Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. mentioned he didn’t suppose there have been any “successes” amongst US well being companies Sunday, claiming the infiltration of pharmaceutical firms have led to a “series of bad decisions.”
Asked throughout an interview with “Fox and Friends” what the final nice success of federal well being companies was, the secretary responded, “I don’t think there have been successes.”
“We’ve seen a 30- or 40-year decline in the agency because, you know, it’s been infiltrated by the pharmaceutical companies, and they’ve made a series of bad decisions,” he mentioned, whereas highlighting the opioid disaster.
“What we want to do now is put an end to it, to end those entanglements, those corrupting entanglements with the pharmaceutical industry, and make this again a gold standard science agency that is protecting the American public,” Kennedy added.
His feedback on the conservative cable community present got here following a testy listening to earlier than the Senate Finance Committee Thursday throughout which Democrats and Republicans pressed Kennedy on his vaccine skepticism and decision to fire the newly-installed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director.
Kennedy decried his intense grilling by senators from each events over main shakeups at the high well being companies as “theater” and defended his management in the Fox News interview.
“I’ve come to realize that those hearings are performative. They’re theater. And, you know, they’re not the kind of debate or open conversation that democracy would give us at its ideal,” he mentioned Sunday.
Kennedy additionally accused senators on the panel that performed a job in his affirmation of being beholden to pharmaceutical firms, with out citing proof, saying “they don’t want to hear the answers to the questions that they ask me. They want to make a little speech and then shut me down.”
Defending his ousting of Dr. Susan Monarez as director of the CDC, which led to the resignation of a number of different high well being officers, Kennedy informed Fox News “we need new blood, and we need new people who are committed to public health and integrity and gold standard science, and the Trump administration is going to make sure that happens.”
Last week greater than 1,000 present and former staff of HHS called for Kennedy’s resignation, arguing that his management has “put the health of all Americans at risk.”
“Secretary Kennedy continues to endanger the nation’s health,” the staff wrote, citing actions together with the facilitation of Monarez’s firing, the resignations of key, longtime CDC leaders, the appointment of what they known as “political ideologues” to influential roles in vaccine coverage, in addition to the rescinding of emergency use authorizations for Covid-19 vaccines with out, they mentioned, “providing the data or methods used to reach such a decision.”
Kennedy was additionally requested Sunday about information that an upcoming HHS report is more likely to hyperlink the growth of autism in kids to Tylenol use throughout being pregnant, which he known as “preliminary.”
“We are trying to get the information to the public as soon as we have it. There are years and years of studies about that we are looking at today for the first time, and we’re finding a number of different indicators, a number of different signals,” he mentioned, later including, “any speculation about what’s in those reports, at this point, is speculative.”