Executive Calendar

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, as we begin this discussion that is so important to America, I thought I would just mention the conversation I had recently with a couple of young medical students who came up to me and said: We know you are interested in healthcare and have been involved in this.

I am so appreciative of Senator Murray, who is going to pick up on the healthcare issue--an area where she has very substantial experience and expertise.

I thought these medical students summed up this debate, because they said: The way we see this Kennedy nomination, it is not just a vote for next week or even next year; this is a vote with enormous impact for decades.

Because Mr. Kennedy, according to these young medical students, has a long record of essentially being anti-science.

What we are going to do in our discussion of his nomination is go into that and other issues.

Suffice it to say, during his confirmation hearings--and they have been in multiple committees now--he was given ample opportunity from members on both sides of the dais to clarify his views on science and vaccines and our Nation's biggest Federal health programs. We are going to, in the hours ahead, touch on each of these and why Mr. Kennedy's failure to demonstrate a basic understanding of these important issues that impact America's health make him a uniquely unqualified nominee to become our Nation's chief healthcare officer.

In beginning my remarks, I wanted to say that ever since my days with the Gray Panthers, I have always felt that healthcare is the most important issue. If you and your loved ones don't have your health, everything just goes by the board. So that just reinforces what these young medical students were saying about the decision we are going to make in future hours with respect to Mr. Kennedy.

I am going to start with perhaps the most dangerous aspect of his long history, and that is his embrace and amplification of vaccine conspiracy theories. He has made a lucrative career out of sowing doubt in the minds of parents when it comes to vaccinating their kids. His nonprofit, the Children's Health Defense, is solely dedicated to peddling these conspiracies. You can even get merch. There are baby onesies, apparently, that read ``Unvaxxed, Unafraid,'' ``No Vax, No Problem.''

He has been the attorney of record on at least five cases against drug companies for their vaccines, which he didn't disclose to ethics officials and refused to answer questions about. He also refused to give up his 10 percent stake in any settlement agreements--instead, passing them off to his son. He refused to recuse himself from taking any actions that might affect his family's financial interests.

A vaccine that became routine for young people about 20 years ago is involved here, and since then, it has successfully cut cervical cancer rates into just a fraction of what they were before the drug came out to market. All of this adds up to a future HHS Secretary who stands to profit off of undermining this vaccine and, as a result, raise cervical cancer rates.

To quote my Republican colleague Senator Cassidy, a physician, Mr. Kennedy is ``financially vested in finding fault with vaccines.''

He also played a big role in one of the most deadly measles outbreaks in recent history. In 2019, he traveled to Samoa and used his platform to promote his anti-vax agenda, taking aim at the measles vaccine. The vaccine rate in Samoa plummeted. By 2019, measles had torn through the population, making more than 5,700 people sick, and 80 people were killed, most of them young kids.

During his confirmation hearing at the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Kennedy told me, ``We don't know what was killing them,'' speaking about those 83 deaths. But just last week, the Director General of Health for Samoa called this claim by Mr. Kennedy ``a total fabrication.''

So, Mr. President and colleagues, just put that in your thinking about this consideration--Mr. Kennedy saying that he didn't know what was killing these young people in Samoa and the Director General of Health of Samoa calling Mr. Kennedy's claim ``a total fabrication.''

A recent analysis showed that Mr. Kennedy has made 114 separate appearances in the last 4 years where he took anti-vaccine views or spread misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines. In 36 of these instances, Mr. Kennedy directly linked vaccines to autism.

Instead of providing the committee with clarity or reassurances about his decades-long career peddling vaccine conspiracies, what did Mr. Kennedy do? He dodged, he weaved, he bobbed and gave no indication that as Health and Human Services Secretary, he would stand by settled science that surrounds vaccines.

As HHS Secretary, Mr. Kennedy would have a huge amount of control over how vaccines are promoted and administered in our country. He could issue orders that discourage doctors from sharing information with parents and patients about lifesaving vaccines. He could issue an order that discourages schools from talking about or even requiring vaccines. He could rubberstamp an Executive order from Donald Trump that defunds the Centers for Disease Control, which is essentially the Agency in charge of getting Americans up-to-date information about vaccines and when to get them.

Just imagine you are a parent scrolling on Instagram or listening to a podcast. You hear this gentleman speaking passionately about the danger of vaccines. Maybe you do a bit of research, and lo and behold, you find this is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, America's chief healthcare guy. You think to yourself: Huh, this guy must know what he is talking about. Maybe he is right in his questioning of whether vaccines are safe and effective.

So the seed of doubt on vaccines gets planted. Then, at your kid's next wellness exam, you decide not to get them their next round of vaccinations. A few months later, you are taking them on a trip to Disneyland, say for spring break, where countless other parents like you have heard the same medical advice from the same person and they, too, decided against vaccinating their kids.

It only takes one of those kids carrying a deadly disease like measles for an outbreak to begin, and pretty soon, after what was supposed to be the spring break trip of your dreams, your kid, sadly, is showing symptoms.

What follows then is a slew of doctor's appointments, maybe even a stay in the hospital, sleepless nights, missed days of work and school, not to mention dread and fear for your child's very well-being. Meanwhile, countless other parents around the country that went on the same trip to Disneyland are now experiencing the same exact nightmare you are.

Sowing the seed of doubt in the minds of just a few people can have massive consequences for communities across the country, and it is not hypothetical. Right now, there is a measles outbreak in Texas that has sickened more than a dozen kids. The number of kindergartners showing up with an exemption for required vaccinations jumped to a record high last fall. The two facts are connected, and Mr. Kennedy and his allies can take the credit for it.

Now, Mr. Kennedy is fond of saying he is not making recommendations about whether parents should vaccinate their kids; he is just asking questions and giving people choices. That is a slippery tactic used by conspiracy theorists to dodge any real responsibility for their words and actions, and it is absurd coming from somebody who is about to be confirmed for a job that is entirely about making recommendations.

Mr. Kennedy is also fond of saying that if somebody shows him the science to prove he is wrong, well, then he will apologize and retract his statements, but when somebody does show him the science proves him wrong, he just brushes it aside and basically will not accept it as fact.

Once again, to quote my Republican colleague Bill Cassidy directly: ``to improve the health of Americans, or undermine it, always asking for more evidence and never accepting the evidence that is there''--that is why, Bill Cassidy told Mr. Kennedy, he was struggling with his nomination.

Even Republicans like Senator Cassidy--someone I work with frequently on the Finance Committee and respect his opinion--he notes how dangerous this guy is.

It is not hyperbole to say that when Mr. Kennedy becomes Health and Human Services Secretary, if he does, and has control over how our government rolls out vaccines or makes them available, I believe kids in America will die.

When disease rates for illnesses that have effective vaccines start to rise in States across the country and hospitalizations and death tolls mount, my Republican colleagues are going to regret voting, if they do, for Mr. Kennedy today or early tomorrow.

When disease rates for illnesses that have effective vaccines start to rise in States across the country and death tolls mount, again, we will see Republicans say: This is something that could have been prevented. What else should we have done?

Republicans will be responsible for every child that dies as a result of not being vaccinated because it seems they care more about staying in the good graces of Donald Trump than they do about protecting the lives of kids. Again, this is something they will regret for years to come.

Now, before we turn to Senator Murray's remarks, I would just like to touch on Mr. Kennedy's stance on reproductive choice--an area where Senator Murray has been our leader for years and years in the Senate.

In the lead up to and during his failed Presidential campaign, Mr. Kennedy repeatedly claimed he supported a woman's right to make her own healthcare decisions. Less than a year ago, in an Instagram post on June 14 last year, he stated that he supports the emerging consensus in this country that abortion should be legal up to a certain number of weeks.

Fast-forward to his confirmation again at the Senate Finance Committee a few weeks ago. He was pressed repeatedly by Democrats about his stance on abortion. Instead of clarifying, Mr. Kennedy defaulted to a clearly rehearsed talking point that he repeated over and over again:

I agree with President Trump. Every abortion is a tragedy.

While that answer doesn't give us much clarity, it is certainly telling. Mr. Kennedy has a long history of changing his stance on healthcare issue after healthcare issue to whatever position benefits him at the moment. As long as it earns him power or it earns him a paycheck, as far as I can tell, Mr. Kennedy will believe--or at least pretend to believe--whatever you want him to. He is willing to give up his principles and all his beliefs that women and mothers are better equipped to make their own healthcare decisions than politicians, and it is all about, as we have talked about on this floor, staying in Donald Trump's orbit of power.

While Mr. Kennedy recites rehearsed talking points on the subject, this is an issue that has had real, deadly consequences for women, as Senator Murray has said again and again.

Donald Trump spent his first term packing the Supreme Court with rightwing extremists willing to rip away the reproductive freedoms guaranteed to us under Roe v. Wade. In the wake of the Supreme Court's gutting Roe, millions of women living in red States have had their reproductive freedoms ripped away from them, all due to Donald Trump.

In the years since the overturn of Roe, there have been countless headlines about the consequences of these abortion bans: women bleeding out in parking lots or in emergency rooms because they were denied care; women becoming infertile and losing their ability to have kids in the future because they couldn't get care; and, in the very worst cases, women dying.

So it should horrify every American that we don't actually know where Mr. Kennedy stands. The man who could become our Nation's chief healthcare officer--we don't know where he stands on reproductive health, short of perhaps just saying he is a ``yes'' man for anything Donald Trump tells him to do.

So I think at this point, Mr. President, I want to yield the floor to my friend and colleague from Washington State because she knows so much about the challenge of ensuring that women's reproductive health services are being protected. As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Mr. Kennedy could do so much damage to the well-being and health of women.

I am very pleased to be able to yield the floor to Senator Murray to discuss that and other pressing issues.

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