Day 2 of confirmation hearings for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become the country’s next health secretary kicked off with heated discussions about the safety of vaccinations, chronic illnesses and Covid-19.
Here is a running list of key health claims, fact-checked by our reporters.
Prioritizing chronic disease
“There has never been an H.H.S. secretary who came in to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said, answering a question about his goal of focusing on fighting chronic disease as secretary for health and human services.
Research into chronic disease has been a major focus of the National Institutes of Health, an agency under the H.H.S. umbrella, for many years.
The N.I.H. spends tens of billions of dollars on research into chronic diseases, operating institutes dedicated to studying diabetes, obesity, neurological disorders and heart disease.
Furthermore, the Biden administration championed a cancer “moonshot” program to fund research into cancer, one of the most common chronic diseases.
Covid-19 in Children
Mr. Kennedy asserted for the second day in a row that Covid does not pose a risk to young children. Senator Rand Paul echoed those statements, saying that no healthy children had died from Covid.
That is incorrect: While children with underlying health conditions are at greatest risk from the illness, those without chronic conditions have still died from the virus.
A study published in the fall examined 183 cases of children who died from Covid between 2020 and 2022, and found that around one-third of these children did not have another medical condition beyond Covid at their time of death. Between 2021 and 2022, Covid was the eighth leading cause of death among children in the United States.
“Nobody would dispute that you want to address one of the leading causes of death,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who emphasized that the risk Covid posed to children was “really not zero.”
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also showed that in 2023, more than 100 children in the United States developed Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, or MIS-C, a rare but serious condition that typically occurs weeks after a Covid infection.
The vast majority of MIS-C cases were in children who were eligible to be vaccinated, but were not. Roughly 1 to 2 percent of those children have died, according to the C.D.C.
Diabetes and Children
Mr. Kennedy said diabetes rates were rising among children. That’s true.
It was a correction of statements he has made in the past that 48 percent of teenagers in the country are diabetic. That number is wrong by orders of magnitude. For instance, Type 2 diabetes occurs in 0.35 percent of Americans under the age of 20, according to the American Diabetes Association.
Hepatitis B Vaccinations
Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, cast doubt about the hepatitis B vaccines, questioning whether infants need protection against a virus that is often sexually transmitted.
“You’re telling my kid to take a hepatitis B vaccine when he’s 1 day old,” he said. “That’s not science.”
Mr. Kennedy did not respond to Mr. Paul’s statement. But, in fact, the vaccine is given to infants because their mothers can pass it to their babies. Hospitals often don’t test pregnant women for it.
The infection, which can lead to permanent liver damage and cancer, used to infect about 18,000 children each year, about half of them at birth.
Since vaccination became routine, hepatitis B has become extremely rare among U.S. children.
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