Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sparred with Sen. Bernie Sanders during a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing earlier this year on April 22, defending his long-held skepticism about vaccines before finding rare common ground with the independent senator on junk food advertising.
Sanders opened by putting Kennedy on the spot over a passage from his book “The Real Anthony Fauci” in which Kennedy wrote that the idea that vaccines were responsible for dramatic declines in infectious disease mortality is “simply untrue.”
Sanders cited a peer-reviewed Lancet study led by the World Health Organization finding that vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives and reduced infant deaths by 40 percent over the past 50 years.
“Do you still believe that one of the central tenets of the germ theory, that vaccines sharply reduce infant mortality, is, quote unquote, simply untrue?” Sanders asked.
Kennedy pushed back, dismissing the Lancet study as “a modeling study” and citing a CDC study he claimed attributed 80% of 20th-century mortality declines not to vaccines but to “hygiene, to sewer plants, better water supplies, to engineering.”
Sanders cut him off before he could finish.
“You’re entitled to your view,” he said. “But according to the World Health Organization and scientists all over the world, vaccines have played an enormous role in saving lives.”
“I don’t contest that,” Kennedy replied. “I’m just saying that if you want to talk about why disease mortalities disappeared in the 20th century, it was not vaccines.”
“Well, you are in a minority,” Sanders said flatly, before moving on.
The hearing took a notably different turn when Sanders shifted to ultra-processed food and childhood obesity. He pressed Kennedy on when the FDA would implement strong warning labels on unhealthy food and beverages, and Kennedy said the agency was already moving through an interagency process to finalize a definition for ultra-processed food, with labeling to follow.
Sanders then asked whether Kennedy supported banning junk food ads from television, a position endorsed by Trump’s own surgeon general nominee Casey Means.
“I would support that,” Kennedy said.
