The Democratic Support for Kennedy’s Proposal for a Senate Appropriate Action on Childhood Asthma Affairs
Kennedy won confirmation on the strength of his promises to Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician and the chair of the Senate’s health committee. Those promises included that he would not interfere with current vaccine policy and that Cassidy would have oversight over some of his decisions at HHS.
Kennedy faced opposition from the left for his decades of espousing conspiracy theories about vaccines and from the right for his past support of abortion rights. He was uncertain if he had enough support from the Senate to get through. On Wednesday, Democratic senators made speeches on the floor past midnight in protest. On Thursday, he had the votes to be confirmed.
The vote was 52 to 48. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the former Republican majority leader and a polio survivor, was the sole Republican joining Democrats to vote against Kennedy.
The Future of Medicaid and Medicare: Facts and Phenomenology During the 119th Congress: Trump’s Health Secretary, Over Democrats’ Loud Objections
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.
Kennedy hasn’t spoken much about the future of Medicaid or Medicare, and in his hearings he fumbled basic questions about how they are set up. But he now oversees both popular programs that together insure about 140 million Americans.
As soon as the 119th Congress was sworn in, Republicans began to talk about ways to cut spending in Medicaid, a public health program for low-income people that is paid for partly by the federal government and partly by states. A survey by the KFF found that more than 70% of Americans wanted to keep the program in it’s current form.
Amid talks of cuts, President Trump declared that his team would “love and cherish” Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and that any cuts would be related to waste or abuse and wouldn’t affect beneficiaries.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is within the Department of Health and Human Services and is led by Mehmet Oz. A date for Oz’s hearing has not been set.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wa., Rejoinds the History of Measles, Health, and Natural Disasters
As senators voted to confirm Kennedy, a measles outbreak continued in Texas. As Marfa Public Radio reported, nine people have been hospitalized in an outbreak of at least 24 measles cases in Gaines County, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the United States. Most cases are children who were unvaccinated.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wa., said in a press conference this week that the promises weren’t believable. “Republicans are choosing to pretend like it is in any way believable that RFK Jr. won’t use his new power to do exactly the thing he has been trying to do for decades: undermine vaccines,” she said.
There is a lot Kennedy could do on vaccines in terms of appointing advisors, directing NIH research, and changing public health messaging about the importance of vaccines. Public health advocates will be watching to see what Kennedy does.
Right now, HHS has a budget of nearly $2 trillion and a staff of 90,000 people. A huge part of that budget is Medicare and Medicaid, the public health programs for seniors and low-income people respectively. Dogs have been at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for several weeks, according to officials.
The Food and Drug Administration is one of the health agencies that are part of HHS.
The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Project 2025, which has been closely related to what DOGE is doing, suggests splitting CDC into two agencies and eliminating Head Start. Kennedy hasn’t talked a lot about his plans for the agencies but he said he would fire 600 researchers from the National Institutes of Health and order the agency to investigate the root causes of chronic diseases.
Several executive orders about “ideology” caused federal health agencies to lose access to scores of databases and websites, which included forbidden terms like “gender,” as well as websites unrelated to natural disasters. A federal judge has since instructed the agencies to restore those pages, but their sudden disappearance of resources — including those used by doctors routinely when treating patients — has alarmed many in public health and medicine. It’s especially unclear how research that involves groups that cannot be mentioned, like transgender people, can now proceed.
It hasn’t been spared either as a source of bipartisan support and national pride. The National Institutes of Health’s grants to research institutions are at risk of being slashed as a result of the federal judge’s decision to stop the move. Several Republican senators, including Cassidy and Susan Collins, have spoken out against the blanket policy that could affect universities with large research institutions. Collins wrote in a statement that Kennedy promised her he would “re-examine” the policy when confirmed.
Kennedy promised during his presidential campaign that he would give the National Institute for Health eight years to devote to infectious disease research. Kennedy told a Senate committee in January that chronic conditions such as diabetes and cancer are responsible for rising healthcare costs, but have historically received less attention than infectious diseases. (Data from the NIH show that cancer alone receives more federal funding than that allotted to all infectious diseases combined.)
He hasn’t yet laid out how he can use policy and his power overseeing the agencies to “put the health of America back on track.” He spoke about the food programs that weren’t in HHS’ jurisdiction, suggesting that he might seek to collaborate with the Department of Agriculture on programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Big Food and Big pharma might be goals that the powerful industries could push back against, as NPR has reported. Some public health researchers are questioning how realistic an improvement to healthcare will be in the federal government.
McConnell’s fitness as the Republican leader was called into question by the President at a press conference on Thursday. “He’s a very bitter guy,” Trump said.
McConnell was also the only Republican Senator to vote against Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and he voted against Pete Hegseth for defense secretary.
Make America a Superpower in Research: A Case Study of a Senator Cortlin McConnell, who admitted AIDS in 1943, and a U.S. Senator Cassidy, a physician-scientist
He had paralysis in his left leg after contracting the disease in 1944, before the vaccine was available. The US had an epidemic of vaccine-preventable diseases starting in the 1950s.
The 82-year-old McConnell, who has served in the Senate since 1985 and is the longest serving party leader in that body, recovered from polio when he was 4. He has health problems related to the illness and still walks with a limp.
Bill Cassidy, the chair of the Senate’s health committee, changed his mind after Kennedy gave him promises.
“The future of America as a superpower in research appears grim,” says Theodora Hatziioannou, a virologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City, who creates new models for studying HIV ― which Kennedy has falsely suggested is not the cause of AIDS. “Even on issues he claims he supports, he does not follow scientific evidence. Picking a person like this to lead is like having the wolf guard the sheep.”
Even some researchers who could benefit from an emphasis on chronic disease are wary. Eric Lau, a cancer researcher at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, says that although it would certainly be nice to see more money poured into studying cancer, the federal government should focus on increasing funding for biomedical research in general.
Both he and Larry Schlesinger, a physician-scientist and chief executive of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio, say that the idea of cutting one field to benefit another creates a false dichotomy between chronic and infectious disease that isn’t rooted in scientific reality.
Some chronic diseases, for example, can be caused by infectious diseases, and researchers cite increasing evidence that infections with human papillomavirus can cause cancer of the cervix and other tissues. He also says that he was diagnosed with oral cancer after getting infections with human immunodeficiency virus. “We are appreciating more and more that infections, and the inflammation they cause, play an important role in these chronic conditions.”
Scientists also say that the ongoing outbreak of bird flu, which has made at least 68 people in the United States ill since the start of 2024, makes this an especially bad time to cut research into infectious diseases.
As part of his ‘Make America Healthy Again’ pledge, Kennedy has repeatedly called for further studies into diet and nutrition, as well as research on the links between environmental pollution and human health. Kennedy questioned why researchers haven’t dedicated themselves to finding and eliminating Obesity when he said during his January hearing that scientists know it is caused by an environmental toxin.