Cassidy clashes with Kennedy over vaccine studies

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) fact-checked Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. multiple times Wednesday about his insistence that vaccines have not helped improve mortality. 

Kennedy cited two studies during his testimony in the Senate health committee to prove that deaths due to some of the most common infectious diseases fell dramatically during the 20th century long before vaccines were widely used. 

In one instance, Kennedy cited a December 2000 paper published in the journal Pediatrics by a Johns Hopkins researcher that concluded that vaccinations alone don’t account “for impressive declines in mortality seen in the first half of the century.”  

It’s an article he’s pointed to previously. After a contentious hearing last September, Kennedy posted a lengthy video to X where he claimed to “shred” a chart showing infections have been substantially reduced by vaccination. 

Cassidy looked up the paper during the hearing and interjected to say Kennedy wasn’t giving the full context. 

Kennedy left out the next sentence: “the reductions in vaccine-preventable diseases, however, are impressive.” 

Once vaccines were more widely introduced in the mid-1900s, they were instrumental in eliminating deaths from measles and diphtheria. 

“So that’s the full context,” Cassidy said. 

The other study Kennedy cited was a 1977 paper about the measles vaccine he said was required reading in virtually all medical schools.  

Later in the hearing, Cassidy again interjected to say he looked up the second article. He noted the paper cited statistics from before the measles vaccine was introduced. 

While measles deaths began falling in the U.S. after 1900, the U.S. still had very high levels of measles cases just before the measles vaccine program was enacted in the 1960s.  

Throughout the hearing, Kennedy indicated he felt Democrats were focusing too much on measles outbreaks, since the disease has killed so few people. 

Cassidy told reporters afterward that he thinks there should be a focus any time people, especially children, die from vaccine-preventable diseases.  

“We are a first-world country, and speaking as a physician that knows this can be prevented, it grieves me,” Cassidy said.  

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