Transcription
But today, Trump's Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. showed the country once again that he is not just a raving conspiracy theorist, and he definitely is one of those. He is also a pathological liar.
Take this exchange for instance. Just last week, in the days after the tragic shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in my home state of Minnesota, you went on Fox News blaming school shootings on anti-depressants. You have no evidence of that because you have no evidence of a connection and you want to talk.
>> I didn't. You're just saying something. You're just making stuff up.
>> You know, this is what you say, right, Secretary Kennedy? When someone presents you with information that does not fit
>> I did not blame that shooting. I I have no idea whether I have no idea and I would I never said that. You're making it up. You're twisting. Yeah, you are.
>> You are being dishonest right now. you want to.
>> Okay, so to to recap quickly, Minnesota Senator Tina Smith asked RFK Jr. a very reasonable question, which was why he went on TV after a horrific shooting that took place in her state of Minnesota that left 21 people wounded, two children dead and entertained the completely baseless conspiracy that anti-depressants and not guns are the culprit behind America's mass shooting problem. And Secretary Kennedy's response was, "You just heard him do it repeatedly." was, "That isn't true. Senator Smith is just making it up. She's being dishonest." Roll the tape, please.
>> We're uh launching studies on uh the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other um psych the psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence.
>> Okay, that clip that you just show saw was was one week ago tonight on Fox News. And it wasn't just that one reference. Kennedy repeatedly went along with that narrative.
>> So, I've never seen that medicine, but you're saying that if you get it, some of the side effects could be uh homicide, suicide.
>> Well, there are blackbox warnings on some of these psychiatric drugs that warn about in their clinical trials that they saw suicidal homicidal ideiation. Now, to be abundantly clear, and I've already said this, I'm going to say it again. There is no evidence, none whatsoever, linking anti-dopressants to mass shootings, but still, Secretary Kennedy fan the flames of that conspiracy repeatedly and then pretended he didn't. And that was far from an isolated moment during the hearing today. I mean, for hours today, RFK Jr. sat in front of the Senate Finance Committee and obfiscated, misled, and brazenly lied about one thing or another.
Take this this exchange about access to health experts.
>> How is that going to happen with the Medicaid cuts that are taking place?
>> There are no cuts to Medicaid.
>> There are no cuts to Medicaid.
Okay, that is how RFK Jr. responded to a question of how Americans would get would continue to get health care services after Medicaid cuts from Trump's big ugly bill. The man in charge of America's health care system simply denied that the bill that is the biggest cuts to Medicaid benefits in history made any cuts at all. The Congressional Budget Office, to give you a specific stat here, estimates that Trump's big ugly bill cuts approximately $1 trillion from Medicaid funding over the next 10 years. But according to Kennedy, there are no cuts. No cuts to see here. Nothing to see here whatsoever. I mean, even after being caught in that $1 trillion lie, Kennedy continued to try to sell the American public a complete bag of goods.
Check out how Kennedy gets fact checked live as he tries to mislead the public about the impact of Trump's big ugly bill on America's rural health care system.
>> It's going to have it. It's going to it's going to be the biggest infusion of federal dollars into rural health care in American history.
>> Yeah. You know why? because you're cutting $150 billion for rural hospitals. You're putting 50 billion back. That's not an infusion. That's a loss of hundred million billion dollars.
Okay, everybody can feel the burn on that one. And it does not take a mathematician. Because here's the thing. Imagine if I stole $150 from you and then I gave you $50 back and then I went in front of the US Senate to brag about how much money I gave you. How generous of me. That is basically how Secretary Kennedy tried to spin the Trump administration's cuts to rural healthcare today.
But of course, the issue that took the cake today, and boy was there competition, was the issue that Secretary Kennedy has centered his public persona around now for years. Vaccines.
So, let me ask you, when were you lying, sir? When you told this committee that you were not antivax, or when you told Americans that there's no safe and effective vaccine?
>> Uh, both things are true.
Okay, now this is the same man who has claimed he is not antivaxed for years now, even though Kennedy has been one of the most prominent prolific antivaccine voices in the country, including through the height of CO. And now that he's actually in charge of America's public health care system, he's attempting to use his position to reshape the national narratives around vaccines to fit his views, despite, of course, an overwhelming amount of actual scientific evidence to the contrary.
>> Would you accept the fact that a million Americans died from CO?
>> I don't know how many died.
>> You're the Secretary of Health and Human Services. You don't have any idea how many Americans died from CO?
>> I don't think anybody knows.
Now, the CDC, one of the agencies that Secretary Kennedy is in charge of, does in fact know that. As in fact, anybody could who looked up public data. I mean, from the beginning of 2020 up until the 23rd of last month, a staggering 1,231,440 people died of COVID in the United States. What Secretary Kennedy means when he says that nobody knows how many Americans died of COVID is not actually that nobody knows. People know. What he means is that he does not like the data. Data that again is from an agency that he oversees. In Secretary Kennedy's warped mind, the issue is not the virus, it's the vaccine. So data showing just how deadly the co virus has been in America is inconvenient for his narrative. Independent studies estimate that the COVID vaccine has saved literally millions of American lives. But Kennedy, for whatever reason, there's many, is a still a vaccine skeptic and he's trying to force that skepticism out on everybody else.
I mean, last week, Kennedy abruptly fired the CDC director just 29 days after she took over the agency. This morning, that fired CDC director published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. In it, she alleges that she was fired from her position because she insisted on rigorous scientific review of the CDC's vaccine recommendations. As she put it, I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric. It is imperative that the panel's recommendation aren't recommendations aren't rubber stamped, but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected. You see, it isn't it isn't actually Kennedy himself who approves or disapproves of the vaccines for the general public at all. It's a panel of actual medical experts inside the CDC.
>> ASIP is an independent panel.
>> Okay. But even today, Kennedy was insisting that the CDC's vaccine advisory panel, as you just saw there, was independent. He had no control over it. But here's the thing. Back in June, Kennedy fired all 17 of the panel's members. He literally got rid of every single person on the panel. And it replaced all of those actual experts with a handpicked panel of his choosing. A panel with, you guessed it, plenty of vaccine skeptics.
So today, after the former CDC director alleged that Kennedy fired her because she refused to just preemptively rubber stamp whatever that panel decided, here is how Secretary Kennedy responded to that allegation.
>> Did you tell the head of the CDC that if she refused to sign off on your changes to the childhood vaccine schedule that she had to resign?
>> No, I told her that she had to resign because I asked her, "Are you a trustworthy person?" and she said, "No."
>> Why?
>> I I don't I I don't even know where to begin and unpacking that statement and what he just said. But I do need to show you Senator Elizabeth Warren's face after Senator Kennedy, Senator Secretary Kennedy said that. Look at her face. We were all Senator Warren in that moment when he said that. This shows you everything you need to know. Now, lawyers for the former CDC director put out a statement today saying that Secretary Kennedy's claims are quote false and at times patently ridiculous. They said the former CDC director stands by what she said in her oped and repeat would repeat it all under oath.
Watching RFK Jr. make ridiculous claim after ridiculous claim today was truly a maddening thing to watch. But the lie that actually astounded me a bit today was when he lied about something that Americans all across the country are actually experiencing for themselves right now firsthand.
>> Will you tell America that all adults and all children over 6 months of age are eligible to get a COVID booster at their local pharmacy today?
>> Anybody can get the booster.
>> I'm sorry.
>> Anybody can get it. anybody people who want to exercise their freedom of choice are being denied that
>> they are everybody I would say effectively we're denying people vaccine
>> Senator Catwell
>> you're wrong
>> they are not wrong at all in fact I mean over and over again secretary Kennedy insisted that anyone over 6 months old in America walk into their local pharmacy and get their COVID booster the biggest pharmacy chain in the country is CVS right now there are three states where CVS isn't offering the co vaccine at all. In 13 other states, you can only get a vaccine if you have a prescription. And no matter where you are in the country, the FDA, another agency Secretary Kennedy overseas, just restricted it restricted its authorization of the new COVID booster to only people over 65 years old or people with underlying health conditions. That means all across the country right now, people cannot in fact get the COVID booster. But rather than acknowledging that fact, a fact that millions of Americans across the country will undoubtedly experience themselves in the coming weeks if they haven't already. Rather than acknowledging that, Secretary Kennedy just denied it.
On Monday, nine other former CDC directors, directors that served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, published an op-ed saying that Secretary Kennedy is actively endangering every American's health. Yesterday, more than 10,000 Health and Human Services employees published a letter demanding that Kennedy resign. They also warned that Kennedy's leadership is endangering the nation's health. I know the word unprecedented gets thrown around a whole lot these days, but we have never been here before.