'Meanwhile, I Was Going to Ask You a…' — C-SPAN

Meanwhile, I was going to ask you a series of questions about things that are relevant right now to the people of the United States about the state of public health in this country. Since President Trump took office in 2025, more than 4,500 cases of measles have been reported. That is more cases in the year and a half since Donald Trump has been president than were reported from 2000 to 2024 combined. Children are dying because there has been increased vaccine hesitancy fueled by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and frankly, his entire administration. Thousands of people in the United States of America have been sickened by a foodborne parasite and the outbreak is nowhere near under control as staffing at the FDA and other critical public health entities has been slashed by Russell Vote and Elon Musk. Last year, the National Institutes of Health awarded I think it's 201 fewer grants compared to the previous years. As those grants were either canceled or delays, especially at the beginning of the Trump administration, I can tell you, I can tell my colleagues what the impact was on people in New Hampshire, on scientists in New Hampshire, on clinical trials in New Hampshire where people's cancer treatment was interrupted because Elon Musk and Russell Vote know better. than the people at NIH about what to fund. And because they did some sort of word search, it seems, for some of the grants, and boy oh boy, if you were studying rural health in New Hampshire and trying to understand how to better engage people who need health care in rural America, that was off the table. I think it's important for researchers and scientists to other countries because researchers and scientists, highly trained, highly qualified, invested in often by the American taxpayer, are finding the hostility from this administration so strong that it interferes with their science and they want to pursue science wherever that science takes them. We have had a number of hearings with nominees recently to fill critical spots. One of those nominees is Dr. Erica Schwartz, a brilliant woman, medical degree, biomedical engineering degree. I think she also told us she has a law degree and a master's in public health. She was a two-star admiral in the United States Navy. And yet, when I asked her if she would push back at Secretary Kennedy, if he instructed her to suspend the promotion of the flu vaccine as he did at some point in the last few months, there's an email to prove it, she couldn't answer that question. She either could not, would not, or had been bullied into evading a question about whether she, as the director of CDC, would stand up to Secretary Kennedy, the most unqualified Secretary of Health and Human Services this country has ever seen, and more than unqualified, somebody who pursues conspiracy theories, creates people with disabilities, and continues to promote disproved science. That's the state of health care and public health in this country right now, not to mention the trillion dollars or so of cuts to the Medicaid program that is decimating health care in my state and decimating it around the country, not to mention the refusal of my colleagues and this administration to extend critical tax cuts for people who are trying to afford insurance on the Affordable Care Act. I just was at one of my community health clinics and they are reporting fewer and fewer people coming in for care, disrupting care because they can no longer afford health insurance. And that is impacting, of course, the revenue stream to the community health clinic, their ability to hire and pay people, their ability to take care of their community. That's what I wish we were having hearings about in this committee and in the help committee. That's what I wish we were trying to address in a bipartisan way. But instead, we are here in an attempt to entrap you because you had a distinguished career trying to put Americans public health first.