Senators pressed President Donald Trump’s nominees to handle major public health programs, asking whether they supported the vaccine skepticism of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the upper chamber grows increasingly frustrated with the administration’s management of vaccine policies.
Dr. Erica Schwartz, the nominee to be the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Sean Kaufman, the nominee to lead the Administration for Strategic Preparedness, faced pointed questions from both Democrats and Republicans regarding vaccines, which have been deeply politicized since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, set the tone early that the hearing would revolve around vaccines and Kennedy’s policies that critics say limit vaccine access.
Cassidy, a physician and liver specialist, lost his bid for reelection in May, even after he set aside his concerns regarding Kennedy’s history of anti-vaccine advocacy and voted to confirm him last year.
“Any equivocation on these facts, and I shall not be able to support your immunization, your nomination, because when trust is destroyed, it’s hard to be effective,” Cassidy said to both nominees.
Schwartz, the former deputy surgeon general during the first Trump administration and a long-term military physician, has a strong record of supporting vaccines, particularly during her time as head of public health in the Coast Guard.
But Kaufman, despite his long public health career, has made public statements criticizing COVID-19 vaccines and Hepatitis B vaccines for infants that led members of the committee to question his commitment to vaccines as a public health tool.
Schwartz dodges questions on Kennedy pressure
Cassidy and several Democratic senators pressed Schwartz on whether she would bend to political pressure from Kennedy regarding vaccine policy.
The senators highlighted the example of Dr. Susan Monarez, the first Senate-confirmed CDC nominee, who was fired by Kennedy and Trump less than a month after her confirmation following clashes with the administration regarding curtailing the number of childhood vaccines.
Monarez testified before the HELP committee last fall that Kennedy fired her because she refused to greenlight in advance decisions from Kennedy’s vaccine advisers on the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
When asked by multiple senators about succumbing to political influence, Schwartz repeatedly said she did not believe Kennedy would pressure her to step aside regarding vaccine policy.
“I don’t think the secretary or the president would do what you just said, but you have my commitment to follow the science wherever the science may lead,” Schwartz said.
The CDC nominee also said on multiple occasions that she would not answer hypothetical questions.
“If you don’t know, Kennedy asked Monarez to approve ACIP recommendations, then they didn’t prep you on that because that’s public knowledge,” Cassidy said. “Now he may dispute it, but that’s public knowledge, and to claim that’s a theoretical, that does a disservice to you.”
Kaufman threads the needle on vaccines
Kaufman had to reassure members of the committee that he supported the use of vaccines as a public health tool.
The nominee said several times during the hearing that his children had received the infant dose of the Hepatitis B vaccine, which Trump and vaccine skeptics have suggested ought to be delayed until age 12 or older.
As head of ASPR, Kaufman would oversee pandemic preparedness not only with existing technologies but also by developing new ones.
Kaufman stressed to several senators the need to bolster the development of innovative technologies to prepare for disease outbreaks, including mRNA vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments.
“mRNA platforms are extremely promising. In fact, we’re going to need them. We’re going to need them to deal with the threats that are coming tomorrow,” Kaufman said.
But he also said that those who reported COVID-19 vaccine complications, whose conditions have been highlighted by vaccine skeptics, ought to be “recognized, treated with compassion, and acknowledged.”
“Many, many, many millions and millions of people around the world took those vaccines and did not suffer, but I cannot sit here and forget the ones that did,” Kaufman said.
Cassidy, during his closing questioning, pressed Kaufman further on the nominee’s support for canceling $500 million in research funding for mRNA vaccines for respiratory diseases made by the Trump administration last year.
Kaufman responded that he supported further research on mRNA and that his previous statements about COVID-19 vaccines for children and healthy young adults did not contradict his enthusiasm for the future of the platform.
“The COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was the only mRNA platform in human health ever used,” Kaufman said.
Cassidy also pointedly asked Kaufman regarding the nominee’s 2022 statement that he “hated the CDC.”
But Kaufman said that statement was taken out of context and was made about decisions from CDC leadership during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“And at that time of heightened sensitivity, I did not agree with what CDC leadership was doing. The CDC workforce has always been the most dedicated workforce I have ever seen,” he said.
Politicos versus career scientists and mission creep at CDC
Schwartz outlined that her goal is to unify the CDC, particularly by building a bridge between political appointees within the agency and at the upper levels of HHS to the career scientists at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta.
Schwartz said her “first order of business” would be to have a “listening session with career scientists” to understand their concerns about the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda.
“I think that is very concerning to me is that internally to the CDC, there is a breakdown in trust between the career scientist and the politicals, and I want to do everything that I can to make sure that we can, I can, and the team that’s already on the ground can help build morale within the CDC,” Schwartz said.
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She also said that CDC ought to narrow its mission to “have an infectious disease prevention focus,” mentioning the founding of the agency in the 1940s to prevent the spread of malaria.
“I think over time the CDC has had some mission creep, and it’s trying to be all things to all people,” Schwartz said. “And in a resource-constrained environment — $40 trillion, nearly $40 trillion in debt — we need to refocus and figure out what should the CDC be.”