Exclusive / Cassidy rips RFK Jr. on vaccines: ‘This is not making America healthy again’ - Semafor
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., sharply criticized the Trump administration’s handling of vaccines on Tuesday, warning that the current approach is out of step with the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” pledge and risks eroding confidence in immunization.
At Semafor’s Future of Health Forum, Cassidy — a former physician and chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee — expressed outrage at the spike in measles cases and instances of “kids dying from measles,” tying it to the administration’s policies and messaging on vaccination.
Cassidy also acknowledged in the interview with Semafor’s Burgess Everett that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., broke commitments on vaccines he made to the Louisiana Republican during his confirmation process, and that it left him angry.
“When you’re given guarantees by people and by the administration and they break those guarantees, I don’t know if painful is the word, maybe urinated off is the word, but the point being that you certainly have a certain emotion,” Cassidy said.
Cassidy, who is retiring at the end of the year after losing his primary to a Republican challenger backed by President Donald Trump, also said that Republicans could pay a political price if Americans see a resurgence of diseases that had largely been brought under control.
“If the American people are seeing that concerted efforts to undermine faith in immunization is leading to children dying from diseases that they haven’t died from in decades,” Cassidy said. “The American people are going to reasonably say, wait a second, this is not making America healthy again. This is making America die from diseases that we never died from before, at least not in decades. And I think that there will be a check at that point upon nonsense coming out of Washington from which people die.”
He pointed to elections as a “portion of an accountability measure.”
“If an administration says one thing and you end up with another, and that other does not serve the American people well, and you have an election, the American people are going to weigh in,” Cassidy continued. “If it turns out that it is a big deal, then you’re going to see the party which has poorly served the American people do poorly in the polls.”
Cassidy was also asked about Trump’s nomination of Heidi Overton to lead the Food and Drug Administration, notably declining to offer an opinion on whether he would support her.
He said “I think there will be a hearing” on her nomination, but asked whether he would support her or not at this point, he declined to comment.
