(Reuters) -U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Saturday called on Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign, days after a senior public health official was fired and four others resigned in disputes over Kennedy’s unorthodox opposition to vaccines.
Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, wrote in a New York Times guest essay that Kennedy is “endangering the health of the American people now and into the future.”
This week, Kennedy ousted the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Susan Monarez, less than a month into her tenure, deepening disarray at the nation’s main public health agency. Monarez had refused to adopt new limitations on the availability of some vaccines urged by Kennedy, saying they went against scientific evidence.
Four other senior CDC officials resigned in protest, citing anti-vaccine policies and misinformation promoted by Kennedy and his team; hundreds of their colleagues walked out of the CDC’s headquarters in Atlanta in support of the departing leaders.
Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate’s health committee and an opponent of Kennedy’s confirmation earlier this year, wrote that Kennedy ousted Monarez because she refused “to act as a rubber stamp for his dangerous policies.”
“Despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts,” Sanders wrote. He said that vaccines for diseases such as polio and COVID-19 had saved hundreds of millions of lives around the world.
A spokesperson for Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.
Kennedy, a lawyer and prominent anti-vaccine advocate, ran an unsuccessful campaign for the presidency last year. He espouses healthy eating, natural foods and exercise, but also frequently shares his theories about vaccines and other medical issues that many doctors and scientists say are groundless and drawn from the conspiratorial fringe.
On Wednesday, Kennedy baffled doctors when he said he kept seeing children walking through airports that he had diagnosed as “overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation,” based on their faces and body movements.
President Donald Trump, a Republican, nominated Kennedy to become the health secretary earlier this year and he was sworn in in February. Kennedy emphasized in a congressional hearing in May that he did not think Americans should ever take medical advice from him.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Alistair Bell)