The RFK vote thread
-
@Horace said in The RFK vote thread:
Something to do with not being crazily anti-vax, presumably.
There's an old story about a frog helping a scorpion cross the river....
-
@Horace said in The RFK vote thread:
Something to do with not being crazily anti-vax, presumably.
There's an old story about a frog helping a scorpion cross the river....
@Doctor-Phibes said in The RFK vote thread:
@Horace said in The RFK vote thread:
Something to do with not being crazily anti-vax, presumably.
There's an old story about a frog helping a scorpion cross the river....
Good analogy
-
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/05/cassidy-kennedy-maha-maga-vaccines/687152/
Interesting article about whether Sen. Cassidy regrets his vote on Sec. Kennedy.
Bill Cassidy did not want to talk about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Last month, as we shuffled through the U.S. Senate subway, a subterranean corridor connecting lawmakers’ offices to the Capitol, the senator from Louisiana was fielding rapid-fire questions from reporters about two of his favorite topics: drug pricing and college sports. But I asked him about his least favorite: Did he regret confirming Kennedy as health secretary?
I was eager to know because, in spite of that decision, Cassidy may be looking at the end of his political career. This weekend, after 11 years in the Senate, he is headed into a Republican primary election with polls trending out of his favor. His vote last year to hand the keys of America’s immunization policy to one of America’s most prominent vaccine skeptics now hangs over him as a political move that may not have been enough to save his life in politics.
Cassidy—who was one of the few Republicans to initially balk at confirming Kennedy—is pro-vaccine. As a liver specialist in a crowded Baton Rouge charity hospital at the turn of the new millennium, he saw firsthand the effects of hepatitis B, a vaccine-preventable disease; he later set up a school-based program in Baton Rouge that inoculated tens of thousands of children against the virus. At Kennedy’s confirmation hearing, Cassidy justified his vote by claiming that Kennedy could help restore faith in the medical establishment. It was, by all apparent measures, a vote against his values, an attempted olive branch to the new administration.
Cassidy has since criticized some of Kennedy’s actions as secretary, namely his decision to stack the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee with vaccine skeptics. Cassidy was also among a group of Republican senators who declined to publicly endorse the surgeon-general nominee Casey Means—a Kennedy ally and wellness guru. (Trump announced a new candidate for the job late last month.) But Cassidy refuses to acknowledge that he made a mistake by confirming Kennedy. In the months since the vote, his staff has repeatedly declined my requests for a sit-down interview. In the Senate subway that day, he sidestepped. “I’m a doctor. You make a decision, you move on,” he told me. “You don’t sit around and say, ‘Oh my gosh, that was a great decision. Oh my gosh, that was a bad decision.’ No, you just move on.”
In Louisiana, being anti-Kennedy means being anti-Trump. And the problem for Cassidy is that many of his constituents already see him as both.
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login