “Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?” Bennet asked. 

“I probably did say that,” Kennedy responded. 

Bennet then asked Kennedy if he had once wrote that “it’s undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease than Western AIDS?” 

“I’m not sure,” Kennedy replied. 

… and lied about others.

During Bennet’s same line of questioning, Kennedy denied that he had once claimed that “exposure to pesticides causes children to become transgender,” as the senator put it. 

Kennedy has actually made the claim several times, with slight variations in its delivery. In multiple instances, Kennedy suggested that environmental chemicals alleged to change the gender presentation of frogs could similarly affect children. 

The nominee also insisted that he had been taken out of context when he claimed in 2023 that the coronavirus was “targeted to attack Caucasians and black people” and to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

Kennedy insisted in his own opening remarks that he is not anti-vaccine. “I am pro-safety, I worked for years to raise awareness about the mercury and toxic chemicals in fish and nobody called me anti-fish,” he said. 

Virtually every senator, including Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) pushed back on the claim that Kennedy was not anti-vaccine. Wyden pointed to a July interview on the Lex Fridman podcast where Kennedy said “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” The nominee claimed that he was taken out of context and interrupted before he could finish his thought, but has given conflicting explanations to justify the quote. At one point he claimed he intended to add that vaccines were not safe or effective “if you ask for the product to be measured against other medical products with placebo-controlled double-blind studies.” On Wednesday, Kennedy changed his rationale, telling senators that he meant to say that “every person, every medicine has people who are sensitive to them, including vaccines,” before the quote was cut off. 

Wyden also noted Kennedy’s writing about the measles vaccine. “In 2020 you wrote that parents are led to believe measles is a deadly disease and vaccines are necessary, safe and effective,” Wyden quoted. 

“Reality is measles are, in fact, deadly and highly contagious,” the senator added. “Something you should have learned after your lies contributed to the deaths of 83 people, most of them children, in a measles outbreak in Samoa,” the senator added, referencing the work of Kennedy and the anti-vax nonprofit he founded Children’s Health Defense, and their alleged promotion of anti-vaccine sentiment in Samoa before a 2019 measles outbreak. The outbreak was sparked after two children died after being administered improperly prepared measles vaccinations. While the deaths were caused by human error, widespread panic ensued over the safety of the medication. 

When questioned about his visit to Samoa, Kennedy denied having any role in the deaths, and claimed his visit to the island nation had nothing to do with the vaccine. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) noted that during his visit to the country, just a few months before the spike in cases, Kennedy met with the prime minister to discuss vaccinations, met with local anti-vaccine activists, and wrote a letter suggesting the outbreak could have been caused by defective vaccines. 

In his opening statement, Kennedy proudly declared to the hearing room that his children are vaccinated. 

He said he will scrutinize the abortion pill 

Several senators questioned Kennedy regarding his stance on Republicans’ desire to continue curtailing access to abortion care, particularly by restricting access to commonly used abortion medications like mifepristone.  

During questioning by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Kennedy said, “President Trump has made it clear to me that one of the things he is not taking a position yet on is this abortion drug — but made it clear to me he wants me to look at the safety issues. I will ask the NIH and FDA to do that.” 

Later in the hearing, Kennedy added that “whatever” Trump decided to do regarding the drug, he would “implement those policies.”

He keeps changing his stance on abortion 

Before allying himself with Trump and his political machine, Kennedy was a lifelong liberal who openly defended reproductive freedoms and the right to abortion care. Throughout the hearing, as he was questioned about his plans for abortion medication, Kennedy responded like a broken record: “I agree with President Trump that every abortion is a tragedy.” 

At one point, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) called out the sudden shift in position. “In 2023 you came to New Hampshire and said ‘I’m pro-choice. I don’t think the government has any business telling people what they can or cannot do with their body’ […] you also said, ‘We need to trust the women to make that choice, because I don’t trust government to make any choices.’”

“You have clearly stated in the past that bodily autonomy is one of your core values,” Hassan continued. “The question is, do you stand for that value or not? When was it that you decided to sell out the values you’ve had your whole life in order to be given power by President Trump? “What you are telling us is that regardless of what you believe, regardless of what values you have, if President Trump tells you to do something, you are going to do it […] That to me is unacceptable in a secretary of Health and Human Services.” 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also made a point to address Kennedy’s pivot on the issue. “I have never seen any major politician flip on that issue quite as quickly as you did,” Sanders said. Why do you think people should have confidence in your consistency and in your work when you really made a major U-turn on an issue of that importance?”

He doesn’t understand Medicaid — or how the health care system works 

A day after the Trump administration’s Medicaid portal failed, threatening care for tens of millions of low-income Americans, Kennedy spoke derisively about the program: “Americans don’t, by and large, like the Affordable Care Act — people [who] are on it. They don’t like Medicaid. They like Medicare, and they like private insurance.”

Polling suggests this isn’t accurate. A 2023 KFF survey found that Medicaid enrollees are more likely to rate their insurance coverage positively than those with employer-sponsored insurance plans. 

Kennedy is correct that Affordable Care Act marketplace plans are less popular with their enrollees — but these are private insurance plans. A key difference between these marketplace plans and employer-sponsored plans is that they have higher out-of-pocket costs, and enrollees often bear more of the premium costs.

He then posed a question to Democratic senators: “Do you think all that money, the $900 billion that we’re sending to Medicaid every year, has made Americans healthy? Do we think it’s working for anybody? Are the premiums low enough?”

States are prohibited from imposing premiums on Medicaid beneficiaries in most cases. 

He signaled he wants to see more Medicare privatization

Kennedy said several times that Americans want to be on private insurance plans. When asked whether patients should move from traditional Medicare coverage to privatized Medicare Advantage plans, he said, “That’s their choice right now.” He quickly added: “I think more people would rather be on Medicare Advantage, because it offers very good services.”

A majority of seniors eligible for Medicare are already on the private plans, as Kennedy noted. That’s in part thanks to the first Trump administration’s efforts to lure people to sign up for Medicare Advantage instead of traditional Medicare. 

Trump’s conservative allies have recommended that Medicare auto-enroll new beneficiaries in private Medicare Advantage plans instead of the traditional Medicare program, which would speed up an end to the traditional program and its foundational premise: that seniors can go to any doctor or provider they choose.

Medicare Advantage plans have narrow provider networks that limit the doctors that patients can see. They also frequently reject prior authorization requests and wrongfully deny claims for health care services, going so far as to use artificial intelligence and algorithms to erroneously deny services in bulk — even though the plans are technically required to cover the same services as traditional Medicare. As a result, the private plans often do not work well for sicker patients — and when those sicker patients seek to leave the program and enroll in traditional Medicare, they often find that is financially impossible.

While private Medicare Advantage plans frequently deny necessary care, they have also, for many years now, systematically overbilled the government as if their patients are sicker than they really are. Altogether, the plans are an enormous financial drain on the Medicare program.

He refused to commit to not cash in from lawsuits against pharma companies 

Kennedy’s ethics and financial disclosures raised concerns about the millions the nominee has collected through referral fees from a law firm suing pharmaceutical companies and vaccine manufacturers. While Kennedy has agreed to sever his consulting relationship with the law firm, he intends to continue collecting referral commissions from the firm. 

Sen. Warren asked Kennedy to commit to not taking “fees from suing drug companies,” during his tenure and for a four year period after. 

Warren listed out a myriad of ways through which Kennedy could potentially use the position of HHS secretary to facilitate and sway lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies, reiterating that he only needed to commit not to profit financially off of them. 

“Senator, you are asking me not to sue vaccine pharmaceutical companies,” Kennedy replied, attempting to dodge Warren’s specific ask regarding his collection of lawsuit kickbacks. 

“I am not,” Warren countered. 

“Have we had a single nominee come through who’s made $2.5 million dollars off suing one of the entities that it would be regulated and plans to keep getting a take of every lawsuit in the future?” she asked the committee.