Senators Bill Cassidy and Bernie Sanders asked HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to make good on a pledge to appear before the committee regularly. It is not clear if or when the hearing, which was scheduled for Thursday, will take place.
Last week, Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and committee ranking member Bernie Sanders (I-VT) invited Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to speak in front of the committee on Thursday. Now, it appears the hearing will be postponed.
The hearing, entitled: “An Update on the Restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services,” was set to “discuss [his] proposed reorganization” of HHS, according to Endpoints News.
“We are following up on the commitment you made during the confirmation process that as Secretary you would come before the HELP Committee on a quarterly basis, upon request of the Chair,” Cassidy and Sanders wrote in their invitation to Kennedy.
Why Kennedy isn’t appearing is not yet clear. If and when a hearing does occur, a committee clerk’s office representative told Endpoints it would posted a week in advance of being held.
The request comes on the heels of mass layoffs across HHS, including 3,500 staffers at the FDA, along with the dramatic, late-night resignation of Peter Marks, the FDA’s chief vaccines regulator, on Friday.
Marks told the Associated Press on Monday that he was given the choice to resign or be fired after refusing to give Kennedy’s team editing access to reports submitted to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, instead granting read-only access.
“Why wouldn’t we?” Marks said to the AP’s Matthew Perrone. “Because frankly we don’t trust these m——-f———. They’d write over it or erase the whole database.”
Kennedy’s schedule is full these days. On Sunday, he visited Texas, the site of a growing measles epidemic. There, he attended the funeral of an unvaccinated 8-year-old girl who died of the disease. Afterward, he praised two Texas doctors, Ben Edwards and Richard Bartlett, for their approaches to treating measles, The Independent reported. They advocate using budesonide, a steroid used to treat asthma not indicated for measles, and clarithromycin, an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections. Measles is a viral infection.
Both doctors have been disciplined by the Texas state medical board for their practices. Edwards works for Veritas Medical, an “online education and support platform” for which Kennedy has previously consulted.
Correction (April 7): This story has been updated to correct that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has not declined the invitation to appear before the HELP committee, but rather will not appear this week.
