The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 5 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got absolutely massacred at a Senate hearing on Thursday. He faced very harsh questioning not just from Democrats, but also from Republicans, who aggressively called out his anti-vax views and condemned his ongoing decapitation of the Centers for Disease Control, which is wrecking our public health system. But Matt Gertz of Media Matters noticed something funny: Fox News’s coverage of the hearing bent way over backward to try to portray RFK as pro-vaccine, as someone who is working to make vaccines available to Americans and not trying to restrict them. We think that’s revealing of just how shaky a political position President Trump now finds himself in amid RFK’s wanton destruction of public health in this country. So we invited Matt on to talk about all of it. Matt, good to see you as always.
Matt Gertz: Good to be back.
Sargent: Just to give people a sense of how bad this Senate hearing was for RFK, let’s start with a couple clips. First, here’s Republican Senator John Barrasso excoriating RFK’s tenure so far.
John Barrasso (audio voiceover): So over the last 50 years, vaccines are estimated to have saved 154 million lives worldwide. I support vaccines. I’m a doctor. Vaccines work. Secretary Kennedy, in your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines. Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned. The public has seen measles outbreaks, leadership of the National Institute of Health questioning the use of mRNA vaccines, the recently confirmed director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention fired. Americans don’t know who to rely on. If we’re going to make America healthy again, we can’t allow public health to be undermined.
Sargent: Now here’s Senator Bill Cassidy after RFK disparaged Covid-19 vaccines.
Bill Cassidy (audio voiceover): Mr. Secretary, do you agree with me that the president deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (audio voiceover): Absolutely, Senator.
Cassidy (audio voiceover): Let me ask you—but you just told Senator Bennett that the Covid vaccine killed more people than Covid.
Sargent: And here’s some more from Senator Cassidy.
Cassidy (audio voiceover): This is from Erick Erickson, good conservative out of Atlanta, Georgia. Occasionally gives me hell. “My wife has Stage 4 lung cancer. She’s one of the people that the Covid vaccine actually helps. Thanks to the current mess at the HHS, CVS is unable to get her vaccine.”
Sargent: That’s rough stuff. And Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell called RFK a “charlatan,” and other Dems brutally exposed him in many other ways. Matt, what did you make of those exchanges?
Gertz: Well, look, I think that they are a body blows to Robert F. Kennedy’s credibility. After all, these are conservative Republicans, strong supporters of President Trump, but also medical doctors who understand that what Kennedy has been doing has really been ripping away at the fabric of the U.S. health system and the nation’s ability to fight serious infectious diseases and threatening the vaccine regimen that protects our children and all of us from those diseases. I will say, though, it’s unfortunate that they’ve come to the conclusion that there’s something to be worried about here after they already voted to confirm him. It’s not like it’s somehow a surprise that Robert F. Kennedy is an anti-vax kook. That has been his political project for the last decade and a half. He and the nonprofit that he oversaw were at the forefront of trying to reduce Americans’ trust in vaccines and in pushing the false claim that vaccines cause autism in children.
Sargent: Well, Matt, I will tell you what. I think that these Republican senators probably went to RFK and went to Trump before the vote on him and said, You can’t really go too far with this stuff. We’ve got to support you because we’re all with President Trump and so forth, but you really can’t let this get out of hand, man. And then all of a sudden they see they’ve got a full-blown sociopath destroying public health in this country, and they’re like, Oh shit. Now I don’t mean to let them off the hook, but—
Gertz: No, of course. I think the problem is once they voted for him, they gave up the power that they had over him. Now he’s in that position. Donald Trump shows no indication of wanting to remove him. So absent the House attempting to impeach him and the Senate removing him from office, which just seems like comical in its plausibility, there isn’t really a lot they can do other than express their deep concern with the person that they have put in such a position of power.
Sargent: Well, they certainly have a lot to friggin explain for doing that. A lot of deaths on their hands as well. You looked at a bunch of the chyrons that Fox News was running during this hearing. One quoted RFK angrily accusing a Democratic senator of making stuff up about his vaccine stance. Another chyron on Fox suggests that it’s wrong to say RFK is denying people vaccines. And as you noticed, Fox ran that latter chyron pretty relentlessly throughout much of the questioning. Matt, can you talk about that? And what else did you see on Fox News along these lines?
Gertz: Yeah, it seems like Fox thinks that the vaccine issue is a case where Republicans are in danger of touching the stove a bit. I think RFK Jr., in his testimony and his back and forth with various senators, tried to make the case that he wasn’t really anti-vax. He trusts the gold-standard science. And we need to get to the bottom of this. And this is a pretty standard argument that anti-vaxxers will use. They’re just totally unwilling to grapple with and accept the vast reams of science underlining all of the vaccines. And so they claim they’re the true people who are following the science, and everyone else is corrupt in some way. I think Senator Sanders did a pretty good job of pointing out that that’s an absurd claim that Kennedy makes constantly to anyone who is criticizing him in the slightest bit.
But what we saw from Fox was running over and over this chyron, “RFK Jr.: ‘Wrong’ he’s denying people vaccines,” which is a reference to the clip you played earlier in which Cassidy read that tweet from the right-wing pundit Erick Erickson about how his wife is unable to get the Covid vaccine even though she has Stage 4 cancer due to what Kennedy is doing at HHS. Kennedy denied it. But as Erickson pointed out on X afterward, it remains the case that his wife cannot get the vaccine from the CVS where she would otherwise get it.
Sargent: It’s a simple fact that RFK has now taken steps to restrict access to Covid vaccines. People over 65 are approved, but he’s been playing a lot of word games around this and it’s a little vague. But the upshot of it is that those under 65 are going to struggle to get the vaccine unless they can get a doctor to vouch for them having a serious condition. And that in and of itself, even if they can get it that way, it’s still a lot harder and there’ll be a lot of people who won’t get it because they won’t want to go to a doctor to get it sorted out. And one of the beauties of this whole thing that we have been able to do to overcome Covid is that people could walk down to their CVS and get a miracle vaccine. And that’s what he’s restricting.
Gertz: And it really speaks to how the conservatives play Calvinball with these arguments, right? Because first the claim was the problem is the Covid mandate. It’s not the vaccine itself, it’s that you’re being forced to take it. But now they’re making it harder for people who want to take it to get access to it as well. But I think it struck me that Fox kept pushing this argument that it’s wrong to say that he’s denying people vaccines. And in fact, as I followed the coverage for the rest of the hearing and afterward, it stood out how they were ignoring all of those clips that you played at the beginning of the show. They don’t want to talk about how Republican senators who are doctors have issues with RFK Jr.’s positions. Instead, they kept trying to present this as a partisan democratic witch hunt, attacks on RFK Jr. that were unfair and that were being made entirely by people who would be inclined to oppose him in any case because they’re of the other party.
Sargent: Just to be clear though, Matt, let me just underscore what you’re saying there. You followed the Fox News coverage and they deliberately went out of their way to downplay the fact that conservative Republican senators were going after RFK very hard and calling out his anti-vax stance. Those conservative Republicans were not saying anything like, Well, thank you, Mr. Secretary, for making vaccines more available to Americans. These conservative Republicans were saying, You’re taking vaccines away from Americans, and that’s a frigging disaster.
Gertz: That’s right. Instead, they hosted members of the committee who support RFK Jr. They hosted John Cornyn. They hosted Marsha Blackburn. They brought Dr. Oz on, who after his years of television commentary is now in charge of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, one of the top lieutenants to RFK Jr. now. All of those people were asked to respond to the Democratic criticism that Kennedy has received. They’re downplaying the risk that Kennedy poses to vaccines, and they’re suggesting that it’s all a Democratic hoax.
Sargent: Well, what I find really striking about this, as you mentioned earlier, is that Fox News does seem to recognize how politically lethal it is for Trump if what RFK is actually doing as health secretary is revealed to American voters. Look, even Republican and conservative voters don’t like this stuff. The problem is that Americans value our public health system. It just is a pillar of American greatness, just as the scientific infrastructure Trump is destroying also is a pillar of national greatness. Fox is aware of that problem, right? Isn’t that what they’re trying to navigate? Can you talk about that?
Gertz: It’s an interesting predicament for them because I think they recognize that to be an outlet in good standing with the MAGA movement, they need to find a way to support Kennedy. If they don’t, they’re going to come under fire from the right. They experienced some of that actually the morning of the hearing when they weren’t carrying it right away. They didn’t carry Kennedy’s opening statement. They jumped in later. And when that happened—when they failed to immediately start airing it live—you had Steve Bannon on his podcast immediately pointing this out and saying, It’s because they’re in bed with the pharmaceutical companies, and, Fox News just isn’t on board with the MAGA agenda. And when you see that, it’s an indication that the network is caught between reality and its viewer base. And that’s always a precarious position for Fox News. So they’re trying to find ways to be supportive of Kennedy. As of yet, they are avoiding being blatantly anti-vax in its entirety.
Actually, a related story that I’ve been tracking is we had Florida’s top medical official come out and repeal all vaccine mandates in that state, including for children who go to public schools. And Fox’s coverage of that has been, I would say, similarly tense. I think in an ideal world for Fox News, Kennedy would not be trying to take vaccines away from people. But that, I think, is going to come to a head later this month, because what we’ve been hearing for weeks now is that Kennedy claims he has found the cause of autism and is going to announce it later in September. That is almost certainly going to be his way of attacking the vaccine schedule, of pushing the lie that vaccines are the cause of increases in autism. That’s a well-known conspiracy theory and falsehood. But it does seem like that’s the direction where all this is heading. And when that happens, Fox News is going to have a choice to make. They are going to have to reckon with that reality in some way. I think it’s going to be pretty significant where they come down.
Sargent: Well, you had this other interesting observation on Twitter that also got at some of this. You pointed out that in going with the line that it’s wrong to say RFK is taking away vaccines, they were actually not making another argument they could have made, which is it’s good that he’s reducing vaccine access. They can’t defend what he’s actually doing. I think in an important sense, Fox News has made RFK’s implosion at this hearing even worse by revealing that Fox knows just how precarious Trump’s political position on this really is, how shaky the edifice is really when it comes down to it.
Gertz: At the same time, what they could be doing is trying to convince Donald Trump that he needs to stop RFK Jr. from doing this. After all, we know that he watches the network religiously. We know that he often takes advice from it. I think this is another moment like early 2021 where Fox had the opportunity to really do a huge public service by providing accurate information about vaccines. And I think they’re much more likely to just do whatever it takes to not disturb their viewers, to not drive them to some other network that is willing to push that.
Sargent: So this issue really looks like it’s tailor-made to split MAGA. If you know what that Republican senator said in highlighting the case of Erick Erickson, who’s a very well-known, very hardcore conservative, his wife being sick and unable to get the vaccine—I suspect that a very large chunk of Republican voters, maybe half, I don’t know, and even a very large chunk of Fox viewers wants to be able to benefit from vaccines. They want their kids to be able to benefit from this miraculous invention that has kept at bay so much unnecessary illness and death. So this is a deeper reason I think for Fox’s travails here. There’s a hardcore MAGA audience that just wants all the institutions of the Republican Party to do what Bannon did and rally behind RFK no matter what and turn it into some bullshit about him taking on corrupt institutions or whatever. But it’s just all bullshit. And these Republican senators know that their voters don’t want to really see the public health system wrecked in this country. Is that the bigger story here?
Gertz: I think so. The unifying argument for Republicans during the 2024 election was that Democrats and public health agencies got Covid wrong. The fact that Donald Trump was president when Covid hit was swept under the rug. But the argument became that something needed to change in U.S. health agencies to “fix the problem.” What Kennedy provides is he brings in the kooky MAHA movement, which their basic premise here is that it’s not just that public health agencies are sometimes wrong but they’re inherently corrupt and that pharmaceutical interventions are a crock; that really you need to exercise and get good food and avoid ill humors and then everyone will remain healthy. And that is, I think, not an argument that the majority of even the Republican Party is really buying. But Trump has offloaded that entire sector to Kennedy and his allies. And once you move away from the other guys were doing it wrong and you start presenting your own plans for what to do with U.S. health agencies, you create schisms. You create splits. And I think that that’s what we could see happen in the days to come.
Sargent: Yeah. And by the way, this whole idea that RFK needs to come in and clean house to fix what went wrong during Covid is itself undermined as we saw from that Republican Senator by the fact that Operation Warp Speed was actually a tremendous success. Trump and MAGA can’t just say straight out that the Covid response actually in many ways was the dreaded administrative state and R&D—meaning research and development—actually succeeding in a stupendous way and saving countless lives. Why can’t they say that?
Gertz: What we saw in 2021 was mainstream elements of the right turn against the Covid vaccines specifically. This was in part a way to damage Joe Biden, whose administration was just beginning and who was overseeing the rollout of those vaccines, which the Trump administration had not done a good job of preparing for. You may remember long lines as people tried to get those first doses and lots of trouble about who was getting it and how. But at the time, what I saw was Fox really going in against that vaccine, claiming at the time that it was ineffective, that it was potentially dangerous, and that instead what people should be doing was taking Ivermectin, a drug that is normally used to treat something very different but in this case was being propped up by these health care influencers as a way to cure Covid.
And from there, that gave people like RFK Jr. an opportunity to get their hooks into more mainstream conservative institutions, to get on Fox News and go on to talk about how the Covid vaccines were bad and the Covid mandates were bad. But once he did that, or once he became accepted as a part of the right’s movement, that allowed him to spread even kookier versions of those arguments and to bring into the Republican Party this idea that vaccines more generally are dangerous and ineffective and potentially cause autism and what have you. And that I think is the reckoning we are headed toward because this is Robert F. Kennedy’s mission. This is the thing that he cares about, the thing that he has tried to change in U.S. policy for years now. And he’s been given by first Fox News and then the Trump administration a great deal of currency on the right and real power to effectuate the changes that he thinks should happen. It’s a huge problem for the nation. It is a crisis in development right now. I think it is going to reach a flashpoint at some point probably whenever he really makes a move against the childhood vaccination schedule, which I think is pretty likely.
Sargent: So what happens, Matt? Does RFK survive?
Gertz: I think it’s very hard to push him out. I think there would need to be a huge groundswell from Republicans. I think that that is possible, but we’re already seeing the early stages of an effort to rally around him. We’re seeing people like Benny Johnson come out and say that he’s going to go after anybody on the right who tries to betray Kennedy, who tries to push him out in some way. This is going to require more courage from Republicans than we have seen in recent years. And that, I think, puts us all in a very dangerous position.
Sargent: In short, we’re really, really fucked. Matt Gertz, thanks for making that so clear to us. You really made our day.
Gertz: Always a pleasure.