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Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, it is not often that the stakes of a vote to confirm a Cabinet nominee are this high, but tomorrow, when we vote on the nomination of RFK, Jr., to be the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, the stakes will be life and death.

Mr. Kennedy, in his words but more importantly in his actions, has proven over and over again that he is a unique danger to society, but he is on the edge of becoming the country's top health leader, with the power to unleash bygone diseases and undermine trust in science for generations to come.

For the first time ever, we will have a Health Secretary who has actively helped to cause outbreaks instead of to contain them. We will have someone in charge of medical research who has taken every opportunity to undermine science instead of promoting it. We will have someone who has never come across a crazy idea that he didn't like, whether it is that anti-depressants are the cause of mass shootings or that chemicals in the water are turning children gay. This is the Secretary of the Health and Human Services Department. Those two things right there should be immediately disqualifying. This should be 100 to 0.

This guy used to be a Democrat. This guy was pro-choice. This guy was for clean energy. This shouldn't be a partisan issue, except to say, for HHS, you need somebody who has devoted their life and hopefully has some expertise in the area of public health.

It is not just that we didn't get someone who has expertise in public health, we have someone who has caused disease and death. I say those words with precision. I understand that both sides of the aisle are prone to exaggerating their case and being apocalyptic when we describe a pending vote. I have been here for a while, and everything is always the most important vote that we will ever cast. I don't know if this is the most important vote we will ever cast. I do think--gosh, I hope I am wrong; I really do hope I am wrong--I do think this is likely the Cabinet Secretary vote that is likely to age the most poorly because this person has the potential to actually cause diseases like rubella, like mumps, like measles, like polio that have been gone for many generations because we have a vaccine regime.

I want to tell you what he did in Samoa. In 2019, he flew to Samoa to discourage people from taking the measles vaccine. The reason was that he wanted to run a ``natural experiment'' to see how people would fare against the disease without protections.

Some of you may know this. My father was the first whistleblower against the Tuskegee experiments in which the U.S. Public Health Service did a similar thing. They knew that penicillin cured syphilis, and they knew that, for the most part, untreated syphilis caused death. But the U.S. Public Health Service decided to divide a cohort of African-American men into two parts. One would receive the medicine and be safe and be cured. Another cohort would receive a placebo and not get the lifesaving cure for syphilis. Why did they do that? To ``observe the disease process.'' To observe the disease process.

When you investigate whether or not a medicine works, there is a whole process to it--the FDA, double-blind studies, all the rest of it. The basic idea is that you try to get to some level of reliability or statistical significance so you can project out into the population what is going to work and what is not. The sick-in-the-head way to do it is to say you can't achieve statistical significance until you just let a bunch of people get sick and figure out what happens.

The U.S. Congress, led by someone with whom I served for a couple of years, Tom Harkin, when they found out about the Tuskegee experiments, they made a law against U.S. Public Health Service ever doing that again because it is immoral. It is bad science, sure, but more than that--they treated these African-American men as if they were worth experimenting on; as if this category of human beings in the United States was expendable for scientific research purposes. And that is exactly what happened in Samoa. That is exactly what happened in Samoa: 6,000 people got the measles, 83 people died, 79 of them were kids.

It is so chilling to contemplate the idea that someone as recognizable as a Kennedy would fly across an ocean to a small, developing country and basically tell everybody: Be afraid of this lifesaving medicine.

It is not like he did that once and said ``I am sorry, I misunderstood'' or ``I am being misunderstood.'' This dude actually sells onesies on his website saying--I think it is like ``Unvaxxed, Unafraid'' for a little baby. This guy has views that are out of the mainstream of, I would guess, 99 out of 100 U.S. Senators.

I do understand the pressure that some of my colleagues are facing. They are being told: If you vote against one Trump nominee, you will be primaried.

That is not a small amount of pressure. But this one, I just promise you, is not going to age well.

Some of my colleagues are expressing reservations in private. I think that is better than not expressing any reservations at all. Some of them are getting private assurances from Mr. Kennedy that he does not, in fact, hate all vaccines; he just wants to answer questions and all the rest of it. I am not reassured. I think this person has demonstrated over a pretty long career that he says whatever is convenient in the moment.

This is like an unreconstructed--he is a Kennedy. He was running for President in the Democratic primary, and now he is a Trump guy like 10 months later. What does that mean? It means he has no core values. There is just no way to go from over here to over here politically in such a short period of time except that he was offered something, and he was offered this job. Why does he want this job? Because he has a very specific view about public health.

I just want to make one other point. The problem of our food system, the problem of the extent to which we subsidize ultraprocessed foods that are coming from commodities, that are subsidized in the farm bill and causing people to get increasingly diabetic and all the related health problems that happen related to that--that is a really legitimate place to do some good, bipartisan work. I would love to do that. It is also not what the HHS Secretary does. It is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture does for the most part, and it is what the Congress does.

The problem is the farm bill. The problem is, you get what you subsidize, and we are subsidizing all the corn products and all the soy products and all the sugar products that go into the lab-tested, extra- delicious, extra-bad-for-you, extra-addictive stuff that is making us all--even though we are the wealthiest country in human history--a very unhealthy country. If that is all this guy were working on, you could count me in.

But if your idea of public health has to do with healthy food, has to do with prevention, has to do with understanding that our food system and our agriculture system and our USDA and our farm bill process is essentially broken, you don't have to purchase this kind of crazy, evil stuff. You just don't. You don't have to do it. There are lots of good people on the food system side you can work with, work for, cheer on, organize with.

But this man is going around--he is not talking about the COVID vaccine. He is not talking about whether or not it is appropriate to require masks in public, and Democrats and Republicans are still arguing about stuff like that. He is talking about stuff that, like, if you are a parent and now you don't know whether, when your kid goes to school, they have reached herd immunity for stuff that is like way, way, way, generations back in the rearview mirror.

So I don't know if this is going to mark one of the most important public health moments in American history, but I can't think of another time where we actually have the technology, we have the medicine, we have the science, we have the distribution system, we have the public infrastructure to keep people safe, and we just decide by a vote of 53 to 47 to make people unsafe.

Secretary of Defense, DNI--all these are important--Treasury--every Cabinet position is important. It is going to be a little more challenging to know whether your vote is vindicated in the sweep of history. I think this guy is going to age very poorly in the job because I think we are going to see bad public health outcomes very, very shortly. This really is a matter of life and death.

I understand what I have learned over the last 10 days is, if Republicans are going to display courage, it is not going to be on the Cabinet. There are a few that have voted not with their party, but for the most part, they are in line, and Trump is going to get his Cabinet. But let this be a marker for everybody. Let today be a marker for everybody. Even if you voted for Trump, if you didn't vote for Trump, if you are not a voter--it doesn't matter. If you think it is a good idea to leave all of these diseases in the rearview mirror, then this is a very, very bad person to have running the Department of Health and Human Services.

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