RFK Jr. Struggles to Explain Past Quote on Vaccines for Black People

RFK Jr. had no good explanation during his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday for his past peddling of dangerous, anti-Black misinformation about how white people and Black people process vaccines.

Senator Angela Alsobrooks, Maryland’s first Black senator, asked Kennedy about his previous comments, made in a 2021 interview. “You said the following, and I quote: ‘We should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites because their immune system is better than ours.’ Can you please explain what you meant?”

Kennedy immediately began to flail. “There’s a series of studies, most of them by Poland, that show that there are particular antigens that … Blacks have a much stronger reaction. There’s differences in reactions to different products by different race …”

‘I have 17 seconds left, so let me just ask you, so what different vaccine schedule would you say I should have received?” Alsobrooks asked, removing her glasses. “What different vaccine schedule should I have received?”

“I mean … the Poland article suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens …”

“Mr. Kennedy with all due respect, that is so dangerous,” said Alsobrooks. “Your voice would be a voice that parents would listen to, that is so dangerous. I will be voting against your nomination because your views are dangerous to our state and to our country.”

Alsobrooks is right. Experts say there is no validity to the study RFK Jr references. And furthermore, racial bias in pain diagnosis, or the assumption that Black people are inherently stronger or more tolerable to pain, has been hurting Black Americans for decades.

A preliminary report on Wednesday night’s plane and helicopter collision near Washington, D.C. contradicts Donald Trump’s favorite DEI scapegoat.

An internal report from the Federal Aviation Administration found that in reality, the tower’s staffing at Ronald Reagan National Airport (DCA) was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” according to The New York Times. There was only one air traffic controller to handle both helicopters and planes in the airport’s vicinity, a job usually assigned to two people.

Having to handle both types of air traffic can be complicated, the Times report states, because air traffic controllers can use different radio frequencies for helicopter and airplane pilots. In such cases, while the controller is communicating with pilots of both kinds of aircraft, the pilots may not be able to talk to one another.

Staffing levels at the airport’s control tower have been below adequate levels for years, like many of the U.S.’s other airports. DCA’s tower only had 19 fully certified controllers as of September 2023, according to congressional reports. This is well below the FAA and air traffic controller union’s preferred number of 30, and is due to employee turnover and budget cuts, according to the Times.

As a result, many air controllers at the airport work up to 10 hours a day and six days a week. Those levels probably have not been helped by Donald Trump’s federal hiring freeze, his gutting of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, and the FAA chief’s resignation at Elon Musk’s behest. As much as Trump and the right might try to blame DEI or something else ludicrous, perhaps they should look in the mirror.

Robert F. Kennedy attempted Thursday to score a cheap political point against Senator Bernie Sanders by accusing the independent Vermont lawmaker of being bought out by the pharmaceutical industry—but he got his facts wrong.

“And by the way, Bernie, the problem of corruption is not just in the federal agencies. It’s in Congress too,” Kennedy said. “Almost all the members of this panel, including yourself, are accepting millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry and protecting their interests.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” Sanders said, raising his hand to quiet the applause that erupted from the gallery. “I ran for president like you. I got millions and millions of contributions. They did not come from the executives; not one nickel of PAC money from the pharmaceutical industry. They came from the workers.”

Sanders’s financial support from the health care industry stemmed from everyday workers, galvanized by his campaign promises of Medicaid for all and large-scale pharmaceutical reform.

“In 2020 you were the single largest receiver of pharmaceutical money,” Kennedy again insisted.

“Because I had more contributions from workers all over this country. Workers, not a nickel from corporate PACs,” Sanders continued, before he was cut off again by Kennedy, reiterating his point.

“Bernie, you were the single largest acceptor of pharmaceutical dollars. $1.5 million,” Kennedy said.

“Yeah, out of $200 million,” Sanders said, before reminding Kennedy that he had deflected from answering a question as to whether, under the “Make America Healthy Again” banner and as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, he would “guarantee health care to every single American.”

But Kennedy never had to answer that. Instead, Senator Markwayne Mullin interjected that Sanders had gone over his allotted time and was “battering the witness.”

Quiver Quantitative, a financial technology startup that provides data on insider trading and campaign contributions, listed no corporate PAC donors for Sanders—let alone any within the folds of the pharmaceutical industry. The company noted, however, that they do not currently track donations by industry employees.

Kennedy, meanwhile, has seemingly made a business out of his extreme public health stances. A disclosure form filed for his nomination revealed that the outspoken vaccine critic pulled in roughly $10 million over the last year related to dividends from his vaccine lawsuits, anti-vax speaking fees, and leading Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading misinformation about vaccine efficacy.

Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee boycotted a meeting Thursday to advance Russell Vought’s nomination to chair the Office of Budget and Management—but of course, Republicans still forged ahead to put his candidacy to a vote.

In a press conference ahead of the meeting, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer explained that in light of the OMB’s effort to “illegally freeze trillions of dollars” for federal funding for grants and loans, Democrats would “not move an inch to advance Mr. Vought’s nomination any further.”

“Make no mistake about it,” Schumer warned. “As long as Russell Vought is Donald Trump’s pick for OMB director, Americans can be virtually certain he will try again to illegally seize funding for their communities.”

Several other senators also spoke against Vought, tying him and his work on Project 2025 to Trump’s efforts to undermine federal funding appropriated and agreed to by Congress. The sudden freeze appeared to affect essential government services, and officials in multiple states reported having problems accessing programs such as Medicaid and Head Start.

In his chapter of Project 2025, Vought had written about how the president could have the power to slash government spending without the support of Congress, and his think tank the Center for Renewing America, or CRA, has repeatedly pushed the view that through “impoundment,” the president can pause, or even outright refuse to spend, the full amount of federally mandated funding that Congress has appropriated.

“You know what makes absolutely no sense? Confirming the mastermind of the last few days—of the last few days of chaos—to oversee our country’s budget again,” said Washington Senator Patty Murray.

Democrats urged that Vought’s confirmation should be postponed until the crisis was resolved—and that’s an issue that seems far from over. After the first memo was published Monday, a second memo came out two days later claiming that certain programs that would clearly be affected wouldn’t actually be.

Then a district judge issued a brief administrative stay on the order, then OMB rescinded the original memo, then Trump’s press secretary revealed that it wasn’t a real rescission. Finally, a federal judge agreed to grant a restraining order on the whole thing. And this was just within the past two days.

Republicans on the committee voted 11–0 Thursday to put Vought’s confirmation to a Senate vote.

Kash Patel, Donald Trump’s choice to run the FBI, pointedly refused to answer a question at his Senate confirmation hearing Thursday about using the bureau to go after the president’s enemies.

Senator Cory Booker directly asked Patel about his past statements in which he pledged to shut down the FBI Hoover building and “replace it with a mausoleum of the Deep State,” noting that Patel had plans to remove specific people from the FBI by bringing in political appointees to an apolitical agency.

Booker’s question was interrupted by Senator Chuck Grassley, the Senate Judiciary Committee chair, who then asked Patel if he would like to answer Booker’s question, or “move on.”

“We can move on,” Patel replied.

Patel likely refused to acknowledge Booker’s question because the New Jersey senator had a point. The nominee compiled a “Deep State” enemies list in his 2022 book Government Gangsters, and would want employees loyal to him to carry out retribution. Fellow administration nominee Pam Bondi, Trump’s choice for attorney general, backed Patel in her own confirmation hearings and implicitly acknowledged his list.

With the previous FBI director (and Trump appointee) Christopher Wray resigning last month, it would seem that Patel has a clear path to take over the bureau and begin going after Trump’s enemies. But not only does he have to be confirmed first, he also would have to fight allegations of malicious prosecution thanks to his preemptive list. Can Trump and Patel overcome the Senate and the courts?

Donald Trump is suggesting that diversity, equity, and inclusion policies are responsible for the deadly plane crash near Washington, D.C., that is believed to have taken the lives of 67 people.

The president made the troubling claim at a press conference Thursday morning—even as he immediately admitted he had zero evidence.

“The FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website. Can you imagine?

“Hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism, all qualify for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country,” the president continued on, reading an FAA diversity program that existed under his own first administration.

Trump immediately made the conversation about DEI rather than focusing on what specific errors occurred or even waiting for a single shred of evidence to support his ludicrous claims to come out. It became overwhelmingly evident that Trump will lean on his DEI boogeyman as a scapegoat for anything that goes wrong with any federal agency during his term.

“We don’t even yet know the names of the 67 people who were killed, and you’re blaming Democrats and DEI policies and air traffic control, and seemingly the member of the U.S. military who was flying that Black Hawk helicopter,” CNN’s Kaitlin Collins said to Trump. “Don’t you think you’re getting ahead of the investigation right now?”

“No, I don’t think so at all.… The names of the people, you mean the names of the people on the plane … you think that’s gonna make a difference?” the president replied.

Trump was again pressed on his claims that DEI caused this fatal crash.

“I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash,” another reporter asked.

“Because I have common sense, and unfortunately a lot of people don’t,” Trump replied. He then alleged that he was going to fix this issue in 2020 if the election hadn’t been “stolen” from him, as he is still convinced.

This statement places people of color, people with disabilities, and anyone who doesn’t fit into MAGA’s vision for America firmly into the crosshairs of the Trump administration. It’s a dark moment in time when our president is trying to convince us that DEI caused all of this, rather than simply honoring the memories of those lost in this horrific accident and committing to taking the proper next steps.

Robert F. Kennedy’s virulent vaccine conspiracies got some members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, or HELP, emotional on Thursday, with New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan arguing that Kennedy’s parroting of debunked theories wasn’t just harming people with autism but paralyzing the entire country’s scientific progress.

“The problem with this witness’s responses on the autism cause and its relationship to vaccines, is because he’s relitigating and churning settled science,” Hassan stressed, raising her voice. “So we can’t go forward and find out what the cause of autism is and treat these kids and help these families.”

Hassan, who herself has a disabled son and who successfully made autism research a federal priority in 2024, told Kennedy that the study that first linked vaccines to the neurodevelopmental disorder “rocked” her world.

“Like every mother, I worried about whether vaccines had done something to my son. And you know what? It was a tiny study of about 12 kids, and in time, the scientific community studied, and studied, and studied, and found that it was wrong. And the journal retracted the study because sometimes science is wrong, we make progress. We build on the work and we become more successful,” she said.

“And when you continue to sow doubt about settled science, it makes it impossible for us to move forward,” Hassan said. “So that’s what the problem is here. It’s the relitigating, and rehashing, and continuing to sow doubt so that we can’t move forward. And it freezes us in place.”

A disclosure form filed for Kennedy’s nomination revealed that the outspoken vaccine critic had made a business out of his extreme public health stances, pulling in roughly $10 million over the last year related to dividends from his vaccine lawsuits, anti-vaxx speaking fees, and leading Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit dedicated to spreading misinformation about vaccine efficacy.

Kennedy’s history in public health is questionable at best. His stances, which include unscientific beliefs that AIDS is not caused by HIV and that a large number of vaccines should be stripped from the market, could have major impacts on the agency designed to protect America’s health, especially as bird flu outbreaks dot the country.

In December, Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching the already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to increased autism rates.

And Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies aren’t just easily refutable, anti-vax hogwash—they’ve caused legitimate, real-world harm. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on the Pacific islands of Samoa in 2019, Children’s Health Defense spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines, sending the nation’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles—an illness that was declared eliminated by the United States in 2000 thanks to advancements in modern medicine (read: vaccines)—as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.

Donald Trump is claiming that diversity, equity, and inclusion is to blame for the deadly collision of a passenger plane and a military helicopter in the Washington, D.C., area.

During a news conference Thursday, Trump cited a “big push to put diversity into the [Federal Aviation Administration]’s program,” which he insisted happened before his second term began.

“The FAA is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems, and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency’s website,” Trump said, citing an “article.” 

The article is likely this one published by Fox News in January 2024, which reported on an FAA policy to place a “special emphasis in recruitment and hiring” on people with “targeted disabilities” that included “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

In a sense, Trump was right: That language did predate his second term. It first appeared on the FAA’s website in 2013, according to Snopes. So it was still in place during Trump’s first term. 

On Tuesday, the Trump administration had released materials targeting disabled employees at the FAA, directing the agency “to immediately return to non-discriminatory, merit-based hiring” and stop its DEI initiatives. Still, according to the president, DEI was to blame for the deadly incident that happened the next day.

Trump also scrapped all Department of Homeland Security advisory committees in a “commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security,” and fired the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.

Republican lawmakers armed with limited information were quick to play the blame game too. Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo spoke to some Republican lawmakers who cast responsibility for the deadly incident on anyone, or anything, but their own party or its leader. 

“You hate to jump to any conclusions,” Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles said, before openly speculating about possible conclusions. 

“Human error?” Ogles mused. “Was it some sort of equipment failure? Did DEI play a role in this type of thing?” 

Ogles encouraged examining the incident with “eyes wide open,” but clearly his eyes are focused away from one group in particular. 

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson also got a chance to guess, after Bartiromo described an expert blaming the Federal Aviation Agency and air traffic control.

“I’m not exactly sure what caused this, what it was, purely the air traffic control system, but I know it’s completely antiquated, it needs to be upgraded; we’ve known about this for years and quite honestly, administrations haven’t done anything about it,” Johnson said.

He added that there was an opportunity for “someone like Elon Musk” to “really modernize things.”

As part of his push to “modernize things,” shadow president Elon Musk demanded that FAA chief Michael Whitaker quit, because he was angry that Whitaker wanted SpaceX  to pay fines for failing to follow its license requirements during two SpaceX launches. Whitaker resigned less than two weeks ago.

Trump’s freshly appointed transportation secretary is doing a terrible job of inspiring confidence in his abilities, following the devastating aircraft collision at Ronald Reagan National airport near Washington, D.C.

A U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger plane carrying 64 people collided late Wednesday night, leaving no survivors and giving the Trump administration its first aviation crisis.

Sean Duffy, the former reality TV star turned transportation secretary, was asked Thursday morning about how normal it was for military helicopters and other aircraft to get clearance to cross a potentially busy flight path.

“I don’t want to go into too much detail about the information we have from the FAA, but obviously it is not standard to have aircraft collide. I want to be clear on that.”

Duffy was quickly lambasted for stating the painfully obvious.

“I’m starting to think the guy from MTV’s The Real World and Road Rules All Stars might not have a lot of expertise in transportation issues, particularly aviation safety,” one X user wrote.

“Just imagine if Pete Buttigieg said this,” said another, in reference to Biden’s transportation secretary.

The administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, Michael Whitaker, resigned from his position on January 20 after repeated demands from Elon Musk that he quit, leaving the agency without a Senate-confirmed leader during a major crisis in the wake of the D.C. plane crash.

Musk called for Whitaker’s resignation in September after the FAA chief proposed fining Musk’s company SpaceX over $600,000 in civil penalties for failing to follow license requirements during two launches in 2023. Whitaker told a congressional panel at the time that fines were “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.”

The tech CEO and fascism enthusiast repeatedly attacked Whitaker from his X account, claiming in one post that the FAA was “harassing SpaceX.” Musk also replied to an X poster who said the FAA “should not exist” and attacked Whitaker for preventing his goal of colonizing Mars.

“The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” Musk posted in a reply to Australian YouTuber Marcus House.

FAA administrators typically serve for a five-year term, but Whitaker only served for one year, replacing Trump appointee Stephen Dickson in 2022. Whitaker had been confirmed by a bipartisan 98–0 Senate vote in October 2023.

On Wednesday, a commercial American Airlines flight collided with an Army helicopter above Reagan National Airport near Washington, D.C., killing everyone on board both aircraft.

Since January 20, the head of the FAA has been deputy FAA administrator Chris Rocheleau, who was only sworn in last week, giving him a stiff learning curve early on the job.

When Whitaker announced in December that he would resign, he told FAA staff in an email, “The United States is the safest and most complex airspace in the world, and that is because of your commitment to the safety of the flying public.” Wednesday’s disaster will certainly raise questions as to whether something went wrong in air safety protocols and whether disruption at the agency contributed to the crash.