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Floor Speech

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Mr. KIM. Mr. President, I rise today because there is nothing-- nothing--that keeps a parent up at night like the health of their child. It doesn't matter if you are a Democrat or a Republican, if you live in the reddest rural areas or the bluest cities. One of the things that binds us as Americans, as people, is that every parent looks at their kids and wants to know that they are doing everything that they can to keep them safe.

And let me tell you, that is not an easy task. I am a father of a 7- year-old and a 9-year-old, two little boys, and I every day wonder, am I doing the right thing for them? Am I being the kind of father that they deserve? Am I looking out and being thoughtful about what they eat, about whether or not I am keeping up with their health, and that they are exercising?

And like most families, I can tell you it is tough to know that you are always doing the best thing for your kids. But like most families, we do what we can. My wife and I, we try our very best. But we don't have all of the answers.

I mean, how many parents out there, when your kid gets sick and it is too late in the night to find a way to call the doctor or the nurse, you are trying to figure out where to turn to for information?

Where do we go when it is that we feel like we have reached the limits of our own personal knowledge and we need to find a place that we can trust? And that is what this is about. It is about knowing that there is someone you can trust when you feel like you don't know where else to turn, that someone can have your back and you can trust that they have your best interests at heart.

When we think about our doctors, when we think about our nurses, our health professionals, when we think about those making decisions in this great Nation of over 330 million people about our healthcare, we want to trust those individuals, these people that are making these decisions.

And I know for the people in New Jersey, over 9 million people there in the State of New Jersey, they are wondering who they can trust. We live in tough times. In fact, we live in the time of the greatest amount of distrust that we have ever seen in modern history of this country.

And that is most pronounced, most clear when it comes to our health. And one of those people we need to trust the most in our country is the person who runs the Department of Health and Human Services.

I rise today because I have met with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I have questioned Mr. Kennedy in committee. I have read his statements and examined his record, and I want to say here on the floor of the Senate that he is not someone I can trust with my kids' health. And in good conscience, I cannot vote for him.

If I cannot trust him with the health of my own kids, how can I ask the families of 9 million other New Jerseyans to go do it or for families across our country to trust this man?

I have had the chance to be able to meet him, talk to him in person, ask him questions, that is more than most anyone in my own State is going to have a chance to talk to him. I took that as a deep responsibility to try to use that time and that opportunity to try to deduce whether or not this man rises to the level of trust that I think the people of New Jersey and this country deserve.

And I have come to the conclusion that I cannot support Mr. Kennedy to lead an Agency in charge of our Nation's health. And he has too often diminished that trust in the very healthcare that he would be in charge of and too often has spread disinformation about the diseases and challenges and threats that we face.

Now, what you will hear from his supporters is a story of an advocate for change. They will tell you that he is fighting against a broken system, that he simply wants to make America healthy. And, look, I think all of us, hopefully, can say that we want to make America healthy, that we care about the health of Americans across this Nation.

And I don't think anyone in this Chamber would disagree that there are broken problems that we face when it comes to our healthcare, to our government, to so many aspects of our society.

But, unfortunately, like most things coming out of this current administration, what we are seeing is corruption and conspiracy disguised as false promises of change. It is important that we take this moment to call it out and to expose it, to explain to the American people why this is a position--the Secretary of Health and Human Services is a position where trust is so important.

Because if he is confirmed, Mr. Kennedy will have an incredible platform, well beyond the strong platform that he already has developed--a bully pulpit. But this would be an official platform of the United States, of our government, paid for by the taxpayers, to shape the health of my children and yours.

Let's begin with the Agency he is nominated to lead. HHS employs more than 80,000 people across the United States and around the world. Their mission is simple: to enhance the health and well-being of all Americans. And to put that another way, their job is to make it easier for parents to sleep at night by making sure their kids can stay healthy.

Now, I am not going to go over every single one of the 13 operating divisions of HHS, but let me name a few you have probably heard of. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they are on the frontlines of preventing the next pandemic; the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, they operate Medicare, Medicaid; the Children's Health Insurance Program, otherwise known as CHIP; and the Health Insurance Marketplaces. All of these provide healthcare for more than 100 million Americans, including my mother and my father who are under Medicare. That is about one in three people under the services of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Then there is the Food and Drug Administration, or the FDA. You probably know them because when there is some sort of outbreak that impacts the food supply, they issue the recalls. But they do a lot of other stuff, too, from approving new medicines to countering bioterrorism.

Now, those are three of the divisions you have heard of. Maybe you haven't heard of the National Institutes of Health, an Agency that sits at the cutting edge of medical research--not just in the Nation but around the world. Or the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an Agency that does work to combat the real addiction and mental health crisis our country is facing.

The Lakewood Community Service Corporation, Lakewood, NJ, received a $2.5 million grant to improve mental health care in one of our State's fastest growing services. Cape May County Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse received a $300,000 grant to tackle substance abuse issues in South Jersey, both important causes that my colleagues from both sides of the aisle can agree to support.

And then, finally, there is the Administration for Children and Families, and whether you heard of it or not, you or someone you know probably is touched by it. It is the second largest Agency in HHS, and it is the Agency that manages temporary assistance for needy families: Head Start, childcare and foster care programs.

I wanted to outline all of this because I want you to understand the enormity of the task ahead of the next HHS Secretary. This is not just someone who can walk in and just say: We need to be healthy again. This is someone who will be tasked with operating programs on a day-to-day basis that mean the very life and death of over a third of all Americans.

So when I say that trust is important, it is not just a buzzword. Who do you trust with your health? Who do you trust with your children's health? Who do you trust with your parents' health, as they age and face challenges of physical and cognitive decline?

Let's look at some of the things that show why we should not trust Mr. Kennedy. One of the first things that many parents have to deal with--vaccines. A lot of us have had to hold our kids through those vaccines. We talk to our pediatricians--people we trust--and they talk to us about the importance of making sure that our kids are protected.

Mr. Kennedy has used his stature to push lawsuits that he personally stands to profit from--including over a common vaccine given to children. And throughout all of this, Mr. Kennedy has claimed that he is ``not anti-vaccine.'' While it is clear that we cannot trust him, what is even more clear is that his deception has had a real impact on the lives of people.

Mr. Kennedy's push to sow distrust in Samoa in 2019 helped lead to a measles epidemic that claimed the lives of 83 people, mostly children under the age of 5. While Kennedy said in his hearing that ``We don't know what was killing them,'' the Samoan Director-General of Health, Dr. Alec Ekeroma, called his words ``a total fabrication.''

The doctor said that if Mr. Kennedy is confirmed, he would be ``a danger to us, a danger to everyone.''

That is not someone we can trust.

In a speech on the Senate floor in the 1960s, then-Senator John F. Kennedy, said that ``the treatment of its older citizens is said by anthropologists to be one of the most basic tests of how civilized a society or nation has become.''

I would broaden that test to be our most vulnerable, our neighbors who are targeted simply because of who they are.

And when Mr. Kennedy spreads false claims like the COVID-19 virus was engineered to spare Jewish Americans and Asians, he uses the trust that he has been given to divide and spread anti-Semitism and anti-Asian hate.

And when Mr. Kennedy, in response to the questions asked of him by Members of this body, refused to acknowledge the importance of taking commonsense steps in our foster care system to protect trans youth, he uses the trust he has been given to divide and spread hate and fear. That is not someone we can trust.

My reasons for opposing Mr. Kennedy's nomination don't just come from the concerns I have for my children; it comes from an understanding I have from my parents.

A little over 50 years ago, my parents came to America from South Korea to start a better life. They did so by working to keep Americans healthy. My father earned his Ph.D. and became a genetic researcher trying to cure cancer and Alzheimer's. My mother worked as a nurse in hospital systems across New Jersey.

They worked hard to earn the trust of people around them, their colleagues, their patients that they had worked on every single day, but also the trust that they had in the people around them for their own health.

My father was a polio survivor; my mother struggled with Lyme disease. They have had their fair share of health struggles. And through them, I have seen a common denominator that our public health system only works when we have people working together with trust and that we the public, in turn, trust them.

But then when I hear Mr. Kennedy say this about Lyme disease. He said:

Another thing that keeps us from enjoying the outdoors and keeps us locked inside and the idea that this may have been, is highly likely to have been a military weapon, and we cannot say 100 percent for sure, but we do know that they were experimenting with tics there. Now, the American Lyme Disease Foundation wrote:

Some claim that Lyme disease was introduced into the northeastern region of the U.S by a man-made strain that escaped from a high containment biological warfare lab on Plum Island.

They said:

However, there is ample evidence to indicate that both the Ixodes ticks and the bacteria causing Lyme disease were present in the U.S well before the Plum Island facility was ever established.''

According to a Washington Post article written by a Professor Sam Telford, ``It's an old conspiracy theory enjoying a resurgence with lots of sensational headlines and tweets. Even Congress has ordered that the Pentagon must reveal whether it weaponized ticks. And it's not true.''

When it came to the disease of polio that disabled my father since he was a baby, Mr. Kennedy had this to say about the vaccine that nearly eradicated polio from the face of the planet. He said the vaccine, for a period of time, may have led to cancer due to a contamination with a virus that ``killed many many many many many more people than polio ever did.''

So with the polio vaccine he said: ``Did it cause more deaths than it averted? I would say, I don't know.''

And he said this just a year and a half ago.

A large study was published that concluded that the polio vaccine under concern was not associated with increased rates of cancer, and other studies showed that the virus of concern was killed by the same process used to inactivate the polio virus.

And in that same podcast, Mr. Kennedy said:

There is no vaccine that is safe and effective.

Again, this was just a year and a half ago. Now he is coming to us and saying: I am all for the polio vaccine.

What are the American people left to believe?

Again, our health and our Nation is founded on trust. That is part of the compact we have as Americans for generations. We want trust for our families.

As I said, I am a father of two little boys. All I want for them is to be healthy and happy. They are the reason that I am here in the U.S. Senate, to take actions to be able to give them the best type of lives, to give other kids and other grandkids the kind of lives they deserve.

And I worry about the foods that they eat, and I support efforts to address ultraprocessed foods in America, to try to make sure we can have Americans eating healthy. But I also want someone who is not going to shoot from the hip and spread disinformation.

Our healthcare is far from perfect, and we do need major reforms to get it in a place where it can better serve the American people. We do need massive changes in the way our healthcare, childcare, elder care, and nutrition systems are run, but not without trust.

We need research--more and more research--to understand safety and to power the innovation that will come up with the cures and the medicines of the future. But, this week, we see efforts to undertake massive cuts at NIH, cuts that would set back the very research we need to keep improving our health.

As I conclude here, these efforts to cut and slash our research at NIH and elsewhere would continue under the leadership of Mr. Kennedy. HHS Secretary is a big job. We can't just hand it to someone we can't trust--not for my kids or for my parents or for yours.

I encourage my colleagues, again: Reject this nomination so that every parent in America can go to sleep having trust in a person tasked with ensuring that our children will be healthy in the morning.

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