OAN Staff Blake Wolf
6:02 PM – Thursday, September 4, 2025
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced questioning from members of the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday during a tense testimony.
Kennedy came under scrutiny from certain lawmakers over his recent dismissal of senior public health officials, including former CDC Director Susan Monarez, and his proposed revisions to federal vaccination policies.
At one point during the three-hour hearing, Kennedy clashed with Senator Ron Wyden (D-Or.), who tried to argue that Kennedy’s policies would be placing children in “harm’s way.”
“This is about kids being pushed into harm’s way by reckless and repeated decisions to get scientists and doctors out of the way and allow conspiracy theories to dictate this country’s health policy,” Wyden asserted.
“I don’t see any evidence that you have any regrets about anything you’ve done or plans to change it. And my last comment is, I hope that you will tell the American people how many preventable child deaths are an acceptable sacrifice for enacting an agenda that I think is fundamentally cruel and defies common sense,” Wyden added.
However, the HHS Secretary swiftly fired back, criticizing Wyden for remaining silent on the rising prevalence of chronic disease in children and vaccine-related injuries, which he maintained have escalated dramatically over the past two decades.
“Senator, you’ve sat in that chair how long? 20-25 years, while the chronic disease of our children went up to 76%. And you said nothing,” Kennedy said. “You never asked the question why it’s happening. Why is this happening? Today, for the first time in 20 years, we’ve learned that infant mortality has increased in our country. It’s not because I came in here. It’s because of what happened during the Biden administration that we’re going to end.”
At another point during the hearing, Kennedy addressed the firing of Monarez, the former CDC director, arguing that the change was necessary to “restore the agency to its role as the world’s gold standard public health agency” after the COVID-19 era destroyed all trust in the agency.
“I would like to address the recent shakeups at CDC. These changes were absolutely necessary adjustments to restore the agency to its role as the world’s gold standard public health agency with the central mission of protecting Americans from infectious disease. CDC failed that responsibility miserably during COVID, when its disastrous, nonsensical policies destroyed small businesses, violated civil liberties, closed our schools, caused generational damage in doing so, masked infants with no science, and heightened economic inequality,” Kennedy stated.
“America is home to 4.2% of the world’s population yet we had nearly 20% of the COVID deaths. We literally did worse than any country in the world and the people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed out schools, are the people who will be leaving,” he continued.
“We are the sickest country in the world, that’s why we have to fire people at CDC. They did not do their job. This was their job to keep us healthy and I need to fire some of those people to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
“We need bold, confident and creative new leadership at CDC. People able and willing to chart a new course. As my father once said, ‘Progress is a nice word, but change is its motivator.’ And change has its enemies. That’s why we need new blood at CDC. That’s also why it’s imperative that we remove officials with conflicts of interest and catastrophically bad judgment and political agendas,” Kennedy added.
Additionally, Kennedy battled with Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who tried to argue that he was taking vaccines away from Americans by removing the recommendation for COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women. In response, Kennedy accused Warren of dishonesty and defended his decisions as necessary to address systemic failures within the CDC.
“Will you tell America that all adults and all children over six months of age are eligible to get a COVID booster at their local pharmacy today?” Warren posed to Kennedy, to which he reminded her, stating, “Anyone can get the booster.”
Pressing Kennedy on the removal of the recommendation, Warren stated: “If you don’t recommend, then the consequence of that in many states is that you can’t walk into a pharmacy and get one. It means insurance companies don’t have to cover the $200 or so cost.”
“You are effectively denying people vaccines,” she continued.
Kennedy then asserted that the CDC is “not going to recommend a product for which there is no clinical data for that indication. Is that what I should be doing?”
After a back and forth, he added: “I never promised that I was going to recommend products for which there is no indication. And I know you’ve taken $855,000 from pharmaceutical companies, senator.”
Kennedy’s fiery testimonial followed just a day after over 1,000 current and former HHS employees signed a letter calling for his resignation.
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