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BERNIE SANDERS: KENNEDY MUST RESIGN  
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Bernie Sanders
August 30, 2025
The New York Times
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_ Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he
must resign. _

, Mark Peterson for The New York Times

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is
endangering the health of the American people now and into the future.
He must resign.

Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and
over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great
slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office
President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.

This week, Mr. Kennedy pushed out the director of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention after less than one month on the job
because she refused to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous
policies. Four leading officials at C.D.C. resigned the same week. One
of those officials said Mr. Kennedy’s team asked him to “change
studies that have been settled in the past” apparently to fit Mr.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views. This is not Making America Healthy
Again.

Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community,
Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against
vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been
rejected repeatedly by scientific experts.

 

It is absurd to have to say this in 2025, but vaccines are safe and
effective. That, of course, is not just my view. Far more important,
it is the overwhelming consensus of the medical and scientific
communities.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the country’s largest
professional association of pediatricians, representing over 67,000
doctors who treat our children every day, calls immunizations “one
of the greatest public health achievements,” which prevents tens of
thousands of deaths and millions of cases of disease.

The American Medical Association, the largest professional association
of physicians and medical students, representing over 270,000 doctors
along with 79 leading medical societies, recently said that vaccines
for flu, R.S.V. and Covid-19 are “the best tools to protect the
public against these illnesses and their potentially serious
complications.”

The World Health Organization, an agency with some of the most
prominent medical experts around the globe, recently noted that over
the past 50 years, vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives and
reduced the infant deaths by 40 percent.

Against the overwhelming body of evidence within the medicine and
science, what are Secretary Kennedy’s views? He has claimed that
autism is caused by vaccines, despite more than a dozen rigorous
scientific studies involving hundreds of thousands of children that
have found no connection between vaccines and autism.

He has called the Covid-19 vaccines the “deadliest” ever made
despite findings cited by the W.H.O. that Covid shots saved over 14
million lives throughout the world in 2021 alone.

He has ridiculously questioned whether the polio vaccine has killed
more people than polio itself did even though scientists have found
that the vaccine has saved 1.5 million lives and prevented around 20
million people from becoming paralyzed since 1988.

He has absurdly claimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and
effective.”

Who supports Secretary Kennedy’s views? Not credible scientists and
doctors. One of his leading “experts” that he cites to back up his
bogus claims on autism and vaccines had his medical license revoked
and his study retracted from the medical journal that published it.

Many of his supporters are from Children’s Health Defense — the
anti-vaccine group he founded and profited from — and a small circle
of loyalists that have spread misinformation and dangerous conspiracy
theories on vaccines for years.

The reality is that Secretary Kennedy has profited from and built a
career on sowing mistrust in vaccines. Now, as head of H.H.S., he is
using his authority to launch a full-blown war on science, on public
health and on truth itself.

What will this mean for the health and well-being of the American
people?

Short term, it will be harder for Americans to get lifesaving
vaccines. Already, the Trump administration has effectively taken away
Covid vaccines from many healthy younger adults and kids, unless they
fight their way through our broken health care system. This means more
doctor’s visits, more bureaucracy and more people paying higher
out-of-pocket costs — if they can manage to get a vaccine at all.

Covid is just the beginning. Mr. Kennedy’s next target may be the
childhood immunization schedule, the list of recommended vaccines that
children receive to protect them from diseases like measles,
chickenpox and polio. The danger here is that diseases that have been
virtually wiped out because of safe and effective vaccines will
resurface and cause enormous harm.

Two years ago, when I was the chairman of the Senate Health,
Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, I held a hearing with the
major government officials responsible for protecting us from a new
pandemic, including the head of the C.D.C. Without exception, every
one of these agency heads said that, while they could not predict the
exact date, there will be a future pandemic and we must be much better
prepared for it than we are today.

Unfortunately, Secretary Kennedy’s actions are making a worrisome
situation even worse by defunding the research that could help us
prepare for the next pandemic. This month, he canceled nearly $500
million in research for the kinds of vaccines that helped us stop the
Covid pandemic. At the same time, Mr. Kennedy is cutting funding to
states to prepare and respond to future outbreaks of infectious
diseases. This is unacceptable.

America’s health care system is already dysfunctional and wildly
expensive, and yet the Trump administration will be throwing an
estimated 15 million people off their health insurance through a cut
of over $1 trillion to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. This cut
is also expected to result in the closing of or the decline in
services at hundreds of nursing homes, hospitals and community health
centers. As a result of cuts to the Affordable Care Act, health
insurance costs will soar for millions of Americans. That is not
Making America Healthy Again.

Secretary Kennedy is putting Americans’ lives in danger, and he must
resign. In his place, President Trump must listen to doctors and
scientists and nominate a health secretary and a C.D.C. director who
will protect the health and well-being of the American people, not
carry out dangerous policies based on conspiracy theories.

_BERNIE SANDERS, an independent, is the senior senator from Vermont
and the ranking member on the Senate Committee for Health, Education,
Labor and Pensions._

_Subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES
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* Robert F. Kennedy
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* Jr.
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* Department of Health and Human Services
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* Center for Disease Control
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* Health Care
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* vaccines
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* Science
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* research
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