MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
One of the senators who had tough words for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in that contentious hearing yesterday was Democrat Maria Cantwell of Washington, and she's with us now. Good morning, Senator. Thanks for joining us.
MARIA CANTWELL: Good morning.
MARTIN: As I said, you were among the senators who had some choice words for Kennedy. You called him a charlatan at one point. Did you feel that way before you got to the hearing, or was it something he said during the hearing that brought you to that conclusion?
CANTWELL: Well, when I was looking at the huge cut that he is making to help us prepare for the next pandemic and drilled down on all the things he said about vaccines, the word came into my head that this is a guy who's a charlatan. He's falsely claiming expertise knowledge, producing none of the data and then putting us into this unbelievable disadvantaged position. And so just as I prepared for the hearing, the word popped into my head. And then when I looked up the definition, I'm like, oh, yeah, this is a charlatan.
MARTIN: Disadvantaged position - you mean what? Compared to other countries? Compared to our preparedness for a future pandemic? What did you mean by that?
CANTWELL: The five-year estimate cost on what COVID cost the global economy is $82 trillion. Go online and look at Bill Gates in a TED Talk in 2014. He basically said, as a country, we need to prepare for pandemics. That was when Ebola was on the front, right? We didn't know that COVID was going to hit us right hard in the United States, and yet it did. So you have to prepare for these things. And what Senator (ph) Kennedy is doing by pulling back this money is saying, I'm not going to be prepared. We, the United States, is not going to be prepared for the next pandemic. And so that's the problem.
MARTIN: Do you think that the moves that Secretary Kennedy has made since he was confirmed are at variance with what he said during his confirmation hearings? I guess the question is, do you feel that he misled the Senate about his intentions?
CANTWELL: Well, absolutely. He said he was going to be the gold standard for science, and obviously he's giving us the bottom of the barrel. He's not giving us the gold standard for science. He's not producing information or individuals. He's basically trying to refute over a hundred years of history on vaccines. And that's what I presented at the hearing, a chart that showed the 20th century. Here's what it looked like with all of these issues - measles, polio and a lot of things being eradicated. And yet he's now saying, I don't know if you should take the measle vaccine. He's promoting a notion that maybe we shouldn't be using these vaccines. So we now have a 400% increase over last year. We're not even halfway through the year. A 400% increase in the number of measle cases. So this is not the gold standard. This is somebody who is undermining the health care system.
MARTIN: Some of your Republican colleagues also question the secretary's actions since he took office. You've said you're not going to share whatever they say to you in private. OK. But if a significant number of you and your colleagues feel misled by what he said during his confirmation hearing and what he's done since, what can they do about it?
CANTWELL: Well, we have two doctors in the Senate Republicans who basically called into question his same cutting of these funds, his lack of support for important vaccines for children, and I hope that they'll prosecute this case. I hope that they will go to the president and continue to push the fact that this particular nominee did say that he was going to follow science, and he's not following science. And we just can't have a health care system being undermined by the chief architect of what our health care delivery system should look like.
MARTIN: So based on what Kennedy said yesterday and his recent actions, like placing anti-vaccine activists on a CDC advisory panel, like terminating mRNA research grants or promoting unproven treatments during a deadly measles outbreak, what are your concerns about the long-term impact on the country's vaccination system in the long term?
CANTWELL: Well, again, go back to, you know, Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have done a lot of this work because they have a global footprint. But when you look at this, you know, what we found with Ebola is we have to start fighting wherever it outbreaks. Or what we found - 'cause Seattle was one of the first COVID cases in the United States of America.
MARTIN: I remember.
CANTWELL: Actually, the first noted one. So the point is, you have to have a system. And that system, you know, enables you, as a country - to say nothing of national security. Why would we want to disarm for being prepared for the next pandemic and then have to rely on some foreign country to help us out if a contagion happens?
MARTIN: That was Senator Maria Cantwell. She is a Democrat from Washington. Senator, thank you so much for sharing these insights with us.
CANTWELL: Thank you.
MARTIN: I do want to mention that we reached out to a number of Republican senators. They were either unavailable or did not respond. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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