4 days ago
26
Politics|Kennedy, Rejecting Data, Fuels Distrust of His Own Agencies
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/07/us/politics/kennedy-health-vaccines-cdc.html
You person a preview presumption of this nonfiction portion we are checking your access. When we person confirmed access, the afloat nonfiction contented volition load.
News Analysis
By promoting suspicions astir the institutions helium oversees, critics accidental Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is jeopardizing nationalist health. He says helium is pursuing transparency.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who reported from Washington, covers Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his movement.
Sept. 7, 2025, 1:35 p.m. ET
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the U.S. decease number from Covid-19 astatine 1.2 million. But Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rejects his ain department’s statistics.
“I don’t cognize however galore died,” Mr. Kennedy told senators during a contentious proceeding Thursday, adding, “I don’t deliberation anybody knows, due to the fact that determination was truthful overmuch information chaos coming retired of the C.D.C.”
When Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, accurately, that it was becoming harder for radical to get Covid shots astatine pharmacies, Mr. Kennedy denied that, retorting: “Everyone tin get entree to them.” He besides claimed mRNA vaccines “cause superior harm, including death, peculiarly successful young people,” though the C.D.C. found “no accrued hazard of death” from the shots.
Mr. Kennedy’s defiant show astatine the Senate Finance Committee connected Thursday, his critics say, enactment connected vivid show what happens erstwhile idiosyncratic with nary aesculapian oregon technological grooming and a conspiracy-minded attack takes complaint of the nation’s nationalist health.
Instead of being guided by rigorous probe and nuanced statement implicit analyzable issues that defy casual answers, the country’s wellness caput rejects facts that bash not acceptable his theories and casts retired experts who are not aligned with him. He is buoyed by the enactment of a vocal populist basal that shares his suspicions of organized medicine and is energized by his propulsion for a caller approach.
Mr. Kennedy’s distrust of his department’s scientists and doctors has created turmoil wrong the nation’s nationalist wellness agencies, peculiarly the C.D.C. Mass firings and restructuring person stripped the instauration of expertise. And the wellness caput dismissed an full sheet of vaccine experts and fired the C.D.C. manager — whom he had called a “brilliant microbiologist and a tech wizard” — conscionable 1 period aft the Senate confirmed her.
English (US) ·