Senator Maggie Hassan, Democrat of New Hampshire, choked up on Thursday as she assailed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Republicans for promoting false links between vaccines and autism in children.
Ms. Hassan, before diving into her questions for Mr. Kennedy, President Trump’s nominee for health secretary, disclosed that she is the mother of a 36-year-old man with cerebral palsy. It was a remarkably personal moment during Mr. Kennedy’s second day of testimony on Capitol Hill as he seeks to take the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services.
She said not a day had gone by when she didn’t think about what she did when she was pregnant with her son that might have caused his condition.
“So please do not suggest that anybody in this body of either political party doesn’t want to know what the cause of autism is,” Ms. Hassan said. “You know how many friends I have with children who have autism?”
She said that when a now-discredited study linking autism and vaccines was first published, it “rocked my world.” She was referring to research put out in the late 1990s that has since been retracted and debunked many times.
“Like every mother, I worried about whether in fact the vaccine had done something to my son,” she said, adding that this “tiny study” had repeatedly been found wrong by the scientific community.
She then accused Mr. Kennedy of continuing to “sow doubt” about settled science.
“It makes it impossible for us to move forward,” Ms. Hassan said. “So that’s what the problem is here. It’s the relitigating and rehashing and continuing to sow doubt so we can’t move forward, and it freezes us in place.”
As she spoke, the packed hearing room was hushed.
Ms. Hassan is not the first senator to draw on personal experiences during the hearing.
Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and chair of the committee, opened the hearing with a story from his days as a physician specializing in liver disease. Mr. Cassidy, a key Republican vote in Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation fight who was visibly wrestling with whether he could support him, described a patient with hepatitis B who needed a liver transplant at 18 years old.
“Barely an adult, her entire life ahead of her, all of the hopes and dreams she might want, the children, the grandchildren, the future generations, wiped away if she did not get to the L.S.U. hospital in Shreveport,” he said, adding that “even if she survived,” the woman would be left with tens of thousands of dollars every year in hospital bills.
“It was the worst day of my medical career,” he said, because “$50 of vaccines” could have prevented her medical emergency.
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