Kennedy Sounded Different on Agriculture Than He Did on Vaccines

Opinion|A Small but Telling Moment in Kennedy’s Hearing

There was a lot of yelling in the Senate on Thursday morning, when the health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., came to defend the many boneheaded decisions he made recently.

Those choices include his firing of Susan Monarez, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who says she was let go because she refused to approve people who had made anti-vaccine statements to a vaccine advisory panel; the Food and Drug Administration’s restricting access to the Covid vaccine, against the recommendations of scientists; and his canceling of almost $500 million in mRNA vaccine contracts. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon accused Kennedy of filling his organization with a cavalcade of “conspiracy theorists, crackpots and grifters.”

I had anticipated that Democrats like Wyden — who have always been opposed to Kennedy, a longtime vaccine cynic — would come out swinging. What was a bit more unexpected was a quieter exchange between Kennedy and Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa.

Grassley said that Iowa farmers had expressed concerns regarding some of Kennedy’s statements and asked him for a commitment to staying in his lane when it comes to regulating agriculture and the environment. Unlike Kennedy’s combative responses about the corruption of the C.D.C. officials he fired, he talked about different priorities of his but assured Grassley that he was “making sure the MAHA agenda is consistent with” farmers’ agenda. Kennedy added, “We are consulting every stakeholder in the farm community in everything that we do.”

The exchange is revealing because it suggests that Kennedy is quite willing to play ball with Big Agriculture, even at the risk of angering his grass-roots Make America Healthy Again supporters. Many of his MAHA faithful were already disappointed in Kennedy’s capitulation on the environment.

In August, when a draft of a White House report on the health of American children leaked to reporters did not include pesticide restrictions, one MAHA-affiliated group said the omission “is not a depiction of Robert F. Kennedy’s commitment; it is a display of many people whose names are on the report, pandering to pesticide company profits and catering to the convenience of agrochemical farmers.” But in this hearing, the words were coming right out of Kennedy’s mouth, not from a leaked draft that offered him plausible deniability.