"The whole process was politicized… We were lied to about everything..."
US Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F Kennedy at a recent Senate hearing
Not least further to this post…
…featuring a striking recent statement from US Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F Kennedy, I thought it worth highlighting parts of this recent Senate hearing:
On 4th September, the three-and-a-half hour session was getting plenty of press coverage in the UK…
But on the following day, the fallout from the resignation of the Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner was dominating the news cycle:
It’s been a while since I bought a house, and I don’t take a lot of interest in such things these days, but even I know that, in the unlikely event that I purchased a second home, I would not be paying the standard rate of stamp duty.
But I digress…
Some context for the hearing
US disability data
Here is a chart showing official US government data on the number of people with a disability:
The figures are based on a monthly survey described in this footnote.1
In 2021, the number was around 30 million. It is now more than 35 million. And, as analyst Ed Dowd points out, population growth at around 4% does not explain disability growth approaching 20%..
A recent statement re the CDC
Here is a recent statement Kennedy made re the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):
The CDC was once the world’s most trusted guardian of public health. Its mission was simple and noble: protect Americans from infectious disease.
But over the years, the agency drifted. Bureaucracy, politicized science, and mission creep corroded that mission and squandered the public trust. We saw the consequences of putting dogma before science during the prolonged covid mandates of the Biden era… cloth masks on toddlers, six-foot distancing with no scientific basis, boosters for healthy children, lockdowns that wrecked our economy, and the suppression of low-cost therapeutics in favor of experimental drugs that were ineffective.
The CDC implemented a school lockdown policy that was written by the teachers’ union and sold to the public as science. This was the template for the politicization of science that became pervasive across the agency as the agency put politics ahead of evidence-based medicine.
It’s always devastating, not just for our children, but to public health. America has just 4.2% of the world’s population, yet we suffered nearly 19% of the world’s covid deaths. We literally did worse than any other country in the world. That failure was no anomaly. For years, the CDC has presided over rising chronic disease and declining life expectancy.
Trust has collapsed. Only a tiny fraction of healthcare workers and parents now follow CDC guidance. President Trump has asked me to restore that trust and return the CDC to its core mission.
We've already shown what a CDC can achieve. When measles flared up this year in Texas, we surged vaccines and therapeutics and staff to the outbreak’s epicenter. The outbreak ended very quickly. That response was not pro-vax or anti-vax. It wasn’t ideological. It was effective, and effectiveness will be the watchword of our leadership.
We also know that chronic disease made covid especially lethal in America. Infectious and chronic illnesses are connected. The very tools we use — vaccines, antibiotics, therapeutics — save lives, but they can also cause harm for some patients. That truth can no longer be ignored.
The path forward is clear. Restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through transparency and by restoring competence.
To achieve this, the CDC will protect against threats with advanced detection tools, strengthen infrastructure at home and abroad, modernize data in labs, rebuild the workforce of disease detectives, and apply gold standard science to every recommendation.
And we’re going to empower states and communities on the front lines. We've already shaken up the leadership and removed conflicts of interest.
The American people elected President Trump, not bureaucrats, to set health policy. That’s the MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] commitment in action. Most CDC staff are honest public servants who are trying hard to accomplish their jobs. With this renewed mission, they can do their jobs without politics or fear. Together, we will rebuild CDC so that it will once again be the world's most trusted authority on infectious disease.
Money from Pharmaceuticals/Health Products to US Senators
In all that follows, it is important to bear in mind the amount of money that US Senators receive from people linked with the pharmaceutical industry. And so for each Senator featured, I will highlight the OpenSecrets figures from the 2020, 2022 and 2024 election cycles, which relate to the years 2019-2020, 2021-2022 and 2023-2024 respectively.
The hearing
The recent shake-up at the CDC
The recent shake-up at the CDC is one of the things that Kennedy addressed fairly early on (0:47:50):
I would like to address the recent shake-up [at the] CDC. These changes were absolutely necessary adjustments to restore the agency to its role as the world’s gold-standard public health agency with the central mission of protecting Americans from infectious disease.
CDC failed that responsibility miserably during covid when its disastrous, nonsensical policies destroyed small businesses, violated civil liberties, closed our schools, caused generational damage in doing so, masked infants with no science, and heightened economic inequality. And yet all those oppressive and unscientific interventions failed to do anything about the disease itself.
America is home to 4.2% of the world's population, yet we had nearly 20% of the covid deaths. We literally did worse than any country in the world. And 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 the CDC... people who are able and willing to chart a new course. As my father once said, progress is a nice word, but change is its motivator, and change has its enemies. That’s why we need new blood at CDC. That’s also why it's imperative that we remove officials with conflicts of interest and catastrophically bad judgment and political agendas. We need unbiased, politics-free, transparent, evidence-based science in the public interest. Those are the guiding principles behind the changes at the CDC, and that is what you can expect all across our agency for the next three years.
A clash with committee chairman Senator Ron Wyden
This exchange between Kennedy and committee chairman Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) gives a flavour of the proceedings (1:01:05):
[Wyden] This is about kids being pushed in harm’s way by reckless and repeated decisions to get scientists and doctors out of the way and allow conspiracy theories to dictate this country’s health policy. I don’t see any evidence that you have any regrets about anything you’ve done or plans to change it. And my last comment is I hope that you will tell the American people how many preventable child deaths are an acceptable sacrifice for enacting an agenda that I think is fundamentally cruel and defies common plans to change it.
[Kennedy] Do I got a reply…? Senator, you’ve sat in that chair for how long… 20… 25 years… while the chronic disease in our children went up… 76%. And you’ve said nothing. You’ve never asked the question, “Why is this happening?”
Today, for the first time in 20 years, we learned that infant mortality has increased in our country. It’s not because I came in here. It’s because of what happened during the Biden administration… [something] that we’re going to end.
NB Pharma-related money received by Wyden: $32,247 (2019-2020); $49,133 (2023-2024)The politicization of covid
Shortly after that, Kennedy was asked by Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) whether he believed that covid was politicized (1:10:58):
[Cornyn] It seems to me one of the biggest problems that we have in America today is the trustworthiness of the information that we actually receive from the news media and from any other source. And obviously the easiest thing for our Democratic colleagues to do is to scare people because that is a powerful emotion no matter what the facts may be. Do you believe covid-19 was politicized?
[Kennedy] The whole process was politicized… We were lied to about everything. We were lied to about natural immunity… We were told again and again the vaccines would prevent transmission… prevent infection. It wasn’t true. They knew… from the start it wasn’t true because that’s what the animal studies and the clinical trials 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… for example… Chairman Wyden [featured in an earlier clip] was talking about me politicizing ACIP [the Advisory Committee on Immunization] but, during covid, probably the most famous scientist on ACIP was Martin Kulldorff from Harvard… the great world-renowned epidemiologist and vaccinologist. And he criticized the covid booster mandates… [And] they ejected him… because he wasn’t in the orthodoxy.
The two biggest health officials at FDA during covid, Dr Gruber and Dr Krause criticized the Biden… vaccine mandates… 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 FDA who said, “Hey, this thing has not been properly tested.” So the whole process was politicized…
[Cornyn] So, I think you answered, “Yes, it was politicized”…
[Kennedy] Yes.
NB Pharma-related money received by Cornyn: $319,062 (2019-2020); $59,426 (2023-2024)At the time (September 2021), Gruber and Krause were reported as “stepping down”:
Some background on Kulldorff can be found here:
A clash with Senator Michael Bennet
A contender for the fiercest clash came in this exchange with Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) who challenged Kennedy on the question of evidence (1:18:26):
[Bennet] I think it’s critical for you to share the evidence that this panel will rely on. Will you give the American people 6 months or 6 weeks in advance the record that they’re going to rely on to make these decisions? Will you make it transparent for the American people?
[Kennedy] All the evidence is transparent… for the first time in history. And you were never there complaining when the pharmaceutical companies were picking those people and then running their products through with no safety testing…
[Bennet] You can characterize it any way you want. I quoted them today. What I said was accurate. What you said were lies…
[Kennedy] Senator, are you saying that the mRNA vaccine has never been associated with myocarditis or pericarditis…?
[Bennet]: I am simply trying to say that the people that you have put on that panel after firing the entire thing…
[Kennedy] You’re evading the question.
[Bennet] No, I’m asking the questions here…
[Kennedy] You’re evading that question.
[Bennet] I’m asking the questions… on behalf of parents and schools and teachers all over the United States of America who deserve so much better than your leadership. That’s what this conversation is about…
[Kennedy] Senator, they deserve the truth, and that’s what we’re going to give them for the first time in the history of that agency.
NB Pharma-related money received by Bennet: $63,047 (2021-2022); $2,950 (2023-2024)Americans have lost faith in the CDC
In this exchange with John Barrasso (R-Wyoming), Kennedy talked about the need to restore faith in the CDC (1:50:43):
[Barrasso] There are real concerns that safe, proven vaccines like measles, like hepatitis B, and others could be in jeopardy. And that would put Americans at risk and reverse decades of progress. As we've seen over the last four years… when recommendations became politicized or were swayed by bias… public trust can be lost.
So what safeguards are in place to ensure decisions are based solely on science and not politics? And how are you going to make sure doctors and parents can count on CDC guidance?
[Kennedy] Right now, there’s only 10 percent of children… complying with the CDC's recommendation on covid boosters… [and] only 15 percent of health care workers…
So Americans have lost faith in the CDC, and we need to restore that faith. And we’re going to do that by telling the truth and not through propaganda… I’m making them understand that everything that we say is true. We’re going to tell them what we know. We’re going to tell them what we don’t know. And we’re going to tell them what we’re researching and how we’re doing it. And we’re going to be transparent. It’s the only way to restore trust in the agency… by making it trustworthy.
NB Pharma-related money received by Barrasso: $55,273 (2019-2020); $202,656 (2023-2024)As to “safe, proven vaccines like measles, like hepatitis B, and others”, I wonder if Barrasso is aware of this detailed and referenced table from the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), which shows that few of the vaccines recommended by the CDC have actually had long-term placebo-controlled trials:
In terms of "[telling] what we know" and "[being] transparent", I wonder when we will hear about US life assurance data such as that discussed here…
...and why anyone should trust an agency that is not open about such figures.
And I wonder what explanation the participants in the Senate hearing would offer for the disproportionate and extraordinary rise in the number of deaths in working age Americans at the time that many companies introduced vaccine mandates in 2021.
VAERS reports
Shortly after the above exchange, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), who is now chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, spoke about reports on the US Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System which is, unsurprisingly, often known as VAERS (1:58:17):
[Johnson] My committee has got now over 8 million pages of information. Just in the first tranche… we discovered… that somebody in the federal health agencies… hid the signal. They admitted there was a signal on myocarditis, and they hid it. They didn’t warn the public. They didn’t warn doctors. So that’s just one instance of corruption and lies told by the CDC…
We held our first hearing… on that hiding of the signal on myocarditis. We’ve heard a lot of studies… I’ve looked into science… it’s been thoroughly corrupted.
Here’s data… and I’d like to enter this sheet into the record. I’ve been publishing this chart… since… early 2021… when I’m on, for example, talk radio shows… They talk about this, they get de-platformed… because of all the censorship in the Biden administration…
The VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] system that was touted in October of 2020,…this great safety surveillance system on covid… a few months later, when they didn’t like the results, they started denigrating their own system. But VAERS shows that there have been 38,742 deaths reported on VAERS worldwide associated with the covid vaccine... 9,252 of those deaths occurred on the day of vaccination or within one or two days…
I agree with you. Nobody knows how many covid deaths there were, because the information was completely corrupted. Nobody knows how many lives were saved by the [covid vaccine]… There’s not any good study on that [but] this is hard evidence.
NB Pharma-related money received by Johnson: $11,372 (2019-2020); $107,917 (2021-2022); $7,705 (2023-2024)I am reminded of this slide…
13. Why is the US VAERS data not being more openly discussed?
Data from the US Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System shows unprecedented levels of deaths and adverse events, with the bulk of these recorded within 72 hours of injection
…that I put together as one of twenty questions in late 2021:
When I tried to raise this with others at the time, few people seemed interested. But I find it hard to see how anyone, irrespective of their level of expertise, could look at that sort of information and fail to see cause for concern.
I am also reminded of this shocking Pfizer report…
…that I featured in this post:
That report was hidden by the UK regulator, usually known as the MHRA (rather than the 15-syllable Medicines and Healthcare products Regulations Agency).
As far as I know they are still keeping quiet about it.
I wonder if 86% of the MHRA budget is still derived from the industry it is supposed to be regulating, as was the case in 2022.
A clash with Senator Elizabeth Warren
This exchange between Kennedy and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) was another contender for the fiercest (2:25:59):
[Warren] Secretary Kennedy, will you tell America that all adults and all children over six months of age are eligible to get a covid booster at their local pharmacy today?
[Kennedy] Anybody can get the booster…
[Warren] So, you’re saying that is now the official rule of HHS… Anybody is eligible to get a booster by just walking into the pharmacy?
[Kennedy] It’s not recommended for healthy people…
[Warren] No. No. If you don't recommend, then the consequence of that in many states is that you can’t walk into a pharmacy and get one. It means insurance companies don’t have to cover the $200 or so cost. As Senator Dr Cassidy said, you are effectively denying people vaccines…
[Kennedy] We’re not going to recommend a product for which there is no clinical data for that indication. Is that what I should be doing…?
[Warren] What you should be doing is honoring your promise that you made when you were looking to get confirmed in this job… You promised that you would not take away vaccines from anyone who wanted them. You just changed the classification of the covid vaccine…
[Kennedy] I’m not taking them away from people, Senator…
[Warren] It takes it away if you can’t get it from your pharmacy…
[Kennedy] Well, most Americans are going to be able to get it from their pharmacy for free…
[Warren] The question is everyone who wants it. That was your promise…
[Kennedy] I never promised that I was going to recommend products with which there is no indication… And I know you’ve taken $855,000 from pharmaceutical companies, Senator.
NB Pharma-related money received by Warren: $818,997 (2019-2020); $18,686 (2021-2022); $56,000 (2023-2024)I don’t know where Kennedy got his figure. But it is similar to the total amount on OpenSecrets.
Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont), who, is sitting next to Warren, received $1,407,680 in 2019-2020 — more than any other Senator. Like Kennedy in 2024, Sanders sought the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020.
But I did not find any evidence that Kennedy has received pharma-related money.
“I’m [not] anti-vax… I’m pro-science”
And finally, I found some of the comments in Kennedy’s exchange with Senator Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) particularly striking (2:51:38):
[Marshall] The situation today is so different [from] when this monster virus was made at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and none of us had ever seen this virus, and we had no immunity to it. But today, every American’s had covid a dozen times probably, and we built up immunity…
Warp Speed [i.e. Operation Warp Speed] was a miracle… what President Trump and his team did… and it saved millions of lives most likely. But it’s also true that it probably killed some people, like most vaccines do. There is a death rate associated... So both things are true.
Anything else you want to clear up on the morbidity, mortality of covid and covid vaccines?
There are so many questionable things about those few sentences that I think it makes sense to discuss them before turning to Kennedy’s response.
If we had had “no immunity” to “this monster virus”, why was the number of people dying in the UK — prior to the implementation of the disastrous “covid restrictions” announced on March 23rd — at or below normal levels? Even though the virus had reportedly been circulating in the UK since January.
As to the comment re the origin of the virus, for a long time the authorities lied to us in stating that SARS-CoV-2 was not made in a lab. Why should we now believe them when they tell us it was made in Wuhan?
But in any case, what evidence is there that we had “no immunity”? I am reminded of what Dr Mike Yeadon, Pfizer’s former chief scientist and vice-president of the allergy and respiratory research division, wrote here in October 2020:
For reasons I don’t understand, given the significance of what I’m about to tell you, none of the so-called medical correspondents and science journalists on radio and TV have ever (as far as I know) spoken of the four, endemic, common-cold inducing coronaviruses. It’s well understood by clinicians and scientists who’ve spent any time reading the scientific literature that at least four coronaviruses circulate freely in UK and elsewhere where they’ve been studied. They have names: OC43, HKU1, 229E and NL63… They were first discovered around 55 years ago and, since they are seasonal (for reasons that are not completely understood), some researchers track their annual arrival and departure…
These four coronaviruses are but a handful of the literally scores of respiratory viruses which, together, cause between a quarter and a third of what we call the common cold... Symptoms of infection with any of these endemic coronaviruses cause the constellation of symptoms you’d expect if you get an upper respiratory tract infection, or a cold. Some people get really minor, if any symptoms at all. Some get really heavy colds and it takes a couple of weeks before you throw them off. Regrettably, a few elderly and already ill people die after what in younger, more healthy people, causes no more than a cold.
It is my belief and that of multiple, top quality research groups around the world, that many individuals who’ve been infected by one or more of these endemic, common-cold producing coronaviruses in the past, have a long-lived and robust immunity, not only to those viruses, but to closely related viruses. SARS-CoV-2 is one such closely-related virus. Note the similarity of some of these viruses: SARS-CoV-2 is 80% identical to SARS at the gene level and the fusion subunit of all these common cold coronaviruses has high identity to the equivalent sequence of SARS-CoV-2...
In researching this specific information, I came across scientists on discussion boards. One of them, responding to emerging data that immunologists were discovering SAR-CoV-2 reactive T-cells in patients never exposed to the virus, speculated that varying exposure and immunity to common cold coronaviruses might play a role in defining susceptibility to the novel virus. My insight is not new. What surprises me is that no one advising the government has done anything with this information.
As an experienced life scientist, I would have predicted that before any experiments had been done those who’d been infected by any of those common cold-causing coronaviruses would now be carrying a level of resistance — let us call it immunity — to infection by closely-related viruses. At the heart of things, this is because that’s the way the incredible molecular machinery that is the innate and adaptive immune system works. To not expect such cross-over is, I submit, once again to demonstrate the lack of the requisite understanding to build a model reliable enough to use. I’m not going to try to detail all the evidence, though it’s there in the references in my earlier, detailed article for anyone who wants to examine it.
I am also struck by the comment that “every American’s had covid a dozen times probably”. Even allowing for hyperbole, that statement is quite an indictment on the so-called vaccines.
As to “Warp Speed was a miracle... it saved millions of lives most likely”, I wonder why Marshall thinks that, and what evidence he would offer to back up what he says.
And, finally, before we move on to Kennedy’s response, the statement that the covid vaccine “probably killed some people, like most vaccines do” is quite striking in and of itself.
[Kennedy] Well, I think you just cleared it up… the covid vaccine was critical. President Trump’s leadership got it to us when our society was locked down. It allowed us to open up. It was, as I said, perfectly matched to a virus that was new in the experience of humanity. And so… it’s a miracle.
But right now we’re dealing with completely different circumstances, where the virus has mutated… where it’s much less dangerous… where there’s a lot of natural immunity and herd immunity… so the calculus is different, and it’s complicated… If you just want to turn everything into a soundbite… you can’t have a grown-up conversation.
There were more reports to VAERS… which is the only surveillance system that we have… of injuries and deaths from that vaccine than all vaccines put together in history. So we have to acknowledge that there was a cause…. We acknowledge that there was a benefit…. We can’t quantify either one because of the data chaos at CDC. And that’s all I’m saying. And they think I’m being evasive because I won’t make… a statement that’s almost religious in nature.
Did it save a million lives? Well, there’s no data to support that… There’s modelling studies, there’s faulty data... [but] I’m not going to sign on to something if [it’s not] a scientific certainty. It doesn’t mean that I’m… anti-vax. It just means I’m pro-science.
NB Pharma-related money received by Marshall: $40,607 (2021-2022); $74,905 (2023-2024)Given what Marshall said, and also what Kennedy goes on say, I find the statement that “I think you just cleared it up… the covid vaccine was critical” rather odd. I would also be interested to hear Kennedy elaborate on what he means by “the covid vaccine allowed us to open up” and the words “it’s a miracle”. If there were another “pandemic”, a scenario for which the authorities seem to be planning…
…would we not be allowed to “open up” without another “miracle” vaccine?
But I do think that Kennedy’s comment that people think he is being evasive because he “won’t make… a statement that’s almost religious in nature” is an important observation. I am reminded of the many ways in which what happened during the covid era bore more than a passing resemblance to a form of religion.
Related
The suggestion here in this post…
…in relation to what we have been told about the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
Also:
Unexpected Turns homepage
The most-read articles can be found here
Below are the six questions on which the disability data is based (h/t Ed Dowd):
Any yes to one of the six questions asked is then considered disabled. This is a statistically imputed portion of the current population survey (CPS) done monthly. It has nothing to due with social security claims.
**Hearing Disability**: Is anyone in the household deaf or do they have serious difficulty hearing?
**Visual Disability**: Is anyone in the household blind or do they have serious difficulty seeing, even when wearing glasses?
**Cognitive Disability**: Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does anyone in the household have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?
**Ambulatory Disability**: Does anyone in the household have serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs?
**Self-Care Disability**: Does anyone in the household have difficulty dressing or bathing?
**Independent Living Disability**: Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does anyone in the household have difficulty doing errands alone, such as visiting a doctor’s office or shopping?
If a respondent answers “yes” to any question, they are asked to identify which household members have the condition. These responses are used to establish disability status for labor force statistics. Note that the CPS disability measure is distinct from Social Security disability status, as it is designed for statistical purposes only and does not assess eligibility for benefits.