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By Ahmed Aboulenein
WASHINGTON, April 22 (Reuters) – U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told senators on Wednesday that if Erica Schwartz is confirmed as director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she will have the ability to make decisions on vaccines independently.
President Donald Trump said last week he would nominate Schwartz to be the next CDC director following multiple leadership shakeups at the health agency.
Her nomination represents a far more traditional pick for this administration, as the White House seeks to focus on more popular issues such as lowering drug prices and food safety, rather than Kennedy’s controversial vaccine policies, with control of Congress up for grabs in November.
Kennedy, appearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions to discuss his department’s budget, said earlier in the week he had vetted Schwartz’s position on vaccines before she was nominated to run the CDC.
Schwartz served as deputy surgeon general during the COVID-19 pandemic in Trump’s first administration.
HELP Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who is also a physician, asked Kennedy if Schwartz would be allowed to make her own decisions, independent of his political appointees or their views, to which Kennedy agreed. The previous CDC director said Kennedy fired her because she disagreed with his vaccine policies.
A Massachusetts judge recently blocked key parts of Kennedy’s effort to reshape U.S. vaccine policy, including a move to reduce the number of shots routinely recommended for children, and his overhaul of a CDC advisory committee on inoculations.
Trump fired CDC Director Susan Monarez last August over her objections to vaccine policy changes planned by Kennedy. Her position was filled by two acting directors: Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill, who was succeeded in February by Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
In a separate hearing earlier on Wednesday, Kennedy said he would share ally and HHS contractor David Geier’s contract with senators by the end of the week. Geier, like Kennedy, is a longtime anti-vaccine activist.
Separately, Kennedy was questioned again about comments he made in 2024 suggesting that Black children with ADHD should be “re-parented” and falsely denied making the comments.
Kennedy has appeared at seven congressional hearings over the past week and was asked about his comments on re-parenting Black children during almost all of them.
He told Senator Angela Alsobrooks from Maryland during the final hearing on Wednesday that he would “have to hear the recording” despite her putting up a poster bearing a transcript of his comments and that “If I said it, I apologize,” adding that “if you ask me what my opinion is, I do not believe that every Black kid should be re-parented to a wellness farm or whatever.”
“Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence,” Kennedy said on the 19Keys online show in 2024. “And those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented, to live in a community where there’ll be no cellphones, no screens. You’ll actually have to talk to people.”
(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; writing by Michael Erman; Editing by Ryan Patrick Jones, Bill Berkrot and David Gaffen)
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