North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis revealed that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed because one senator decided to believe his lies.
During an exclusive interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper Wednesday, Tillis responded to the claim that Kennedy had gone back on his promises to Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, who serves as the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
“The main reason I supported Kennedy was because Bill Cassidy thought that we should see how it plays out,” Tillis said.
But Cassidy, who had led the charge on Kennedy’s confirmation, had been duped.
In February, Cassidy had promised before the Senate that, if confirmed, Kennedy would “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ recommendations without changes.”
But in early June, Kennedy stripped that committee of all of its members.
In a post on X Monday, Cassidy explained that “now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion.
Cassidy also claimed that Kennedy had “committed that he would work within current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems and not establish parallel systems,” and that he would not use his position to “wrongfully sow public fear” about vaccines.
In May, Kennedy announced that he’d made changes to the CDC’s recommended vaccine schedules without ACIP’s input, upending the decades-old consensus-driven method for making recommendations. Kennedy has also repeatedly sown doubts about vaccines, touting conspiracy theories and possible health risks for the measles vaccine amid a massive measles outbreak.
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