An archived version of a live blog about the Senate hearing, with more details, can be found here.

WASHINGTON — Through shouting matches and gulfs of understanding about basic facts, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vigorously defended his aggressive reform agenda in a remarkable hearing on Thursday before the Senate Finance Committee.

Kennedy — over more than three hours of questioning — offered new explanations for his remaking of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, repeated misinformation about the safety of vaccines, and revealed new details about his plans for the federal health establishment. 

But some Republican senators who have stood by the health secretary through crucial moments appeared frustrated by Kennedy’s answers — or lack thereof.

And Democrats who have long opposed Kennedy unleashed a new level of fury over his acceleration of changes at the nation’s health agencies.

Still, other Republicans doubled down on their support for Kennedy. And throughout the hearing, the White House voiced support for the secretary, despite President Trump’s acknowledgment of the “mess” at CDC just days ago.

The hearing offered no sign that Kennedy intends to slow down his efforts to upend the agencies he oversees. 

Here are the top takeaways from his testimony:

Rewriting the story of CDC director’s ouster

Kennedy was asked more than once whether, before his firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez, he pressured her to accept recommendations from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, as Monarez has recounted. The secretary said Monarez was lying. His version of events was vastly different. 

Under questioning by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kennedy said he called Monarez into a meeting with others and asked her if she was a “trustworthy person.” Monarez said no, Kennedy claims, and that was what led to her ouster. He said he had asked Monarez “for clarification” about a prior statement he claims that she had made: that she would not sign on to certain ACIP recommendations. “I told her I didn’t want her to have a rule that she wasn’t going to sign onto it,” Kennedy said in the hearing. 

The secretary did confirm that he asked Monarez to fire several key leaders in the agency. 

By Monarez’s retelling, published in The Wall Street Journal just before the hearing — as in multiple news reports about the events leading up to her ouster — she refused to fire career staff without cause and so she was fired. Those leaders then resigned in protest. She also has said that Kennedy had directed her to “preapprove the recommendations” of the vaccine advisory panel.

Kennedy said he had never had a one-on-one meeting with the former CDC director, and witnesses who were in the room could back up his story.

More clues about what’s to come on autism, vaccines

Several senators asked Kennedy about his views on vaccines, and about research his agency is doing into the causes of autism. The secretary is expected to announce new findings this month about factors driving a rise in autism in the U.S. (Many seasoned autism researchers are skeptical that any findings will be backed by legitimate science, given how quickly they will have been produced.) In a cabinet meeting last month, he made reference to “interventions” that the Department of Health and Human Services is finding are connected to autism cases. He has for years promoted the idea that childhood vaccines are unsafe and that some of them may be causing autism, a theory that has been debunked by over a dozen studies involving hundreds of thousands of children around the world. 

Still, during the hearing, Kennedy mentioned the case of a CDC “whistleblower” whom he and his allies have echoed, saying the agency hid data suggesting a possible link between measles-mumps-rubella vaccines and autism in Black boys. Independent reviews of the case have rebutted that claim. A reanalysis of the data by Brian Hooker, a vaccine-skeptic researcher in the secretary’s orbit, that doubled down on the vaccine-autism link was later retracted. 

The researcher, William Thompson, has said data were suppressed. But in a statement after the fact, he also said conclusions could not be drawn from a single internal study. “The fact that we found a strong statistically significant finding among black males does not mean that there was a true association between the MMR vaccine and autism-like features in this subpopulation,” he wrote. 

When asked later Thursday by Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) who Kennedy was receiving counsel from on immunizations, the secretary named Thompson, who is not an HHS employee. The nonprofit that Kennedy founded, Children’s Health Defense, has featured Thompson in its documentary, “Vaxxed.”

Separately, the secretary confirmed that David Geier, a controversial figure who once attempted to treat autistic children without a medical license, is an HHS contractor engaged in work related to a federal database of information on post-vaccination side effects. Kennedy had previously denied that Geier was working at the agency, but has defended and praised his work.

Kennedy, facing questions about vaccine safety, also said HHS would be conducting observational studies to analyze whether approved childhood vaccines are linked to chronic diseases. He has dropped hints for months (if not years) that he plans to revise the childhood vaccine schedule. As secretary, he has sweeping power to make changes to vaccine availability and undermine confidence in a wide variety of shots, especially now that key career staff who led vaccine-related work at CDC have been fired or laid off. 

Covid anger rears its head

Questions around Covid policies — and vaccines — elicited strong reactions from Kennedy, who pointed to the government’s policies throughout the pandemic as proof that major reforms are needed at HHS and the agencies it oversees. Kennedy shouted his way through fierce questioning on the pandemic from several senators, at times calling them liars.

The health secretary was also pressed on current policies around Covid vaccines; moves taken by the Food and Drug Administration have effectively limited access to the shot for many Americans.

Kennedy used discussions on Covid vaccines to relitigate — though without evidence — grievances around their safety.

He suggested, without evidence, that health officials covered up data about Covid and misled the public in their recommendations.

“We were lied to about everything,” he said.

He repeated his belief that the shots are dangerous and can be deadly for young people, citing documented but rare cases of mostly adolescent boys developing myocarditis after receiving Covid-19 vaccinations. 

Covid vaccines have been tested for years through large studies — both those using placebo control groups and those following real-world evidence in populations that have gotten the shot. Vaccinations have been repeatedly recommended by multiple independent regulatory and expert groups around the world, and experts estimate the shots have saved millions of lives since their release.

Kennedy was also pressed by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who has previously been a key supporter of Kennedy, to praise Trump’s efforts in his first term to bring the shots to market.

The health secretary did praise the effort and said he believed Trump should get a Nobel Prize for it — because, Kennedy said, the shot closely matched the virus circulated at the time, and because the effort helped produce therapeutics as well. 

Several senators expressed puzzlement at how Kennedy could support “Operation Warp Speed” on the one hand but raise concerns about the safety of vaccines at the same time.

His conditioned support for Trump’s efforts wasn’t enough to soothe some Republicans’ concerns about his vaccine rhetoric or policies generally.

Cassidy said he was surprised to learn that, under Kennedy, HHS canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts supporting research using mRNA technology, using justifications at odds with current evidence.

Other Republicans, including Sens. John Barrasso (Wyo.) and Thom Tillis (N.C.) also voiced concerns about Kennedy’s approach on vaccines in recent months.

“Secretary Kennedy, in your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines,” Barrasso said. “Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned.”