By Noah Weiland and Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s nominee for health secretary, faced more than three hours of hostile questioning from Democrats in his first confirmation hearing on Wednesday, displaying limited knowledge of critical health programs he would oversee as he tried to reject accusations that he is “anti-vaccine.”
“I am pro-safety,” said Mr. Kennedy, whose long history of questioning the safety of vaccines helped him build a large national following. He told senators that he had been mistakenly labeled anti-vaccine in news reports.
He was quickly interrupted by a protester in the audience who shouted, “He lies!”
Mr. Kennedy’s appearance before the Senate Finance Committee, his first of two hearings, soon gave way to a series of angry, argumentative exchanges with Democrats on the panel, some of whom asked Mr. Kennedy whether he still stood by anti-vaccine comments he had made in the past.
Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, said that “out of 330 million Americans, we’re being asked to put somebody in this job who has spent 50 years of his life” spreading “half-truths, peddling in false statements, peddling in theories that, you know, create doubt about whether or not things that we know are safe are unsafe.”
His voice rising, Mr. Bennet read a series of Mr. Kennedy’s past statements back to him, including his claim that Covid-19 was engineered to target Black and white people but spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.
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