Ron Johnson may be the most anti-vaccine lawmaker in Congress; he’s the kind of guy who says he’s “sticking up for people who choose not to get vaccinated” while claiming without valid evidence that thousands have died from COVID shots. This morning, at the Capitol, Johnson walked over to his Senate Finance Committee colleague Bill Cassidy, a doctor and a passionate advocate for vaccination, and gave him an affectionate pat on the shoulder. The two of them had just advanced Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services to the Senate floor.
The committee vote, which was held this morning in a room crammed to capacity with what appeared to be roughly equal numbers of Kennedy’s skeptics and devotees, certainly fit with the behavior of a compliant GOP. But it was still surprising in its way, if only because, until this morning, Cassidy had been so clearly wary of giving the nation’s highest role in public health to a prominent anti-vaccine activist. At last week’s confirmation hearings, he seemed like he might even be prepared to cast his vote with the opposition. That didn’t happen.
Whether you like Kennedy or not, the hearings showed that he lacks the basic qualifications to hold this office. He knows very little about the nearly $2 trillion behemoth that he would be tasked with running. He flubbed the basics of programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and seemed wholly unaware of an important law that governs emergency abortions. The hearings also called attention to a passel of health-related conspiracy theories that RFK Jr. has floated in the past, including that Lyme disease was developed as a bioweapon, that COVID is “ethnically targeted” to infect Caucasians and Black people (and spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people), and that standard childhood vaccinations are damaging or deadly.
As of last Thursday, Kennedy appeared to have unwavering support from the committee’s Republicans, who occupy 14 of its 27 seats—with one notable exception: Cassidy. Prior to taking office, the Louisiana senator had personally led a campaign to vaccinate 36,000 kids against hepatitis B. In an interview with Fox News last month, he said that RFK Jr. is “wrong” about vaccines. And in early 2021, Cassidy joined six other GOP senators in voting to convict Donald Trump on charges of “incitement of insurrection.” The doctor had voted his conscience before. It seemed possible that he would do so once again.
Cassidy made no attempt to hide his skepticism of RFK Jr. during Thursday’s hearing. He spoke up at one point to correct the record after his Republican colleague Rand Paul worked up the crowd of pro-Kennedy spectators by disparaging the practice of vaccinating babies for hep B. Later on, he paused to cite a meta-analysis disproving Kennedy’s often-stated belief that childhood vaccines may be a cause of autism. (Cassidy also explained the concept of a meta-analysis for those in the room and people watching at home.) When RFK Jr. cited his own evidence for being skeptical of vaccines, referring to a paper from a little-known journal, Cassidy put on his reading glasses, peered at his iPad, and reviewed the evidence firsthand. At the end of the hearing, he reported that he’d found “some issues” with the paper, and then implored Kennedy to disavow mistruths about vaccine safety. “As a patriotic American, I want President Trump’s policies to succeed in making America and Americans more secure, more prosperous, healthier. But if there’s someone that is not vaccinated because of policies or attitudes you bring to the department, and there’s another 18-year-old who dies of a vaccine-preventable disease […] It’ll be blown up in the press,” he warned. “So that’s my dilemma, man.”
Cassidy’s “dilemma” hardly went unnoticed by RFK Jr.’s supporters. Calley Means, a proponent of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, said last weekend on The Charlie Kirk Show that MAHA moms are now “camping out at [Cassidy’s] office.” (I did not see any tents or sleeping bags outside his door this morning.) Other MAHA leaders, including the anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, have also issued political threats to any lawmakers who might try to stop Kennedy’s confirmation. “Anyone that votes in that direction, I think, is really burying themselves,” Bigtree told me and a group of other reporters last week.
Cassidy, for his part, wasn’t saying much about his personal deliberations. His only official social-media post from the weekend quoted a Bible verse from the Book of Joshua: “Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged,” it read in part. “Be strong and courageous.”
When he arrived at the committee room this morning, Cassidy was somber. He stared straight ahead, his brow furrowed. He’d been verbose at last week’s hearings, but now he said only a single word—“aye”—and left the room. In a social-media post that went up this morning, Cassidy explained that he’d received “serious commitments” from the Trump administration that made him comfortable with voting yes. Speaking later on the Senate floor, he added that RFK Jr. had promised to “meet or speak” with him multiple times a month, that the Trump administration would not remove assurances from the CDC’s website that vaccines do not cause autism, and that the administration would give his committee notice before making any changes to the nation’s existing vaccine-safety-monitoring systems. “It’s been a long, intense process, but I’ve assessed it as I would assess a patient as a physician,” Cassidy said. “Ultimately, restoring trust in our public-health institution is too important, and I think Senator Kennedy can help get that done.”
Even if Cassidy had voted no, his vote may not have mattered in the end. Under normal circumstances, a nomination that got voted down by the Senate Finance Committee would be dead in the water—but these were not normal circumstances. Majority Leader John Thune could still have scheduled a vote by the full Senate, at which point Kennedy would have been kept from office only if at least three other Republicans had joined Cassidy in opposition.
It’s still not a sure thing that Kennedy will be confirmed by the full Senate. Other Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, have raised concerns about Kennedy’s anti-vaccine activism. But the odds of RFK Jr.’s defeat are shrinking, and Cassidy’s thumbs-up may one day be remembered as the mirror image of John McCain’s thumbs-down from 2017, when that independent-minded senator doomed Trump’s efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Faced with an opportunity to make the same sort of stand, Cassidy folded. Now the American public is at the whims of the administration’s promises.