Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Thursday that the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was politicized, and alleged that the federal government had lied to the American public about the effectiveness of vaccines and masks.
In a hearing about President Donald Trump’s health care agenda, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, asked Kennedy whether he believed “COVID-19 was politicized.”
“The whole process was politicized, senator. I mean, we were lied to about everything,” Kennedy responded.
Kennedy claimed the government, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lied about “natural immunity,” that vaccines would prevent transmission and infection, and the “science behind cloth masks.”
Many of those allegations are false or misleading. It’s not clear what Kennedy was referencing when he mentioned “natural immunity,” but there is no evidence that any significant group of people were immune to COVID before either contracting the disease or receiving a vaccination.
In early 2021, soon after the initial COVID vaccines had received emergency use authorization by the government, then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” She also said data showed vaccinated people didn’t transmit COVID. But the CDC’s official guidance at the time was that vaccines only “reduce the risk of people spreading COVID-19.”
The federal government’s mask guidance changed dramatically over the course of the pandemic, much of which occurred during Trump’s first term. The CDC regularly advised people to wear the most effective masks available, including N95 and KN95 respirators, surgical masks or homemade cloth masks, which the agency said were “inferior” but “a suitable option for community use when medical masks are unavailable.”
Kennedy appeared before the Senate Committee on Finance a day after more than 20 medical societies and organizations called for his resignation. They cited “repeated efforts to undermine science and public health,” most recently the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez over vaccine science and the resulting resignations of other leaders at the organization.
During his tenure, the health secretary and former anti-vaccine advocate has narrowed long-standing U.S. vaccine recommendations. He’s also replaced a key panel of medical experts with his hand-picked candidates ahead of the start of the respiratory virus season in the United States.
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Do you believe COVID-19 was politicized and the whole process was politicized. Senator, I mean, we were lied to about everything. We were lied to about um about natural immunity. We’re allied to about, you know, we were told again and again the vaccines would prevent transmission. They’d prevent infection. It wasn’t true. They knew it from the start. It wasn’t true, cause that’s what the animals thoughties is in the clinical trial showed. We were told that there was science behind cloth masks. The CDC allowed the teachers union to write the order closing our schools, which hurt working people all over the country and then pretend it was science-based. All of these issues, and then I can show you, like, for example, Chairman Wyden was talking about me politicizing ASIP during COVID, the, the probably the the most famous scientist on ASIP was Martin Caldore from Harvard, the great renowned world renowned epidemiologist and vaccinologists. And he criticized the COVID booster mandates. They ejected him from COVID because he wasn’t in the Orthodoxy. The two biggest health officials that FDA during COVID, Doctor Gruber and Doctor Prenes criticized the Biden mandates, vaccine man, you know, President Biden said in August, I would never take that vaccine, the Trump vaccine, and he came in, he mandated it, and then he fired the two top health officials at the FDA who said, hey, this thing has not been properly tested. So the whole process was politicized and even today, so let me, I’m 15 seconds, so I think you answered yes. It was, and does I have concerns that when you look at some of the sta, the conflicts of interest in peer-reviewed articles and professional journals. And when you point out that even some of the physician associations are conflicted because of the money they get from the pharmaceutical industry, are you committed to trying to make sure that we use the best science, elim and separate and eliminate politics as much as possible. That is what my job is. That’s what my mission is, eliminate the politics from science
