Sen. Bill Cassidy on June 25 accused Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of breaking the commitments that helped win Cassidy's vote and of undermining public health with falsehoods. The Senate health committee chair said Kennedy had not restored trust, and he tied the dispute to vaccine policy and the way the country talks about it.
Cassidy made the remarks on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, where he said it is easy to surmise that Kennedy made promises to secure his support. He said the commitments made to him and the country were violated, warning that if public health is built on lies, adequate public health will not follow.
That criticism matters because Cassidy was the decisive vote to advance Kennedy's nomination. He said he backed Kennedy only because the alternative was a White House health czar with the president's ear and no congressional oversight, while a confirmed role would at least come with guardrails. “You can criticize it, but I chose to have the one with the guardrails,” Cassidy said.
The clash also reaches back to a specific pledge Cassidy said he extracted on the Senate floor on Feb. 4, 2025: that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would keep statements on its website saying there is no established link between vaccines and autism. The current CDC page still carries the heading “Vaccines do not cause Autism,” but it also says the page was updated because that statement is not evidence-based and notes there are still no studies supporting claims that infant vaccines DTaP, HepB, Hib, IPV and PCV do not cause autism.
That is where the friction sits. Kennedy testified last June in a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee budget hearing that he was complying with all the agreements he made with Cassidy, yet Cassidy said in the interview that the broken agreement with the secretary was not supposed to happen. He also said polling shows Americans understand vaccines are important, and that the administration has shifted off an anti-vaccine message into something more positive.
What remains unclear is how many of the promises Cassidy says he heard were actually tied to the nomination and how many were never meant to survive once Kennedy took office. Cassidy has made plain that he believes the bargain was breached, and that the question now is not whether Kennedy made assurances, but which ones still hold.
