In his appearance Thursday before the Senate Finance Committee, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a series of extreme statements that exposed the fascist character of his assault on vaccines, science and public health. Throughout the three-hour hearing, Kennedy repeatedly told senators they were “making stuff up,” dismissed basic scientific evidence as “confusion” and doubled down on his campaign to eliminate vaccine protections for American children.
When questioned by Senator Maggie Hassan about whether COVID-19 vaccines have saved millions of American lives, Kennedy responded with a total dismissal of scientific consensus: “The only confusion I’ve expressed is how many they saved. I don’t think anybody knows.” This statement flies in the face of overwhelming evidence, including research published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases estimating that nearly 20 million lives were preserved globally during the first year of vaccination alone.
Kennedy’s most revealing statement came when defending his firing of CDC officials involved in the pandemic response: “The people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving. And that’s why we need bold, competent and creative new leadership at CDC, people able and willing to chart a new course.”
This declaration makes clear that Kennedy’s attacks on science flow directly from the far-right opposition to all public health measures implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. Any semblance of public health must be replaced by “a new course” predicated on opposition to all efforts to save lives.
The Democratic senators’ theatrical outrage represents nothing but hot air from a party that has refused to organize workers in defense of public health, let alone Trump’s ongoing coup and efforts to establish a military dictatorship in the United States. These are the same Democrats who sat silently as the Biden administration dismantled COVID-19 protections, ended the Public Health Emergency and denigrated masking, policies that laid the political foundations for Kennedy’s far more extreme assault today.
Kennedy’s testimony came the day after Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced that the state would move to eliminate all school vaccine requirements for children, setting a dangerous precedent that will open the floodgates for every Republican-led state to follow suit.
Standing beside Republican Governor Ron DeSantis at a Tampa press conference held at a private Christian high school, Ladapo declared that vaccine mandates “drip with disdain and slavery” while claiming “your body is a gift from God.” Multiple vaccine mandates will be eliminated in Florida immediately through health department rules, including chickenpox, hepatitis B, Hib, and pneumococcal vaccines. When the state legislature reconvenes in 2026, they will target statutes requiring immunization against polio, diphtheria, measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis and tetanus.
These coordinated attacks come just days after Kennedy’s firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez, who revealed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday that she was pressured to “preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric.”
This panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), is scheduled to meet on September 18-19 and will implement the most extreme positions that Kennedy and the Trump administration believe they can advance.
Having purged all 17 qualified experts from the ACIP in June, Kennedy has stacked the panel with handpicked anti-vaccine ideologues. ACIP is now headed by Martin Kulldorff, co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for mass COVID-19 infection in 2020 before vaccines were available. Kennedy’s appointee to lead ACIP’s COVID-19 immunization workgroup, Retsef Levi, has called mRNA vaccines “the most failing product in history” and has advocated for their complete banning.
Kennedy confirmed during Thursday’s testimony that he is receiving counsel from William Thompson, a CDC employee who vaccine skeptics claim exposed data linking MMR vaccines to autism in black boys. Independent reviews have thoroughly debunked this claim. Kennedy also confirmed that David Geier, a controversial figure who once attempted to treat autistic children without a medical license, is working as an HHS contractor on vaccine safety databases.
Kennedy’s Senate hearing, Ladapo’s announcement in Florida, and the upcoming ACIP meeting represent a marked escalation of a coordinated far-right campaign to eliminate all vaccine requirements nationwide.
The Trump administration’s assault on vaccines and public health infrastructure represents nothing less than a plot to kill Americans through the deliberate spread of disease. Their goal is to turn back medical progress by over 200 years, to the era before Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine in 1796. The result will be a return to an age when childhood diseases claimed millions of lives annually.
The specter of iron lungs returning to children’s hospitals as polio vaccination rates plummet looms large, alongside the revival of other relics of diseases once conquered by science—measles and chickenpox parties, whooping cough epidemics in elementary schools, and the return of childhood mortality rates not seen since the 1950s.
This represents the latest stage of a decades-long bipartisan policy aimed at lowering life expectancy and systematically sickening and killing working class children and the elderly, a campaign that has sharply escalated in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2020, the United States has suffered over 1.5 million excess deaths compared to peer nations, while globally, over 400 million people now live with Long COVID.
The 11th wave of the pandemic is currently underway in the United States with virtually no reporting or acknowledgment from health authorities. Emergency department visits for COVID-19 have increased 15.2 percent in the most recent week, with test positivity rates at 9.9 percent nationally. This wave is being covered up more completely than any prior wave, even as the spread of COVID-19 is growing in 40 states. Under these conditions, Kennedy has systematically dismantled the very infrastructure needed to monitor and respond to this ongoing crisis, while drastically restricting access to COVID-19 vaccines.
Since taking office, Kennedy has implemented mass firings across HHS agencies, with total layoffs surpassing 20,000 workers. He has also cancelled nearly $500 million in mRNA vaccine research and development contracts and moved to restrict access to COVID vaccines, with reports indicating he plans to fully revoke access to mRNA COVID vaccines within months.
When Kennedy and Ladapo present their campaign against vaccination as a Christian crusade against scientific infidels, they are laying the groundwork for a complete abandonment of evidence-based medicine.
The scientific community has responded to Kennedy’s assault with growing resistance. More than 1,000 current and former HHS employees have now signed letters demanding Kennedy’s resignation. A September 3 letter accused Kennedy of “endangering the nation’s health” through his appointment of “political ideologues masquerading as scientific experts,” and the rescission of COVID-19 vaccine emergency authorizations without scientific justification, while an August 20 letter accused Kennedy of being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure.”
What Kennedy and Ladapo deliberately obscure is that public health is not about individual choice but rather collective social responsibility. Mass vaccination protects not just individuals but all of society, especially the most vulnerable. The attacks against these precepts amount to the most vile form of libertarian ideology, the dangerous nonsense that independence and individual freedom outweigh scientific evidence and collective action.
The ruling elites are overseeing a plot against Americans and the entire world, aiming to sacrifice millions of lives on the altar of capitalist profit. The fight against this conspiracy and the Trump administration’s attacks on science cannot be waged by scientists alone. Above all, it depends on the building of a mass movement of the working class, in the US and internationally, with the fight for science and public health as a critical component of the broader struggle for world socialism.