The Senate Finance Committee voted Tuesday to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) after a pair of contentious hearings last week.
Kennedy, 71, is expected to be considered by the full Senate sometime next week after the panel approved his nomination 14-13 along party lines — matching an early whip count previously reported by The Post.
The nominee appeared before the Finance Committee for more than four hours last week, facing sharp questions from Democrats about his past claims about the safety and efficacy of vaccines.
A longtime environmental lawyer, Kennedy slipped up a few times when trying to explain the differences between key benefit programs like Medicare and Medicaid but mostly stuck to his message that President Trump, 78, had nominated him to “Make America Healthy Again” by ending the chronic disease epidemic and cleaning up the US food supply.
Kennedy also had to defend a slew of outlandish claims he had made in the past about the virus causing COVID-19 being “ethnically targeted” against black and Caucasian people, about Lyme disease being a military-engineered bioweapon and his statement last year that he would not “take sides on 9/11.”
The Kennedy scion was vetted by both the Finance and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committees — but will only receive a vote in the former.
