Trump HHS nominee RFK Jr. to get hearing this month

A nomination hearing is scheduled for Jan. 29 for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s nominee to oversee the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Senate Finance Committee Chair Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) announced the hearing will begin at 10 a.m. Jan. 29 for Kennedy. It will take place in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C.

Previously, the Bloomberg Government news outlet reported Crapo said a confirmation hearing the week of Jan. 27 “wasn’t likely” because the committee had not yet received a report from the Office of Government Ethics and other paperwork.

Meanwhile, multiple news outlets have reported opposition to Kennedy.

Advancing American Freedom, an advocacy group founded by Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence, has called on Senate Republicans to bounce Kennedy as unqualified to lead HHS, according to a report from Politico. Reasons range from Kennedy’s past use of heroin, to support for drug legalization and abortion rights, to expressions about vaccine conspiracy theories, according to Politico and U.S. News & World Report.

The Hill reported Advancing American Freedom on Jan. 23 began a Washington, D.C.-area advertising campaign opposing Kennedy as HHS leader. The campaign will highlight Kennedy’s past statements on issues ranging from abortion access to vaccine safety and vaccine connections with cancer and autism.

The ad blitz will include a mobile billboard that will travel around the Capitol and the March for Life, scheduled for Jan. 24 on the National Mall in Washington, according to The Hill.

“RFK’s dangerous views on vaccines” are at the top of a 34-page letter from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), who questioned Kennedy about spreading “false hysteria that vaccines cause autism,” and “compared COVID public health mandates to the Holocaust,” according to her website. Her concerns involved a dozen other topics including Kennedy’s views on abortion and reproductive rights; conspiracies about public health; allegations of corruption in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and willingness to gut the National Institute of Health and measures of the Affordable Care Act.

Warren noted there are issues within health care on which she may agree with Kennedy. For example, her summary included “RFK’s encouraging views on drug pricing,” which include supporting the government’s authority to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical makers, and cap consumer prices.

Warren also noted potential agreement on food safety reform and on his “encouraging views on physician payments.” She said Kennedy has “publicly-stated plans to create an in-house process conducted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to set physician payment rates, which currently overvalue high-cost specialists at the expense of primary care providers.”

The New York Times has reported Kennedy will keep a financial stake in litigation against Merck, the pharmaceutical maker his department would regulate if he is confirmed as HHS leader. Kennedy would continue to collect fees from the firm suing Merck over Gardasil, a vaccine against human papillomavirus that is given to adolescents. Kennedy filed an ethics statement that he is not a lawyer in any of those cases, the Times report said.

It appeared Kennedy remains involved with Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit organization he started to address the chronic disease epidemic in America’s children. The website stated in 1986, 12.8% of children in the United States had a chronic condition, compared with 54% in 2007, the last year that data was available publicly.

“The parallel between rising disease rates and the increasing number of childhood vaccines is hard to ignore,” the website said.

The organization’s website includes a promotional video for his book, “The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race.” The book “unveils a global conspiracy of epic proportion and lethal consequence,” according to the website. In a promotional video, Kennedy said: “We need transparency in our government programs, and we need transparency particularly in anything to do with public health. We can’t turn public health over to the secretive spy agencies that have other agendas, that have control agendas, that have surveillance agendas.”