Last Thursday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr entered, the Senate Finance Committee hearing knowing what to expect. Democrats had declared war before he’d even sat down.

On the eve of his testimony, they issued a “report card” cataloguing every alleged misstep during his 203 days as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

From his shake-up at the CDC to the fact that he once wore jeans on a hike in the blazing Arizona sun — supposedly defying CDC advice to “wear loose, lightweight clothing” in extreme heat — nothing was too trivial to mention.

And, if that wasn’t enough, more than a thousand current and former HHS employees had signed a petition demanding his resignation.

For just under three hours, Senators from both parties shouted, interrupted, hurled insults and staged “gotcha” moments…it was an ambush.

The Opening Trap

Operation Warp Speed dominated the early exchanges. Senators pressed Kennedy on whether Donald Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for pushing vaccines out at record speed.

“Absolutely,” Kennedy said. “It was an unprecedented achievement.”

Then, hoping to catch Kennedy in a contradiction, they challenged him on whether the vaccines saved “millions of lives.”

Kennedy refused to put a number on it. “I don’t think anybody knows that because of the data,” he said, pointing out that the figures were based on modelling, not clinical trials.

The panel accused him of being evasive.

Demands without Data

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) came out swinging, alleging Kennedy had broken his promise not to “take vaccines away from anyone” by narrowing Covid booster recommendations to high-risk groups.

Kennedy held firm. “It’s not recommended for healthy people.”

“You are effectively denying people vaccines,” Warren snapped.

“I’m not taking them away from anybody,” Kennedy shot back. “You want me to indicate a product for which there is no clinical data? Is that what you want?”

Warren lost her composure. “You clearly are taking away vaccines. You’re putting America’s babies’ health at risk, America’s seniors’ health at risk, all Americans’ health at risk, and you should resign.”

The exchange exposed the mindset in the room…Senators spoke of vaccines with a kind of zealotry and religiosity that was deeply unnerving.

They were openly demanding that people be injected with a product lacking safety data, and calling it “science.”

Further, framing it as a matter of “denying access” to Covid vaccines was not only misleading but conniving. The vaccines remain available off-label to anyone who wants them.

Kennedy refused to yield. Recommending products without evidence, he said, is politics, not science.

Across Europe and Australia, governments have already pulled back, limiting use of the shots in under-18s without controversy. In the US, unfortunately, alarmism continues to drown out reason.

The Insults Fly

As tempers escalated, so did the insults. Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO) flatly accused Kennedy of spreading “lies.”

Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) sneered, calling him a “charlatan” after cancelling $500 million in mRNA contracts.

Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) branded Kennedy “a hazard to the health of the American people,” demanding his resignation.

And Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) warned that Kennedy was “dead set on making it harder for children to get vaccines and that kids are going to die because of it.”

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) thundered that professional associations like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, all agreed that vaccines were “safe and effective.” How dare Kennedy doubt them.

Kennedy shot back, “There’s a big difference, Senator, between established science and the scientific establishment, which has been co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry.”

He reminded Sanders that his advisers included Marty Makary, Vinay Prasad, Jay Bhattacharya and Dr Oz — scientists willing to challenge orthodoxy.

But Sanders scoffed at his “few advisers,” insisting the consensus from big associations carried more weight.

That gave Kennedy his opening. “Senator, you’ve sat in that chair for how long? Twenty, twenty-five years, while the chronic disease in our children went up to 76 percent, and you said nothing. You never asked the question why it’s happening.”

Kennedy had turned the accusation back on the Senate itself…guardians of institutions who had watched chronic disease spiral while doing nothing.

The Monarez Dispute

Much of the drama circled back to Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director who claimed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that Kennedy pressured her to “preapprove” the recommendations of his newly overhauled vaccine advisory panel (ACIP).

“No, I did not,” Kennedy insisted.

Asked outright if Monarez was lying, Kennedy replied: “Yes.”

He added: “These changes were absolutely necessary adjustments to restore the agency to its role as the world’s gold standard public health agency.”

Monarez resisted firing senior officials who opposed the new Terms of Reference for ACIP’s Covid vaccine work group — including Dr Demetre Daskalakis, who openly acknowledged in his resignation letter that he would not sign off on them.

ACIP in the Crosshairs

Another flashpoint was Kennedy’s June decision to fire all 17 members of ACIP, the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee.

Democrats accused him of stacking the panel with “antivaxxers,” “conspiracy theorists” and “non-experts,” claiming it had “lost scientific credibility.”

Asked why he appointed Dr Robert Malone, who had publicly raised questions about the safety of mRNA vaccines, Kennedy replied: “Dr Malone is one of the inventors of the mRNA vaccine.”

Senators pressed Kennedy about MIT professor Retsef Levi, who chairs the new Covid vaccine work group and has argued that “evidence is mounting and indisputable that mRNA vaccines cause serious harm, including death, especially among young people.”

Kennedy backed Levi. “I think that’s true, yes.”

He argued that ACIP had long been riddled with conflicts of interest. “What we did is we got rid of the conflicts,” he explained. “We depoliticised it and put great scientists on it from a very diverse group.”

He reminded senators that Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, now chair of the new ACIP, had been removed during Covid after opposing mandates and questioning boosters. That, Kennedy said, was the real politicisation.

The Protocols Farce

The hearing tipped into absurdity when Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) zeroed in on the forthcoming autism study, fixating on the “protocols” (the standardised plans scientists make public before a study begins).

“Will you commit to sharing the protocols?” Luján demanded.

“They’re public,” Kennedy replied.

“Will you commit to giving them to this committee by the end of the week?” Luján pressed.

“That’s not the way it works…You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Kennedy shot back, visibly frustrated.

But Luján wouldn’t let go.

“Will you commit to sharing those protocols by the end of the month?” he asked again.

“Anybody can get a hold of the protocol,” Kennedy repeated. “It’s published with the study.”

By now, the spectacle had turned embarrassing. Luján, blinded by his contempt pushed further still — calling on the chairman to subpoena the very documents Kennedy had just explained were already public.

Fortunately, Chairman Mike Crapo (R-ID) shut Luján down with a firm “no.”

The exchange was excruciating. It was a textbook example of a Senator desperately seeking a “gotcha” moment, and only succeeding in embarrassing himself.

Kennedy Fights Back

When Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) asked whether Covid had been politicised, Kennedy didn’t hesitate.

“Yeah, the whole process was politicised,” he said. “We were lied to about everything. We were lied to about natural immunity. We were told again and again the vaccines would prevent transmission, they prevent infection [but] it wasn’t true. They knew it from the start.”

At one point he declared that the CDC “is the most corrupt agency in HHS.”

Kennedy added that the CDC let the teachers’ union dictate school closures, pretending it was “science-based,” while Americans suffered the fallout.

It was a sharp reminder of just how much the establishment had got wrong, and how little accountability there had been.

The Battle Lines

By the close, even with a handful of Republicans backing him, Democrats pressed relentlessly for Kennedy’s resignation.

But Kennedy did not buckle. He defended his firings as essential to root out corruption. He stood by his advisers and insisted he would not recommend products without evidence.

What the hearing revealed was not Kennedy’s weakness but the desperation of his critics — Senators clinging to captured institutions, hurling insults and posturing for the cameras.

I watched in disbelief, exasperated by the childishness and the sheer dishonesty on display. For all the talk of “science,” what unfolded was politics at its dirtiest.

Republished from the author’s Substack