The questions health leaders want senators to ask RFK Jr.

Health leaders want senators to grill Robert F Kennedy Jr. about whether or not he believes that germs cause disease and challenge him over some of the “harmful” conspiracy theories he has peddled. Next week, Kennedy, President Donald Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services, will face two Senate committee hearings in his bid to get confirmed. On Wednesday, he will be questioned by the Senate Committee on Finance, which oversees HHS, and on Thursday, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions will get to probe the former Democrat.

As the hearings approach, Kennedy has reportedly softened some of his more controversial views on vaccinations. He has reportedly been assuring the Republican senators who have to vote him in that he’s “all for” polio vaccines, and that he isn’t going to ban any vaccines. But the backpedaling has not done anything to alleviate the concerns of some of the nation’s leading health professionals, who shared the questions that they would like senators to ask Kennedy next week with Politico.

“Someone needs to pin him down on whether or not he believes that germs cause disease,” Dave Chokshi, a practicing primary care physician and former New York City health commissioner, told the outlet. “The germ theory of disease was established in the late 19th century and all first year medical students are well-versed in it. Does he believe in it?” Chokshi added. A health economist who served under Presidents Bush, Clinton and Obama said she would quiz Kennedy about how he would fund “healing farms” for drug addicts. When Kennedy ran as an independent candidate, he said that the government should send people struggling with addiction for up to three or four years to farms growing organic food. “The ‘healing farms’ for substance abusers cost $10,000 a month (per person),” Sherry Glied, now dean of the NYU Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, told Politico. “Is Congress going to spend $120,000 a year for people who use heroin?”

Peter Lurie, the head of the non-profit Center for Science in the Public Interest and former FDA associate commissioner for public health strategy and analysis, referred to comments Kennedy made to an anti-vaccine group in November 2023 about the National Institutes of Health. “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, ‘God bless you all. Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years.’” Lurie mocked: “Have you communicated your intention for NIH to ‘give ... infectious diseases a break ... for about eight years’ to the relevant pathogens so they know not to attack during that period?” In a second cutting question, Lurie said he hopes senators ask Kennedy to “please explain the analytical approach that has led you to conclude that vitamins, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are effective for COVID-19,” he said. “But that Ozempic, backed by clinical trials showing reductions in weight, cardiovascular disease and total mortality, is being sold by pharmaceutical companies ‘counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.’”

Executive director of the American Public Health Association Georges C. Benjamin added that senators should ask the former Democrat: “Should women have control over their own bodies?”

And Andrea Baccarelli, dean of the faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, asked: “How will you balance the right to free speech against the reality that all people, but especially those facing a serious illness, are vulnerable to manipulation by individuals peddling harmful or ineffective ‘cures’?”

The Independent