Kennedy: A Health Secretary Between Nobel Prize and Vaccine War

It was one of those hearings that condense the ambivalence of American politics into a single room. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health, told the Senate Finance Committee that Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize - of all things for Operation Warp Speed, that multibillion-dollar project that at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 organized the development, testing, and distribution of the Covid vaccines in record time. The program was an unprecedented public-private partnership: government funds, military logistics, and pharmaceutical research were combined in such a way that vaccines were ready for the market within a few months - something that had previously taken years. "Do you agree with me that President Trump deserves a Nobel Prize for Operation Warp Speed?" asked Republican Senator Bill Cassidy. "Absolutely," Kennedy replied without hesitation. And then came the sentence that electrified the room. Cassidy calmly replied: "But you just told Senator Bennet that the Covid vaccine killed more people than Covid?" Kennedy denied it: he had merely pointed to the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis in adolescents - a risk that the FDA had put at eight cases per million.

But Cassidy did not let up. He reminded Kennedy that as a lawyer he had repeatedly tried to restrict access to vaccines and that his department had canceled $500 million contracts for the use of the mRNA platform - the very technology on which the vaccines from Operation Warp Speed were based. For Cassidy this was a contradiction: "It surprises me that you think so highly of Operation Warp Speed when you at the same time tried to restrict access to the results of this program." Kennedy defended himself, praised the ingenuity of the program and stated that it had "matched the vaccine perfectly to the virus at that time" and also made other therapeutics possible. There had also been no mandates - those he had only legally fought under President Biden. But Cassidy stuck to his line, read out reports from citizens who under Kennedy's tenure no longer had access to vaccinations, and accused him of in effect cutting people off from care. Kennedy countered briefly: "That is not true."

Later Democratic Senator Maggie Hassan picked up the issue and accused Kennedy of a complete reversal. Her team held up a poster with a social media post by Kennedy from 2024 in which he had called Trump weak: "Operation Warp Speed and the lockdowns were the most devastating consequences of President Trump's weakness - but not the only ones." Now Kennedy called the operation a "monumental national achievement" - just like Trump. The image presented in this hearing was that of a secretary who swings between praise and fundamental criticism. Kennedy said that the US had handled the pandemic worse than any other country, accused the CDC of catastrophic failure, and could not even state how many Americans had died of Covid. When confronted with studies showing millions of lives saved by vaccinations, he merely responded with an evasive "It is possible." Republican Senator Thom Tillis summed up the unease of many observers at the end: after this statement he could not tell where Kennedy actually stood - whether he celebrated Operation Warp Speed or undermined its legacy. The impression remains of a secretary who on the one hand wants to crown Trump's fastest vaccine program of all time with a Nobel Prize, but on the other hand has politically and legally torpedoed its results. "A paradox that acts like a magnifying glass on the torn state of American pandemic policy - led by a conspiracy theorist who has long since left reality."