Senator Slams RFK Jr. for Refusing to Accept Science

Robert F. Kennedy’s virulent vaccine conspiracies got some members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP, emotional on Thursday, with New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan arguing that Kennedy’s parroting of debunked theories wasn’t just harming people with autism but paralyzing the entire country’s scientific progress.

“The problem with this witness’s responses on the autism cause and its relationship to vaccines, is because he’s relitigating and churning settled science,” Hassan stressed, raising her voice. “So we can’t go forward and find out what the cause of autism is and treat these kids and help these families.”

Hassan, who herself has a disabled son and who successfully made autism research a federal priority in 2024, told Kennedy that the study that first linked vaccines to the neurodevelopmental disorder “rocked” her world.

“Like every mother, I worried about whether vaccines had done something to my son. And you know what? It was a tiny study of about 12 kids, and in time, the scientific community studied, and studied, and studied, and found that it was wrong. And the journal retracted the study because sometimes science is wrong, we make progress. We build on the work and we become more successful,” she said.

“And when you continue to sow doubt about settled science, it makes it impossible for us to move forward,” Hassan said. “So that’s what the problem is here. It’s the relitigating, and rehashing, and continuing to sow doubt so that we can’t move forward. And it freezes us in place.”

A disclosure form filed for Kennedy’s nomination revealed that the outspoken vaccine critic had made a business out of his extreme public health stances, pulling in roughly $10 million over the last year related to dividends from his vaccine lawsuits, anti-vaxx speaking fees, and leading Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading misinformation about vaccine efficacy.

Kennedy’s history in public health is questionable at best. His stances, which include unscientific beliefs that AIDS is not caused by HIV and that a large number of vaccines should be stripped from the market, could have major impacts on the agency designed to protect America’s health, especially as bird flu outbreaks dot the country.

In December, Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching the already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to increased autism rates.

And Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies aren’t just easily refutable, anti-vax hogwash—they’ve caused legitimate, real-world harm. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on the Pacific islands of Samoa in 2019, Children’s Health Defense spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines, sending the nation’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles—an illness that was declared eliminated by the United States in 2000 thanks to advancements in modern medicine (read: vaccines)—as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.

Donald Trump is claiming that diversity, equity, and inclusion is to blame for the deadly collision of a passenger plane and a military helicopter in the Washington, D.C., area.

During a news conference Thursday, Trump cited a “big push to put diversity into the [Federal Aviation Administration]’s program,” which he insisted happened before his second term began.

“The FAA is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website,” Trump said, citing an “article.” 

The article is likely this one published by Fox News in January 2024, which reported on an FAA policy to place a “special emphasis in recruitment and hiring” on people with “targeted disabilities” that included “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

In a sense, Trump was right: That language did predate his second term. It first appeared on the FAA’s website in 2013, according to Snopes. So it was still in place during Trump’s first term. 

On Tuesday, the Trump administration had released materials targeting disabled employees at the FAA, directing the agency “to immediately return to non-discriminatory, merit-based hiring” and stop its DEI initiatives. Still, according to the president, DEI was to blame for the deadly incident that happened the next day.

Trump also scrapped all Department of Homeland Security advisory committees in a “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security,” and fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

Republican lawmakers armed with limited information were quick to play the blame game too. Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo spoke to some Republican lawmakers who cast responsibility for the deadly incident on anyone, or anything, but their own party or its leader. 

“You hate to jump to any conclusions,” Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles said, before openly speculating about possible conclusions. 

“Human error?” Ogles mused. “Was it some sort of equipment failure? Did DEI play a role in this type of thing?” 

Ogles encouraged examining the incident with “eyes wide open,” but clearly his eyes are focused away from one group in particular. 

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson also got a chance to guess, after Bartiromo described an expert blaming the Federal Aviation Agency and air traffic control.

“I’m not exactly sure what caused this, what it was, purely the air traffic control system, but I know it’s completely antiquated, it needs to be upgraded; we’ve known about this for years and quite honestly, administrations haven’t done anything about it,” Johnson said.

He added that there was an opportunity for “someone like Elon Musk” to “really modernize things.”

As part of his push to “modernize things,” shadow president Elon Musk demanded that FAA chief Michael Whitaker quit, because he was angry that Whitaker wanted SpaceX  to pay fines for failing to follow its license requirements during two SpaceX launches. Whitaker resigned less than two weeks ago.

Trump’s freshly appointed transportation secretary is doing a terrible job of inspiring confidence in his abilities, following the devastating aircraft collision at Ronald Reagan National airport near Washington, D.C.

A U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger plane carrying 64 people collided late Wednesday night, leaving no survivors and giving the Trump administration its first aviation crisis.

Sean Duffy, the former reality TV star turned transportation secretary, was asked Thursday morning about how normal it was for military helicopters and other aircraft to get clearance to cross a potentially busy flight path.

“I don’t want to go into too much detail about the information we have from the FAA, but obviously it is not standard to have aircraft collide. I want to be clear on that.”

Duffy was quickly lambasted for stating the painfully obvious.

“I’m starting to think the guy from MTV’s The Real World and Road Rules All Stars might not have a lot of expertise in transportation issues, particularly aviation safety,” one X user wrote.

“Just imagine if Pete Buttigieg said this,” said another, in reference to Biden’s transportation secretary.

The administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, Michael Whitaker, resigned from his position on January 20 after repeated demands from Elon Musk that he quit, leaving the agency without a Senate-confirmed leader during a major crisis in the wake of the D.C. plane crash.

Musk called for Whitaker’s resignation in September after the FAA chief proposed fining Musk’s company SpaceX over $600,000 in civil penalties for failing to follow license requirements during two launches in 2023. Whitaker told a congressional panel at the time that fines were “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.”

The tech CEO and fascism enthusiast repeatedly attacked Whitaker from his X account, claiming in one post that the FAA was “harassing SpaceX.” Musk also replied to an X poster who said the FAA “should not exist” and attacked Whitaker for preventing his goal of colonizing Mars.

“The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” Musk posted in a reply to Australian YouTuber Marcus House.

FAA administrators typically serve for a five-year term, but Whitaker only served for one year, replacing Trump appointee Stephen Dickson in 2022. Whitaker had been confirmed by a bipartisan 98–0 Senate vote in October 2023.

On Wednesday, a commercial American Airlines flight collided with an Army helicopter above Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C., killing everyone on board both aircraft.

Since January 20, the head of the FAA has been deputy FAA administrator Chris Rocheleau, who was only sworn in last week, giving him a stiff learning curve early on the job.

When Whitaker announced in December that he would resign, he told FAA staff in an email, “The United States is the safest and most complex airspace in the world, and that is because of your commitment to the safety of the flying public.” Wednesday’s disaster will certainly raise questions as to whether something went wrong in air safety protocols and whether disruption at the agency contributed to the crash.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appearance Thursday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) sparked a terse discussion of vaccine safety, pushing at least one Republican to set the record straight on the genuine science behind the jab.

Opting to lecture rather than question Kennedy over the course of several minutes, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul—an ophthalmologist—claimed that it’s unclear what the root of conditions such as autism or schizophrenia are, and that they, by all means, could be caused by vaccines.

“There isn’t proof that the vaccines cause it, that’s true,” Paul said. “But we don’t know what causes it yet. So shouldn’t we be at least open-minded? We take 72 vaccines. Could it be?”

He also went on to point his finger at the hepatitis B vaccine, claiming that a jab to prevent the sexually transmitted illness shouldn’t be required for infants.

“I waited on the hepatitis B vaccine until my kids went to school. Does that make me a horrible person?” Paul said. “Is there science to say you shouldn’t do it? Probably not but it’s my kid.”

But that prompted Senator Bill Cassidy, the committee chair, to jump in with the facts on the deadly and incurable disease.

“For the record, if a child is born to a hepatitis B mother, that child may have a 95 percent chance of becoming a chronic carrier,” the Louisiana Republican, a physician, said.

“And we vaccinate those people, nobody is against that,” interjected Paul. “That’s a very small percentage—95 percent of children don’t have a hepatitis B mom, and could they wait a while?”

“Again, for the record, if a mother’s hepatitis B status is known, then that can be delayed. But the problem is that a significant percentage of the time, the mother’s status is not known. If she’s positive, a vaccine on day one of life prevents chronic hepatitis B 95 percent of the time,” Cassidy retorted.

“So it really depends on the knowledge of the mother’s hepatitis B status, and when they used to just ‘okay we know the mother’s status,’ there were mothers who snuck through whose status was unknown,” Cassidy continued. “For the record, there is an absolute rationale for that.”