Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) is once again refusing to admit that he regrets providing the decisive vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a known anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, to become secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“Last week, when you were asked if you regret your vote to confirm Secretary Kennedy to HHS, you noted that you couldn’t see into the future at the time. You couldn’t see that he was not going to honor his promises to you to get your vote,” CNN’s Jake Tapper told Cassidy on “State of the Union” Sunday. “How do you respond to the criticism that you didn’t need to look to the future; you just needed to look to the past because Secretary Kennedy, RFK Jr., has been spreading disinformation about vaccines for 22 years?”
Cassidy, a physician who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, again avoided taking accountability.
“Yeah. Again, people always want to bring that up, and all I can say is you have to live life living forward,” he said. “In fact, I think actually people bringing this up now distract from actually what we should be speaking about.”
Cassidy then argued that we should be more focused on “making America healthy again.”
“And that means that we should be working to increase immunization rates, not to decrease them,” he said.
Cassidy also criticized Trump for signing an executive order last week to split the MMR vaccine — which protects against measles, mumps and rubella — into three separate shots during different visits to a doctor. Trump signed the order after claiming, without scientific evidence, that the combination shots deliver an unsafe volume of fluid at one time and can lead to autism.
“…The policy that the president just put forward is going to decrease immunization rates aside from being less convenient and costing families more,” Cassidy said. “And frankly, that is where the focus should be.”
Despite pushback from major medical organizations, Trump also signed an executive order earlier this month recommending that children receive vaccines for 11 diseases instead of 18, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended in 2024.
While appearing on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week, Cassidy avoided answering questions about whether he regrets voting for RFK Jr.
“Well, so first, this is a presidential executive order. RFK told me he was not going to change the ACIP,” Cassidy said, referencing the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which creates official federal recommendations and schedules for vaccine use.
“So, if you’re going to tell me that somebody didn’t tell me the truth, and I should have like, you know, seen in the future that they were not going to tell the truth. You can say ‘Oh Bill, you should have seen into the future,’ in which case I’d be on your show talking about the futures of stocks as opposed to vaccine policy,” he added.
