In his first Congressional hearing since his confirmation, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has avoided sharing his beliefs and defended deep cuts to health institutes. Specifically, Democrat members have been pushing for answers on the impact of the Trump budget on health as well as what Kennedy really believes in terms of medicine.
Kennedy has been outspoken against vaccines for many years, and his beliefs play a major role in how the US is responding to health threats, both future and currently happening. The measles outbreaks spreading through the country have now passed 1,000 cases.
Out of the three deaths in this outbreak, two of them have been of unvaccinated children. Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan asked Kennedy if he would vaccinate his own children today, to which Kennedy replied “probably” for measles, adding that “what I would say is my opinions about vaccines are irrelevant.”
“I don’t want to seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking advice, medical advice from me,” Kennedy continued.
Kennedy’s opinion on vaccines or other medical advice is unfortunately not irrelevant. During Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, US Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) stressed the role Kennedy played in discouraging uptake of the measles vaccine in the Pacific nation of Samoa in 2019. Samoa, too, saw thousands of people infected, and 83 people, most of whom were children, died.
As the measles situation in the US got worse, he eventually urged people to get the vaccine; he also made unscientific claims on alternative treatments for measles, as well as claiming that the MMR vaccine contains aborted fetus debris, which it doesn’t.
“The problem is that is his job – the top line of his job description – is the nation’s chief health strategist. That is the top line of every health official, federal, state, local leader. That is his job, is to give people the best advice that he can. I believe that he’s giving up on, in my view, his chief responsibility,” Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told reporters on a call as reported by ABC following the Kennedy testimony.
The Trump budget is proposing the biggest cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) ever, reducing the funding from $48 billion to $27 billion. Many of the NIH’s 27 institutes will be collapsed, and funding for the ones focused specifically on carrying out minority-health and international research is being scrapped entirely.
Members of the committee pointed out that without funding, clinical trials and crucial departments like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s lead poisoning prevention program have been closed down. Many people had already been fired even before these proposed cuts, as the United States Department of Health and Human Services plans to cut its workforce by a quarter. Among them was Dr Richard J. Youle, who won the Breakthrough Prize in 2021 for his contribution to understanding the role of cell death in Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
Kennedy claims that the cuts won’t affect the work of the institutes, clinical trials, and programs without presenting any evidence or details of how that is going to happen.
Source Link: Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr Says People Shouldn’t Take Medical Advice From Him
