Vice President J.D. Vance reportedly stepped squarely into the fray Thursday, rising to the defense of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who faced a barrage of criticism from Democratic senators during a contentious Senate Finance Committee hearing.
Kennedy, who has pushed through sweeping changes at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, endured what allies described as a partisan onslaught.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Michael Bennett of Colorado, and independent Sen. Bernie Sanders accused him of misleading the public on vaccines, at times suggesting outright dishonesty.
Vance, in a sharply worded post on X, dismissed the senators’ attacks as hollow. “When I see all these senators trying to lecture and ‘gotcha’ Bobby Kennedy today all I can think is: You all support off-label, untested, and irreversible hormonal ‘therapies’ for children, mutilating our kids and enriching big pharma,” Vance wrote. “You’re full of shit and everyone knows it.”
The vice president’s comments underscored the deep divide between Democrats eager to defend the legacy of federal health institutions and a Republican administration that has empowered Kennedy to shake them up.
The criticisms have not been confined to Capitol Hill. On Wednesday, more than 1,000 anonymous HHS employees signed an open letter calling for Kennedy’s resignation.
The letter objected to his firing of Dr. Susan Monarez, the Senate-confirmed CDC director, which led to the resignation of several high-ranking doctors at the agency. It accused Kennedy of “appointing political ideologues who pose as scientific experts and manipulate data to fit predetermined conclusions” about vaccine effectiveness.
“Should he decline to resign, we call upon the President and U.S. Congress to appoint a new Secretary of Health and Human Services, one whose qualifications and experience ensure that health policy is informed by independent and unbiased peer-reviewed science,” the letter read. “We expect those in leadership to act when the health of Americans is at stake.”
The White House has remained firmly behind Kennedy. President Donald Trump, though silent on Truth Social as of Thursday afternoon, has repeatedly defended his health secretary in past statements.
His support reflects a broader administration view that Kennedy’s efforts to question entrenched orthodoxies in public health are long overdue.
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, went even further last week. Speaking on the South Lawn, he hailed Kennedy as “a crown jewel of this administration,” adding that the secretary is “working tirelessly to improve public health for all Americans, and … to deal with the drivers of the chronic health crisis in this country.”
Kennedy’s tenure has ignited fierce debate but also rallied conservatives who see his critics as emblematic of a political class unwilling to reckon with past public health failures.
To them, the resistance from Democratic lawmakers and federal employees illustrates a bureaucracy more concerned with preserving its authority than addressing the concerns of American families.
With Vance and other administration figures offering unequivocal support, Kennedy appears poised to continue reshaping the nation’s health agencies despite escalating calls for his ouster.
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