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Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the Presiding Officer to the U.S. Senate. I hadn't had a chance, really, to do that, as you sit in the chair.

We are now going to get somebody else, but I thank the Presiding Officer for being here.

(Mr. HUSTED assumed the Chair.)

I also want to thank my colleague from the Commonwealth of Virginia, Senator Kaine, for his heartfelt remarks.

I think we are through the looking glass in many ways, and there is a pattern here that is reflected in what you were talking about, this idea of being able to tell the difference between fact and fiction-- fact and fiction.

I know that when you were the mayor of Richmond, it was probably pretty important for people who were working with you to know the difference between fact and fiction. When you were the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, it probably was pretty important for you to do that as well.

It does seem like, in President Trump's administration, he is really at war with the facts and trying to muddle what is fact and fiction, to be kind about it.

I can't think of a time in the history of this country when families have wanted to know more about what is real and what is false--with their kids, what is real and what is false.

I was the superintendent of schools in Denver, as the Senator from Virginia knows, and it is a great irony that at a time when parents want their kids to be able to distinguish between what is real and what is false--because of all the falsehoods that are coming over social media and other places--the President has decided to nominate the head of the WWE to be the Secretary of Education in this administration.

You were talking about the inability of Bobby Kennedy to pick which side he was on when it came to what happened on 9/11. It reminds me exactly of the situation with Congresswoman Gabbard, who decided over and over and over again that she was going to choose not America's side but our adversaries' side, whether it was the chemical weapons in Syria--I mean, it is hard to even contemplate that--or the fact that at 12:30 at night, or I guess it was 11:30 at night, literally the night that Putin invaded Ukraine, a country that was at peace, a crossing of a peaceful border--the first time a tyrant had done that in Europe since World War II when the United States had led the international and global order that created these incredibly important institutions, NATO being one of those. And she had to reach out at 11:30 at night to basically mimic the talking points from Vladimir Putin. And I am not saying that she was a Russian spy or anything; I am just saying that it is the same stuff that he was using. Two days later, the Russian propaganda television in Moscow was running that stuff on the TV in Moscow.

So I think it really does matter that people are telling the truth to the American people and that, where possible, where there are differences of opinion, that we try to get to the bottom of the truth. There are a lot of reasons to have differences of opinion. We live in a democracy, and we have the freedom to have differences of opinion. We have the freedom to have a different understanding of the facts, but we need to be pretty certain about that when it comes to public health, when it comes to healthcare in this country.

Mr. President, we live in the richest country in the world. We are blessed to live in the richest country in the world. If you look at our national wealth as a function of our population, there is nobody who is remotely even close to us. That is the reflection of an economy that has been much more dynamic than economies across the world, innovation that is much more dynamic, and, I would say, a culture that is not beset by corruption in the way many countries around the world are.

But even though we are the richest country in the world and the richest per capita, shockingly, we have some of the worst health outcomes of any country that is wealthy. We have the lowest life expectancy among large, wealthy countries. We have the highest maternal mortality rate of any other high-income country in the world, and it is getting worse every single year. We have the highest hospitalization rates for chronic conditions--like congestive heart failure and diabetes and asthma--of all our peer countries.

We spend twice as much per capita as any other industrialized country for worse results. It is a bad deal for patients, and it is a terrible deal for taxpayers.

This isn't just about our physical health. We have the highest suicide rate among high-income countries. We have the second highest drug-related death rate among high-income countries.

We have some of the lowest numbers of mental health practitioners per capita in many parts of the country. In my own home State of Colorado, there are entire counties that really don't have any mental health expertise at all. And at a time when there is an epidemic in our country, I would say especially among young people, that is a shameful failure on our part.

Americans in every corner of our country are getting sicker in 2025. They are spending more on healthcare, they are traveling farther, and they are waiting longer to see fewer doctors.

The citizens of Colorado, I can tell you, are deeply, deeply unhappy with our healthcare system--deeply unhappy.

I will actually say I was here when we passed the Affordable Care Act during the Obama years, and it has not fixed the issues we are facing.

My constituents, when they think about healthcare, they think about scarcity; they think about the unavailability of drugs that their moms and dads have been prescribed but they either can't get or they can't afford even though they have been prescribed.

Unlike other countries around the world, this is a nation where our senior citizens actually spend their retirement going from pharmacy to pharmacy to pharmacy to get the drugs they have been prescribed by a doctor, to be able to get the inhaler that will keep them healthy so that they don't end up in the emergency room.

This is a country, unlike our competitors, where it is very common for moms and dads to spend 2 hours or 3 hours or 4 hours on the phone with an insurance company denying their claim--their legitimate claim-- for their kid.

This is a country, as I mentioned, where we do not have ready access to mental health care, which people living in other countries far less wealthy than we are have as a reasonable expectation of being a citizen of that country.

When we are in the midst of a physical and mental health care crisis like this, unlike many of the other Cabinet positions we are going to fill--and for some of them, it is true as well--the Secretary of Health and Human Services is a job of life and death. That is why Mr. Kennedy's confirmation, I think, would be so dangerous.

We are on the precipice of allowing a practiced trafficker of vaccine conspiracy theories--admitted, of these theories--to administer healthcare to over 29 million children in America who receive routine, lifesaving vaccines through Medicaid; a man who has made his fame and fortune by treating our most vulnerable children as his personal science experiment.

Mr. Kennedy has peddled bunk science that claims vaccines cause autism, sowing confusion and fear and causing heartbreak among parents who are now afraid to vaccinate their kids because they are so worried that it is going to cause autism--that they won't have a vaccine for their kid for fear of autism. But the failure to get that vaccine means their kids are exposed to profoundly important childhood and serious childhood illnesses.

He makes his claims with incredible conviction. He is not shy about it. He claimed that the measles vaccines ``poisoned an entire generation of children'' and went further to say that the ``only thing that cures measles is nutrition and clean water.''

Before the measles vaccine was developed in the 1960s, hundreds of American kids died every year, and measles is a completely preventable disease with two vaccines administered in childhood. Without it, measles can spread like wildfire, leaving behind serious complications like blindness and encephalitis. We don't know that. We don't remember that because the pages that are on this floor can't remember a time when we weren't having the measles vaccine in the United States of America. It would be a very different world if we hadn't had them, but we do.

Doctors in sub-Saharan Africa, where measles runs rampant, describe watching children die from this preventable disease in their dire warnings they are now sending to the United States.

The CDC warns that kindergarten MMR vaccine rates have dropped below the 95-percent threshold needed to prevent worldwide measles outbreaks.

As I stand here tonight, as the Presiding Officer sits here tonight, five States have reported measles cases. An outbreak in Gaines County, TX, has rapidly grown to 24 reported cases, all of them unvaccinated children. Nine are in the hospital. Nine of these children are in the hospital. Vaccine exemptions in Gaines County are among the highest in the State of Texas. Mr. President, 17.5 percent of Gaines County kindergartners have vaccine exemptions. That is almost 20 percent.

It is not just Mr. Kennedy's vaccine conspiracies that are of grave concern, however. He has spent 50 years muddying the waters of scientific consensus with half-truths and misinformation and bad science.

In his hearing before the Finance Committee, Mr. Kennedy showed an alarming inability to answer simple questions about his past statements. He appeared to have selective memory regarding some of his most outlandish claims.

I asked him point-blank about his claims that COVID-19 was a genetically engineered bioweapon--these are his words: genetically engineered bioweapon--that targets Black and White people but spared Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people. He never denied this. He never denied that he said it and instead pointed to a debunked theory study as flimsy proof of his claims.

I asked him further, based on what he had said--again, quoting him:

Did you say Lyme disease is a highly likely militarily engineered bioweapon?

To this he answered:

I probably did.

``I probably did'' say that Lyme disease was a militarily engineered bioweapon. How can we consider someone for the highest health office in the country who believes that America's own military engineered Lyme disease and uses it as a weapon against us? What could go wrong?

He said on his podcast that exposure to pesticides could cause children to become transgender--a statement he claims not to remember, but he said it. It is on the record.

He insisted he forgot writing in his own book that ``it's undeniable that African AIDS is an entirely different disease from Western AIDS'' and could provide no explanation for this false statement either.

Mr. Kennedy likes to talk about the need for more research. In fact, that was his answer to many of my colleagues' questions. He even told me to look at an NIH study when I asked him about some of his unfounded claims about COVID-19.

Now, the NIH, as you know, is under attack tonight as we are here, and all Mr. Kennedy has to say about that is that he will look into that.

The NIH is the gold standard worldwide for scientific research and innovation. The University of Colorado is telling me that the system could lose $85 million a year in research dollars to study Alzheimer's, brain injuries, mental illness, and heart disease. If confirmed, Mr. Kennedy would oversee NIH.

I guess I really think that we could do better than a known peddler of junk science to run the most important medical research in the country.

Is a vaccine denier the best we can do for our doctors who are working around the clock and our nurses, too, in the midst of the worst flu outbreak in 15 years? Is a man who became a millionaire many times over by claiming vaccines cause autism the best we really can do for our kids?

Do we really want parents making a choice that is unsafe for them and for their communities because people at the highest offices in the country are making false statements about science? Out of 330 million Americans, we can surely do better than this.

I appreciate the Presiding Officer's patience.

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