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Floor Speech

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Ms. HASSAN. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleagues, to join the many Granite Staters who have written my office and expressed their grave alarm in opposing the nomination of Mr. Kennedy as the next Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is without experience or qualification for this post. He is uninformed and apparently uninterested in the most basic elements of healthcare policy. He entertains and spreads conspiracy theories that virtually everyone in this body knows to be dishonest and dangerous.

In a different time, in a different political moment, with a different President, Members of this Chamber would have joined together to resoundingly reject Mr. Kennedy's nomination. In fact, in a different time, where qualifications and character mattered, Mr. Kennedy's nomination would never have made it to the floor. But here we are.

Today, it appears that Mr. Kennedy will be confirmed and that Members of the U.S. Senate--the so-called world's greatest deliberative body-- will sacrifice the health of our fellow Americans by failing to stand up for science and for the truth.

For even the most skilled and experienced person, running the Department of Health and Human Services is a really daunting task. We expect and trust the HHS Secretary to direct the administration of critical programs like Medicare or Medicaid; to direct research so that we can find cures for cancer, Alzheimer's, and other diseases; to help bring new lifesaving medications to market; to find ways to make medicine and care more affordable; to help ensure that our children grow up healthy and that our parents age with dignity.

When a crisis hits, we look to the Secretary of Health and Human Services for leadership, to help lead the fight against fentanyl or to protect our communities from a pandemic.

There is, perhaps, no aspect of public policy as complicated as healthcare, and there are few aspects of life as fundamental as being healthy.

And to be sure, there are grave healthcare challenges facing our country. The cost of healthcare is too high; the cost of prescriptions, too steep. While we have made extraordinary progress in recent generations, we know that too many diseases still cry out to be cured, and too many people struggle to get the care that they need where and when they need it.

The challenges are real, but progress is possible.

When I was Governor of New Hampshire, I worked with Republicans and Democrats in the legislature to help our State adopt Medicaid expansion. And during the first Trump administration, we came together to end surprise medical billing with a new bipartisan law. Of course, there is much more work to do. The point is that when we work together, embrace commonsense solutions, and have the right leadership, we can forge progress. But it takes hard work. It takes seriousness to tackle a challenge as daunting as healthcare. It takes experience, talent, and ability. We are talking about the health of our country and of our children.

This is a job that requires us to search far and wide across our country to find the right person; someone who is informed, capable, and forthright; someone who has a proven track record of leadership; and someone willing to tell the truth in service to the goal of helping every American to be healthy.

Instead, the President of the United States offered us Mr. Kennedy. It is entirely unclear to me what qualifications Mr. Kennedy brings to this office. He has never run an organization or a business even one- hundredth of the size of the Department of Health and Human Services. He has no background in medicine, science, health policy, or government. Most concerning, though, is his complete and utter lack of even the most basic knowledge of the Department he is supposed to lead or the health policy debates and challenges that our country has been grappling with over the last several decades.

It is not simply that we have been asked to hope that Mr. Kennedy learns on the job. It is not simply that we are being asked to grade Mr. Kennedy on a curve. It is worse than that because even for his confirmation hearings, Mr. Kennedy couldn't be bothered to even do his homework.

During his confirmation hearing, I asked Mr. Kennedy some fairly basic questions about Medicare and Medicaid, the most well-known health programs overseen by the Department he seeks to lead, programs which tens of millions of Americans count on for their care. He couldn't accurately identify a single part of Medicare. He got every question I asked wrong.

When it comes to Medicaid, which, among other things, provides coverage for about half of the births in the United States, he wrongly said it was fully, federally funded, which it isn't.

Let me be clear: The administration is asking the American people to place these critical health programs in the hands of a man who has no idea what they even are. That is a big ask. And it is an ask we wouldn't make of our own constituents. No one in this body would hire even an entry-level healthcare staffer who did not understand the basics of Medicaid and Medicare. Why should we exercise a different, weaker standard for the person who is supposed to be in charge of both? Why, with this administration, does the bar go even lower when the office becomes even higher?

If Mr. Kennedy cannot be bothered to learn the basics about Medicare and Medicaid, he will certainly not bother to stand up for them. This administration has made clear that it is willing to gut Medicaid in order to pay for tax breaks for billionaires.

The President's new Director of the Office of Management and Budget has, in fact, proposed that the administration cut Medicaid--a program that provides health insurance coverage for approximately 80 million Americans--by more than one-third. Does anyone think that Mr. Kennedy will be a voice of reason; that he will speak out on behalf of American families and make the case for saving Medicare or Medicaid? He can't even describe what they are.

Mr. Kennedy is an intelligent and educated man. But education and intelligence aren't a substitute for taking the job seriously. If Mr. Kennedy were in the running for a different post, his failure to understand the basics of our healthcare system might not be relevant. But it so happens to be the American people's great misfortune that he is, in fact, being called to serve as the highest public health official in our land.

Mr. Kennedy's lack of qualifications and knowledge about healthcare have real consequences. If confirmed, his lack of preparation, experience, and interest in America's healthcare will leave our country worse off. Our people will be less healthy.

And nobody will feel Mr. Kennedy's careless disregard for the magnitude of his position more than America's women. When I was initially considering Mr. Kennedy's nomination, one mark in his favor was his long record of advocacy on behalf of a woman's fundamental freedom to make her own health decisions. When Mr. Kennedy was in New Hampshire campaigning for President, he told Granite Staters:

I am pro-choice. I don't think the government has any business telling people what to do with their bodies.

But since he came out in support of President Trump, Mr. Kennedy has made a remarkable discovery. He decided at the age of 71 that his long- held belief in reproductive freedom for women was wrong. All of his principles about women making their own choices were suddenly no longer true.

Instead, as the Nation's leading public health official, he has said that he will faithfully and enthusiastically carry out the anti-choice policies of an administration that continues to dedicate itself to undermining and taking away a woman's fundamental freedom.

This isn't a hypothetical issue. In his confirmation hearing, Mr. Kennedy said that he and the Trump administration would be examining the safety of the drug mifepristone, which is used for abortions and in miscarriage care. During the hearing, I showed Mr. Kennedy study after study--stacks--hundreds of pages of research done over the course of decades, all of which demonstrate the safety of this medication. Let me be clear, the safety has been proven. If Mr. Kennedy and the Trump administration continue to persist in studying a drug that is proven to be safe, it is clear that their objection is not with a lack of research; their objection is to the result of that research. So they want to sow doubt about it. They want to sow confusion. And once they do, they will hide behind the very doubt that they have created as a reason for denying women the most basic of human freedoms: body autonomy.

Mr. Kennedy, having sold out his pro-choice principles, will surely help in that effort. He certainly will not stand in the way of it. The debate about reproductive freedom is fundamentally a debate about whether one believes in the basic promise of our Declaration of Independence that all of us are free and equal. The question for Mr. Kennedy and all those who would deny women this basic freedom is whether they believe that women have the capacity and judgment to make their own healthcare and reproductive decisions just as men do.

Make no mistake, Mr. Kennedy did not have a miraculous conversion something like the Apostle Paul's on the road to Damascus on this issue. He just made a cold-blooded, expedient choice to cut a path to power. He decided that the freedom of women was a small price to pay in order to be able to call himself a Cabinet Secretary. I have had good- faith disagreements with friends and colleagues on the issue of abortion, but Mr. Kennedy is different.

Mr. Kennedy has spent his lifetime arguing for a woman's reproductive freedom. But he now abandons what he used to refer to as a core value for a title and for what he, apparently, thinks is more important than freedom--being in Donald Trump's orbit.

Americans have a particular disdain for those who sell out the freedom of their fellow citizens in pursuit of power. We call such people many things. We seldom call them ``Mr. Secretary.'' Even if Mr. Kennedy was not inexperienced, even if Mr. Kennedy had basic knowledge regarding our health system, even if Mr. Kennedy was not willing to imperil freedom for women, members of both political parties should reject his nomination because Mr. Kennedy, who has forged a career of peddling cynicism and conspiracy regarding vaccines, is, perhaps, the most uniquely dangerous man ever nominated to head America's Department of Health and Human Services.

Vaccines are among the greatest achievements in human history, and America has been at the center of that success. Our doctors and scientists were instrumental in helping vanquish smallpox and banish polio. Because of vaccines, more than 20 million people walk today who otherwise would have been stricken with polio. Hundreds of millions of people are alive today because of vaccines. I am reminded of the words of a previous HHS Secretary:

Vaccines are some of the most thoroughly tested medical products we have. Vaccines are safe, effective, and lifesaving.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar, who was appointed by President Trump, said those words during his first term. He was right when he said this 6 years ago. But today, Mr. Kennedy asserts that this statement is wrong.

Mr. Kennedy has a long history of dealing in both outright lies and clever half-truths to sow cynicism, mistrust, and confusion regarding vaccines. He has, at various times, discouraged people from getting vaccines for measles and polio.

Mr. Kennedy has led litigation to discredit the HPV vaccine, a vaccine which has led to a dramatic decrease in cervical cancers among young women.

When the pandemic hit, President Trump helped marshal America's scientific resources in Operation Warp Speed to produce a COVID vaccine in record time. This was, in my mind, one of the greatest public health achievements in decades and a real credit to President Trump. But Mr. Kennedy helped lead efforts that attempted to revoke President Trump's COVID vaccine's authorization.

And for more than 25 years, Mr. Kennedy has helped perpetuate the dangerous lie that vaccines cause autism. During his confirmation hearings, my colleagues virtually begged Mr. Kennedy to recant these views. But Mr. Kennedy would not, insisting that if he somehow saw more evidence--only then, perhaps--he might reverse course and tell people he was wrong.

This is a dangerous game that Mr. Kennedy plays. He hides his anti- vaccine conspiracies under a cloak of deniability. Sometimes he outright lies. But most of the time, he insists that he is merely raising questions and that he is simply a man looking for answers. But to borrow from Benjamin Franklin:

Half the truth is often a great lie.

When Mr. Kennedy is presented with facts, he ignores them. He ignored the conclusive data that my colleagues showed him proving that vaccines do not cause autism. He, instead, continued to rely on one tiny, outdated, faulty, disproven study from way back in 1998; a study that the Journal that originally published it has since withdrawn to support his claim, instead of relying on the exhaustive studies that have been conducted since then that prove there is no link between vaccines and autism.

It is fine to ask questions. It is often urgently important. But it is not doctors and scientists who are ignoring Mr. Kennedy's questions; it is Mr. Kennedy who is ignoring their answers. Mr. Kennedy's vaccine conspiracies are not a quirky personality or harmless eccentricity, but especially with the authority and megaphone he will have if he is confirmed, it will be a grave danger to the health of our people.

Mr. Kennedy has already spent much of his career taking legal action against safe and effective vaccines. With the full power of the Department of Health and Human Services, it stands to reason that he will use his post to limit access to certain vaccines, pull FDA approval of others, or change guidelines and recommendations concerning what vaccines children should receive.

But more than that, with the platform of HHS Secretary, Mr. Kennedy will undermine public trust in vaccines and will discourage a growing number of parents from getting their children vaccinated. As for Mr. Kennedy's insistence that is simply raising doubts about the safety of vaccines doesn't mean that he is urging people not to get their children vaccinated--well, Mr. Kennedy may be unqualified, but he is not naive. He knows full well that millions of people listen to his words. Millions more will listen should he be confirmed to this office.

And so what happens? How much, Mr. President, does a lie about vaccines truly cost? Let us say that a greater number of Americans become wary of vaccines due to Mr. Kennedy's musings from the seat of the most powerful public health perch in the world. A greater number of families decide that their kids don't need vaccines. Sometimes that will mean just skipping one vaccine. Sometimes it will mean skipping all of them. These parents aren't necessarily conspiracy theorists themselves, but they have read some scary, if untrue, stories online, and as they try to figure out what to do, the most important public health authority in the land chooses to give credence to the lies rather than reassure parents with the truth.

Maybe, as is true with every parent, these parents are worried about their child developing a disability, and now they hear Mr. Kennedy suggest that vaccines maybe cause autism, so they hesitate. They don't return to the pediatrician's office for the next dose of a vaccine that will prevent their child from getting a deadly disease.

As more and more children become unprotected and as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., fails to advocate for safe, effective, lifesaving vaccines, children get sick, they spread the disease, and all of a sudden, we are back to the kind of deadly disease outbreaks that doctors used to witness in the early decades of the 20th century--a time long enough ago wherein many Americans don't realize what it was like to lose a loved one to an illness like measles. There will be more measles outbreaks like the one going on right now in West Texas, or maybe, instead of measles, it will be polio. People will get sick, and people will die. Take a look in a museum at a rusting iron lung. Go to the graves of the unvaccinated measles victims in American Samoa. That is the cost. That is the price of this particular lie.

I also take issue with the notion that Mr. Kennedy's anti-vax cynicism is somehow advancing scientific progress or healthy debate. The truth is that Mr. Kennedy's conspiracies are not particularly new. They are old theories that have been disproven but that Mr. Kennedy keeps alive by continuing to recycle them long after the debate has been concluded.

Remarkably, during the hearings, Mr. Kennedy and some of my colleagues sought to place Mr. Kennedy in the tradition of great scientific minds like Galileo and Newton, who dared challenge the scientific status quo with their own provocative questions. There is, of course, a key difference. The difference is that Galileo and Newton were right, and Mr. Kennedy is wrong. The evidence vindicated Galileo. The evidence refutes Mr. Kennedy. That difference is what separated Galileo from the village crank. That difference is what separates a witch doctor from a real one.

This never-ending cycle of cynicism--of relitigating old debates about whether vaccines cause autism--doesn't further scientific progress. It doesn't unlock new truths or cures. It keeps us stuck in the past, stuck having the same debates over and over and over again. All that changes is that the mound of evidence disproving Mr. Kennedy grows higher and higher.

In his hearing, Mr. Kennedy said that he wouldn't apologize for asking what he called uncomfortable questions because ``we have massive health problems in this country that we must face honestly.''

The problem is not that Mr. Kennedy is asking uncomfortable questions; the problem is that Mr. Kennedy himself is not willing to accept the answers to them. The problem is that Mr. Kennedy is wasting our time and our money with dishonest and already settled debates, debates that distract us from the task at hand--the task of tackling the real and significant health problems that are facing our country-- because in his lifetime of fearmongering, what good has Mr. Kennedy actually contributed to the mission of public health?

Mr. Kennedy says he wishes to make America healthy again, but when Mr. Kennedy suggested that the polio vaccine gave people cancer, what child did he make healthier? Mr. Kennedy says he is trying to promote vigorous scientific debate. When Mr. Kennedy suggested that the United States of America develop Lyme disease as a bioweapon, what medical breakthrough did that yield? What disease did he help cure then? Mr. Kennedy's vaccine fears garner him headlines, but have they made healthcare more affordable for a single American family?

Think about the hours and resources that Mr. Kennedy has urged his followers to invest in relitigating proven science and what progress could instead have been made if that money were invested in finding treatments and cures to diseases. That is the price of Mr. Kennedy's insistence that we remain frozen in time in our understanding of science.

Mr. Kennedy has not made America healthier in his career thus far, nor will he if he is confirmed. He will make America less healthy, more doubtful, more divided, more cynical, and further away from finding cures and making scientific progress.

We have real healthcare challenges in this country. The American people need healthcare costs to come down. They want to stop having to make impossible choices between making ends meet and getting their children the medications they need. They want it to be easier to get a prompt appointment with a good doctor in their neighborhood who talks with them and doesn't rush them out the door. They want better mental health care in our schools. They want cures. They want their loved ones to stop being held back by chronic diseases. They want to say fewer early goodbyes because of cancer, Alzheimer's, and other diseases. They want to be able to age at home with dignity and high-quality home care.

Making our country more healthy is no small task, but we can do it. We live in a great country. The American people are talented and imaginative. When we work together, we have the capacity to do extraordinary things. We can make our country better. We can save more lives. But we cannot move forward if we confirm a Cabinet Secretary who engages in the same, tired debates over and over again, if we confirm a Cabinet Secretary who goads us into fighting each other rather than fighting for cures or for lower healthcare costs.

If this body confirms Mr. Kennedy, it will, in effect, be declaring that experience doesn't matter and qualifications do not count. It will be ignoring plain truths and suspending our capacity for reasoning--all because a President demanded that the majority of this body do so.

If this body confirms Mr. Kennedy, it will be betraying who we are as Americans. It will be sacrificing a better future for the sake of needlessly relitigating the past. It will be confusing a charlatan with a prophet and cynicism with wisdom.

In the end, if this body confirms Mr. Kennedy, more parents will reject vaccinations for their children, more people will get sick, and a growing number of children will likely die.

The exact impact of Mr. Kennedy's confirmation in terms of lives lost or progress thwarted will, of course, be hard to quantify. Regardless, what we do know for certain is that Senators on both sides of the aisle are willing to denounce the lies that Mr. Kennedy has spread, and we saw that in our hearings. But, colleagues, the issue in this moment isn't whether you will stand up against lies; the issue is whether you will stand up to the man who tells them. And in this moment, in this Chamber, it appears that not enough of my Republican colleagues are willing to do that. I hope I am wrong.

I urge my colleagues to reject Mr. Kennedy's nomination.

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