WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy and the nation's health secretary squared off at a Senate hearing Thursday, with the Louisiana lawmaker questioning Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s actions impacting vaccines and national health policy.

Kennedy went before the Senate Finance Committee amid his effort to restrict COVID-19 vaccinations and recent turmoil at the nation's leading health agencies. In one exchange, Cassidy wanted to know more about Kennedy's decision to cancel $500 million in federal mRNA vaccine research funding and Kennedy's past statements that “the COVID vaccine killed more people than COVID.”

Kennedy said the recently fired CDC director was untrustworthy, and stood by his past anti-vaccine rhetoric. He disputed reports that people are having difficulty getting COVID-19 shots.

Cassidy expressed alarm at Kennedy’s effort to overhaul the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel, saying many of Kennedy’s appointees had served as paid witnesses in cases against vaccine makers.

“That actually seems like a conflict of interest,” Cassidy added. Kennedy said the bias was acceptable as long as it was disclosed.

GOP senators at the hearing said President Donald Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for the 2020 Operation Warp Speed initiative to quickly develop mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, while Kennedy separately had criticized the shots.

“I can’t tell where you are on Operation Warp Speed,” said Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis.

In testimony, Kennedy claimed wrongly that vaccines had “failed to do anything about the disease itself.”

“The people who at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving,” Kennedy said. He later said they deserved to be fired for not doing enough to control chronic disease.

The Senate Finance Committee had called Kennedy to a hearing about his plans to “Make America Healthy Again.” 

Last week, the Trump administration fired the CDC’s director less than a month into her tenure. Several top CDC leaders resigned in protest, leaving the agency in turmoil. The ousted director, Susan Monarez, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that Kennedy was trying to weaken public health protections.

“I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric,” Monarez wrote. “It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected.”

Kennedy told senators he didn’t make such an ultimatum, though he did concede that he had ordered Monarez to fire career CDC scientists.

Kennedy pushed back on concerns raised by multiple Republican senators, including Kennedy, Tillis and Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming. Barrasso and Cassidy are physicians.

In May, Kennedy — a longtime leader in the anti-vaccine movement — announced COVID-19 vaccines would no longer be recommended for healthy children and pregnant women, a move opposed by medical and public health groups.

In June, he abruptly fired a panel of experts that had been advising the government on vaccine policy. He replaced them with a handpicked group that included several vaccine skeptics, and then shut the door to several doctors groups that had long helped form the committee’s recommendations.

Kennedy has voiced distrust of research that showed the COVID-19 vaccines saved lives, and at Thursday’s hearing even cast doubt on statistics about how people died during the pandemic and on estimates about how many deaths were averted — statistics produced by the agencies he oversees.

He said federal health policy would be based on gold standard science, but confessed that he wouldn’t necessarily wait for studies to be completed before taking action against, for example, potential causes of chronic illness.

“We are not waiting for everything to come in. We are starting now,” he said.

A number of medical groups say Kennedy can’t be counted on to make decisions based on robust medical evidence. In a statement Wednesday, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and 20 other medical and public health organizations issued a joint statement calling on him to resign.

Many of the nation’s leading public health and medical societies, including the American Medical Association, American Public Health Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have decried Kennedy’s policies and warn they will drive up rates of vaccine-preventable diseases.

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This report was compiled from various news sources, including The Associated Press.