DLNews Politics:

Senators Spar as RFK Jr. Stumbles on Health Data

Washington, D.C. — It was less a hearing and more a verbal cage match as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now eight months into his role as Health and Human Services Secretary, faced a Senate grilling that exposed just how messy America’s health debates have become.

Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, a physician by training, wasted no time turning the heat up. With measles cases on the rise and confidence in public health wavering, Barrasso accused Kennedy of fanning the flames of distrust. “Vaccines work,” Barrasso reminded bluntly, pressing Kennedy to explain how his department planned to rebuild credibility. Kennedy fired back with a sweeping promise: for the first time, he said, all new vaccines would be tested against an inert placebo before approval. It was a bold declaration that played well to his base but left skeptics wondering if he was rewriting the rulebook mid-game.

If that wasn’t combustible enough, Kennedy then stumbled on a question that should have been a layup. Asked by Democratic Sen. Mark Warner whether he accepted the roughly one million American lives lost to Covid-19, Kennedy hedged. “I don’t know how many died,” he admitted, citing what he called “data chaos” at the CDC. Warner pounced, incredulous that the nation’s top health official could not or would not affirm the basic numbers of the pandemic. “How can you be that ignorant?” Warner shot back.

The exchanges revealed a deeper fracture in Washington’s health playbook: one side worried about credibility slipping away, the other arguing that credibility can only be restored by tearing down the system and starting fresh. Kennedy, once an outsider critic, now sits at the center of the storm — a storm that shows no signs of quieting.

Some background: Covid-19 was the third leading cause of death in the US in 2020 and 2021, fourth in 2022 and 10th in 2023, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data from the World Health Organization shows the United States has reported about 1.2 million total deaths from Covid-19 through mid-August — about one out of every six Covid deaths worldwide.