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  Title	RFK Jr. confirmed as HHS Secretary
  ID	6891038
  External ID	7548544239
  Author	Sam Brodey
  Published Date	Feb. 13, 2025, 11:18 a.m.
  Summary	WASHINGTON — Over and over again during his contentious process to get confirmed as federal health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. found himself making promises. To not interfere with the federal go
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  URL	https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/02/13/nation/robert-f-kennedy-jr-rfk-jr-confirmed-health-and-human-services/
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  Content ID	4291864
  Key	d60f1e06-e3e4-4c51-b0b5-1e65607e1905
  Content	WASHINGTON — Over and over again during his contentious process to get confirmed as federal health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. found himself making promises. To not interfere with the federal government's review and approval of new vaccines. To not withhold funds appropriated by Congress for vaccination programs. To give Congress a remarkably high level of visibility and ongoing engagement in his administration of the country's most essential health programs. In public hearings and private meetings, Kennedy made these commitments — and many more — at the prompting of and to assuage the concerns of senators, particularly those with serious concerns about his views on vaccines and other issues. Virtually no previous nominee in recent memory to lead the Department of Health and Human Services has gone through such lengths to claim that he would not interfere with the basics of key public health programs in unprecedented ways. Nevertheless, Kennedy's willingness to make promises was perhaps the biggest factor in his successful confirmation, which broke largely along party lines on Thursday. Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a polio survivor, joined Senate Democrats in voting against the nomination. Senator Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, was seen as a make-or-break vote for Kennedy's confirmation; he announced his support in a Senate floor speech on Feb. 4, by listing all the commitments Kennedy had made to him personally, calling them the “basis of my support.” Another skeptical Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, wrote on X Kennedy earned her support by making “numerous commitments to me and my colleagues,” including to “base vaccine recommendations on data-driven, evidence-based, and medically sound research.” “These commitments are important to me and, on balance, provide assurance for my vote,” Murkowski said. Now that those votes have installed Kennedy at HHS, his confirmation promises will remain top of mind to lawmakers, public health experts, and watchdogs as a foundation for assessing his performance as secretary. While Cassidy touted his concessions as amounting to “unprecedented” level of power for himself and Congress in working with HHS, Kennedy's many critics fear he will act with impunity to advance his long-held antivaccine views regardless, especially if they are backed by Trump. “To be brief, I'm skeptical,” said David Blumenthal, a professor at Harvard University's Chan School of Public Health, who was a key health care adviser to President Obama and the late Senator Ted Kennedy. There are limits, he said, to what lawmakers can do “to change or influence the behavior of a strong-willed, opinionated secretary with a strong-willed, opinionated boss in the form of President Trump.” “Oversight is of modest value when the subject of oversight is unlikely to be affected by it,” Blumenthal said. Senator Ed Markey, of Malden, who questioned Kennedy directly during the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee's confirmation hearing, argued the nominee was not truthful in response to his questions about his 2019 trip to Samoa organized by antivaccine activists, which health professionals on the Pacific island blamed for fueling a deadly measles outbreak. Kennedy “may have made promises on vaccine misinformation and [National Institutes of Health] cuts to reassure senators, but I have no faith that he will make good on those commitments,” Markey said. “If he can't tell the truth in committee hearings, we can't trust him to tell the truth when he is head of HHS.” The bulk of Kennedy's promises centered on vaccine policy, the subject in which his decades-long questioning of established immunizations posed the biggest obstacle for senators to support him. During his hearing before the health panel, Cassidy, its chairman, asked Kennedy several yes or no questions about how he would conduct vaccine policy at HHS. He asked Kennedy if he would promise to “not de-prioritize or delay review and or approval of new vaccines, and that vaccine review standards will not change from historical norms” and if he would commit to not “work to impound, divert, or otherwise reduce any funding appropriated by Congress for the purpose of vaccination programs?” To both, Kennedy answered succinctly: “Yes.” In his floor speech announcing his support, Cassidy said Kennedy committed to come before his committee on a quarterly basis if requested and meet regularly with Cassidy in private. Kennedy also committed to giving the health panel chair influence over any new commission formed to review vaccine safety. And he vowed to give a 30-day notice to the health committee about any potential changes in vaccine safety programs, giving the chair time to call a hearing if he wanted to. Cassidy also said Kennedy promised to maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a key advisory board on vaccines, “without changes,” addressing a key concern that many Kennedy skeptics have. At other points, such as during his hearing in the Senate Finance Committee, Kennedy ventured his own promises on vaccine policy. “I support the measles vaccine. I support the polio vaccine,” Kennedy said, listing two childhood immunizations that his former longtime advocacy group, Children's Health Defense, has consistently spread doubt and misinformation about. “I will do nothing as HHS secretary that makes it difficult or discourages people from taking any of those vaccines.” Those skeptical of Kennedy are reading between the lines of his commitments to identify areas where he might quietly change policy without breaking his specific word to senators. According to Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C., who specializes in public health, “there are so many ways Secretary Kennedy can really change the vaccine and immunization landscape and still abide by all his commitments.” Kennedy's influence over the department's handling of vaccine injury claims is particularly concerning, according to Gostin, and Representative Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat from Newton, who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee's health sub-panel and represents a district heavy with life sciences companies and professionals. The HHS secretary has the authority to alter federal processes to make it harder or easier for people to sue vaccine makers if they believe they were injured. “The vaccine liability question is central here,” said Harvard's Blumenthal, who noted Kennedy appeared to make no promises on this front. “He has control over the list of vaccines that are granted protection against liability for side effects.” There's also Kennedy's influence over the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, the HHS-run alternative process to civil lawsuits for seeking compensation from vaccine makers. Auchincloss worried Kennedy could use his power over that program to side with more vaccine injury petitioners and open the door to more lawsuits against vaccine makers, which the congressman argued could chill development of new immunizations and make the economics of providing vaccines more difficult. He called the “loophole” a “dangerous one.” Cassidy did say in his floor speech Kennedy “committed that he would work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems, and not establish parallel systems,” but observers still have deep reservations about the specificity of such promises and Kennedy's baseline dedication to them. Indeed, in the confirmation hearings, Kennedy was repeatedly reluctant to disavow his skepticism of vaccines. At one point, when Cassidy asked him to reassure parents that measles and hepatitis B vaccines don't cause autism, Kennedy said he would do so — if shown data, which already exists in abundance proving the point. “I just want to pledge to you that I will never stick on a point if somebody shows me data that says I'm wrong,” he said. “You can go back and find dozens, hundreds, of studies in medical and scientific literature demonstrating the safety of vaccines, yet he says the data is not fully public,” Blumenthal said. “What a hearing about a proposed change with respect to vaccine policy would accomplish in light of that history … I'm not sure.” Cassidy, meanwhile, promised in his floor speech that if Kennedy is confirmed, the senator would “rebuff any attempts to remove the public's access to life-saving vaccines without ironclad, causational scientific evidence that can be defended before the mainstream scientific community and before Congress” and would “carefully watch for any effort to wrongfully sow public fear about vaccines between confusing references of coincidence and anecdote.” What concerns Gostin most is, outside of the specific functions of HHS, Kennedy will have enormous “soft power” to “undermine confidence in vaccines … you don't have to pull a vaccine, you can kill it with 1,000 cuts.” “It's certainly better he made those commitments than if he hadn't,” Gostin said. “And it's better that the Senate has it on record that he made these commitments and can hold him accountable. But there are very few ways you can hold him accountable.” Sam Brodey can be reached at sam.brodey@globe.com . Follow him @sambrodey Thank you for reading Globe.com. Get UNLIMITED access for only 99¢ per week. Subscribe Now
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  Publisher Name	Boston Globe, The (MA) (#3551)
  Publisher URL	https://www.bostonglobe.com/
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  Citation Flow Score	55

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