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FEATURING Dr. ROBERT STEINBROOK - In a contentious Senate hearing that, at times devolved into a screaming match, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. attempted to defend his record.

Senators questioned his mass firings at the agency, his cuts to critical services including COVID-19 vaccine access, and his unscientific claims about public health.

RFK Jr.’s testimony was riddled with contradictions. For example, he asserted that President Donald Trump deserved the Nobel prize for Operation Warp Speed, which yielded the COVID-19 vaccine. But he also claimed the vaccine didn’t work.

Dr. Robert Steinbrook is the director of Public Citizen's Health Research Group and a Professor Adjunct of Internal Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about RFK Jr.'s Senate hearing and what states are doing to fill the dangerous gaps in public health.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Well of course, most of us who knew RFKs record before he was brought on by Trump to lead this agency were deeply, deeply concerned that here was an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who's going to be in one of the top health positions in the nation. Were you surprised at just how unscientific, to put it mildly, RFK appeared at his Senate hearing last week?

Dr. Robert Steinbrook: Well, we opposed Secretary Kennedy's nomination. We spoke out urging the Senate not to confirm him. In fact, one of the statements from co-president basically said that no senator should have voted to confirm him, but he was confirmed.

And in a sense, we would've been delighted to be proved wrong, in other words that our concerns were not justified. But I think you and everybody else who watched the testimony last week, this was what was to be expected, unfortunately. And it has put us in very much uncharted territory for the future of public health in this country.