The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the U.S. death count from Covid-19 at 1.2 million. But Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rejects his own department’s statistics.
“I don’t know how many died,” Mr. Kennedy told senators during a contentious hearing Thursday, adding, “I don’t think anybody knows, because there was so much data chaos coming out of the C.D.C.”
When Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, accurately, that it was becoming harder for people to get Covid shots at pharmacies, Mr. Kennedy denied that, retorting: “Everyone can get access to them.” He also claimed mRNA vaccines “cause serious harm, including death, particularly in young people,” though the C.D.C. found “no increased risk of death” from the shots.
Mr. Kennedy’s defiant performance at the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday, his critics say, put on vivid display what happens when someone with no medical or scientific training and a conspiracy-minded approach takes charge of the nation’s public health.
Instead of being guided by rigorous research and nuanced debate over complex issues that defy easy answers, the country’s health secretary rejects facts that do not fit his theories and casts out experts who are not aligned with him. He is buoyed by the support of a vocal populist base that shares his suspicions of organized medicine and is energized by his push for a new approach.
Mr. Kennedy’s distrust of his department’s scientists and doctors has created turmoil within the nation’s public health agencies, particularly the C.D.C. Mass firings and restructuring have stripped the institution of expertise. And the health secretary dismissed an entire panel of vaccine experts and fired the C.D.C. director — whom he had called a “brilliant microbiologist and a tech wizard” — just one month after the Senate confirmed her.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Department said that “Secretary Kennedy was debunking numerous false claims, emphasizing that the American people deserve full transparency from the agencies that serve them,” citing his “commitment to evidence-based science.”
Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly vowed to restore trust in the agencies he leads. In an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Sunday, he reiterated what he said at Thursday’s hearing, defending his shake-up at the C.D.C. and accusing agency scientists of failing to document vaccine injuries and “stonewalling” him in requests to review vaccine safety data. “This is malpractice,” he said.
In making his case against the medical establishment, Mr. Kennedy has seized on widely held concerns about whether it puts profits before patients. It is true that the pharmaceutical industry is a lucrative business, raking in tens of billions in profits each quarter. Medical journals and elected officials do take financial contributions from the industry.
Like all vaccines, the Covid shots can in rare cases produce serious side effects. And the C.D.C. has publicly acknowledged its shortcomings with respect to data gathering during the pandemic, and has moved to correct them.
But by citing such episodes without context and putting a nefarious spin on the work of mainstream institutions, Mr. Kennedy is helping fuel the current crisis of mistrust in public health, according to experts who study conspiracy theories and their role in society. His supporters don’t trust the agencies he oversees, and his detractors don’t trust him.
By “accusing powerful people of doing things in secret for their own benefit, against the common good,” Mr. Kennedy is trafficking in conspiracy theories, according to Joseph E. Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who studies the phenomenon.
Having a top government official contradicting science is “a serious, serious problem,” Professor Uscinkski said, “because the hope is that, in a free society, you develop expertise and methods for developing knowledge, and you build institutions to do that, and you develop ways to find out what’s true and what’s false.” He added: “Once you pervert those institutions, now there’s no way to know what’s true or false.”
People across the political spectrum are alarmed. In recent days, Mr. Kennedy’s sister Kerry and his nephew Joe Kennedy III called for him to step down. Three former surgeon generals, including Dr. Jerome Adams, who served during the first Trump administration, wrote in an essay for USA Today that Mr. Kennedy was jeopardizing the integrity of the C.D.C. and public health.
President Trump, who promised to let “Bobby go wild on health” — and who, like Mr. Kennedy, has rejected scientific evidence in asserting that vaccines are linked to autism — has not criticized Mr. Kennedy.
But Mr. Trump did contradict him and like-minded officials, such as the Florida surgeon general, who announced last week that the state would end all vaccine mandates, including for children. A memo from the Republican pollsters Tony Fabrizio and Bob Ward warned Republicans before the hearing that limiting access to childhood vaccines could hurt them politically, citing “sky-high” approval for routine vaccinations among swing voters.
“It’s a tough stance,” Mr. Trump said, when asked about Florida’s action. “You have vaccines that work. They just pure and simple work. They’re not controversial at all, and I think those vaccines should be used.”
In the nearly 80 years since it was established, the C.D.C.’s recommendations on vaccination have stood as the gold standard, nearly always accepted across the country. Now states are going their own way, with Republican states loosening vaccine requirements while Democratic states tighten them.
Before Florida’s move, the Republican governor of Idaho signed a measure earlier this year that bans all vaccine mandates, although there are exemptions for hospitals and a provision allowing schools to send home sick children. And Democratic states such as California, Washington, Oregon and Massachusetts are adopting their own vaccine recommendations.
An August poll by KFF, a health policy research organization, found that about half the public expresses confidence in government agencies like the C.D.C. and F.D.A. to ensure the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, but only 37 percent “have at least some confidence” the agencies will act independently without interference from outside interests.
Mr. Kennedy, the poll found, “continues to be the least trusted source of information on vaccines,” with just 37 percent of the public saying they trust him at least a fair amount.
Mr. Kennedy’s recent announcement that Covid-19 vaccines are no longer recommended for healthy children or adults under 65 has led to confusion and conflicting policies, with pharmacies in some states requiring a prescription and others not carrying the shots at all.
“It does matter when the country’s leading health official has a conspiratorial mind-set and encourages suspicion about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, among other things,” said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College who studies misperception. “It makes it almost impossible to engage in an evidence-based policy-making process about public health.”
Mr. Kennedy is more apt to belittle or attack his agencies than praise them.
During Thursday’s hearing, he asserted that the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health — the world’s premier biomedical research agency — have been “asleep at the wheel” in studying the long-term effects of antidepressants in children. He failed to note that the N.I.H. has funded a study that followed adults for up to one year and four months, and another that followed adolescents for 18 months. Both ran much longer than the short-term trials the Food and Drug Administration requires.
Mr. Kennedy also discounts the opinions of medical societies, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, which he declared “gravely conflicted” because “their biggest contributors are the four largest vaccine makers.” The academy does partner with vaccine makers, but says children’s health, not financial considerations, drive its recommendations, noting that many physicians say providing vaccines is in fact a financial burden for them.
In talking about the C.D.C.’s expert vaccine advisers, whom he fired several months ago, Mr. Kennedy asserted that 97 percent had conflicts of interest. The actual figure is 6.2 percent, according to research published last month in The Journal of the American Medical Association — a publication Mr. Kennedy has dismissed as “corrupt.”
Mr. Kennedy’s critics say he accepts government numbers when they are convenient to him. He wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the United States has 4.2 percent of the world’s population but had 19 percent of Covid deaths — a calculation that suggests he knew how many Americans died, despite what he told senators on Thursday.
As Mr. Kennedy’s sharp distrust of his agencies continues to weaken them, parallel institutions have emerged.
At the University of Minnesota, Michael T. Osterholm, a prominent epidemiologist who has advised administrations of both parties, has put together the Vaccine Integrity Project, funded by an unrestricted gift from the Alumbra Innovations Foundation, founded by Christy Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, to promote health and restore the environment. The project’s goal is to provide accurate and timely data that might help states guide their fall vaccination recommendations.
Dr. Osterholm said he and his colleagues asked themselves a question: “What are those unique challenges we’re going to have if C.D.C. is not credible and A.C.I.P. is not functional?” (He was referring to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Mr. Kennedy reconstituted in May, firing all 17 former members.)
Dr. Osterholm says his group does not make vaccine recommendations, but simply provides evidence. He does not see it as a substitute for the immunization advisory committee. Dr. Osterholm said he is hoping, but not entirely confident, that the storied public health agency will survive.
“We see ourselves as a stopgap measure, not as a permanent solution,” he said. “We can’t wait for us to go out of business.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg covers health policy for The Times from Washington. A former congressional and White House correspondent, she focuses on the intersection of health policy and politics.
The post Kennedy, Rejecting Data, Fuels Distrust of His Own Agencies appeared first on New York Times.
