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The Senate Finance Committee made a decision on Tuesday to move forward with the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) following two heated hearings last week.
At 71 years old, Kennedy is set to undergo review by the full Senate next week, having received a 14-13 approval from the committee along party lines. This outcome was in line with an earlier vote count reported by The Post.
During his appearance before the Finance Committee last week, the nominee faced over four hours of questioning, primarily from Democrats, regarding his previous statements on the safety and effectiveness 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 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 an onslaught 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 militarily-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 Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committees — but will only receive a vote in the former.