Senators: Please grill RFK Jr.’s health nominees with these suggested questions

President-Elect Donald Trump has rounded out the list of his nominees for health positions in his administration, and I have…questions. Initially, he had nominated antivax activist and all-around conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whom given his having bent the knee to Donald Trump before the election in return for the promise of a high-ranking health position in Trump’s administration, I had previously characterized as an “extinction-level threat” to federal health and biomedical science programs, to be his Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), a truly awful and alarming pick, a veritable catastrophe for public health and medical research. Likely on the advice of RFK Jr, Trump soon followed up by nominating “America’s Quack” Dr. Mehmet Oz to be Administrator of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a “blast from the past” antivaxxer (and former Florida Representative) Dr. Dave Weldon to be Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as a veritable rogues’ caller of quacks and grifters, including Dr. Jay “the pandemic will be over in six months” Bhattacharya to be NIH Director. The only somewhat tolerable nominee was Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for Surgeon-General, given that she is definitely not antivaccine (although she did eventually swear fealty to the “anti-mandate” crowd.) She is, however, a Fox News pundit and does sell a self-concocted and self-branded line of vitamin supplements, because of course she does. She also was one of the directors of a chain of urgent care centers that settled a lawsuit alleging fraud by the Department of Justice for fraudulently obtaining government reimbursements for COVID tests from February 2020 to April 2022 by submitting false claims to a COVID program for uninsured patients regardless of whether their patients had health insurance or not.

Let’s recap who the current nominees for key health positions are:

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for HHS Secretary. What else can we say about RFK Jr that we haven’t already said many times before? He first came out as antivax in 2005, when Salon.com and Rolling Stone co-published his conspiracy-fest of an antivax article, Deadly Immunity, which claimed that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal that was in a number of childhood vaccines until around 2001 had been responsible for an “epidemic” of autism—evidence overwhelmingly says that it wasn’t—and that the CDC had “covered up” that evidence. Since then, he has been nothing, if not consistent, in his demonization of mercury in vaccines, which ultimately grew to become demonization of all childhood vaccines as a cause of autism and all sorts of chronic illness, as well. as his becoming a fan of “autism biomed” quackery to treat autism as “vaccine injury.” Unsurprisingly, when COVID-19 hit, RFK Jr. soon became antimask and opposed nonpharmaceutical interventions to slow the spread of the disease and, even less surprisingly, turned anti-COVID-19 vaccine as soon as mRNA-based vaccines appeared on the horizon. Oh, and he has characterized vaccines and the childhood vaccination program as a “holocaust“—repeatedly—all while risibly proclaiming himself “fiercely pro-vaccine,” starting with an appearance on Dr. Oz’s show. When he bent the knee to Trump, he proclaimed. that he and Trump would “make America healthy again” (MAHA), a nod to the longtime Trump slogan of “make America great again” (MAGA), assiduously avoiding mentioning vaccines while later declaring “war” on the FDA.
• Dr. Mehmet Oz for Administrator, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Here’s yet another one whom we’ve written about more times than I can remember and whom I long ago dubbed “America’s Quack,” in a “nod” to Oprah Winfrey having declared him “America’s Doctor,” thus launching his TV career. It’s worth mentioning first how Dr. Oz routinely had antivaxxers like RFK Jr., Dr. Mark Hyman, and Mike Adams on his daytime TV show back in the day. During the pandemic, Dr. Oz also boosted quack tycoon Joe Mercola, who’s now (hilariously) in the thrall of a psychic medium claiming to channel Bahlon, an “ancient and wise high-vibration entity from the Causal Plane,” and as a result now thinks he’s a “new Jesus” who will save the world. His promotion of COVID-19 misinformation started early too. During the early weeks of the pandemic in 2020, Dr. Oz, enamored of Didier Raoult‘s horrendously awful science, promoted Didier’s protocol using hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, as a cure for COVID-19. Meanwhile, as he was angling to run as a Republican to be one of Pennsylvania’s Senators, he started embracing the minimization of COVID-19, in particular becoming critical of school closures. Indeed, he went so far that he was forced to apologize for having suggested that reopening schools was a “very appetizing” opportunity because it was estimated that reopening schools might “only” increase the total number of COVID-19 deaths by 2-3%. Dr. Oz also had Donald Trump on his show in September 2016 during the election, and the two got along so famously that I referred to it as a “huckster bromance.”
• Dr. Dave Weldon for Director, Centers for Disease Control. I recently wrote about him. He was, I must confess, a real surprise, a “blast from the past,” an antivaxxer about whom I hadn’t thought in years. During his 14 years in Congress, Weldon funneled his belief in an “autism epidemic.” He also apparently believed in the thimerosal-autism link, to the point of promoting highly dubious studies and attacking decent studies examining whether mercury in childhood vaccines had been responsible for such an “epidemic.” Back in the day, he even spoke at antivax “conferences” falsely billed as scientific conferences. Back in 2003-2004, Weldon used his position in Congress to write letters to then-CDC Director Julie Gerberding demanding an “investigation” of supposed links between vaccines and autism. Basically, the letters made the same claims that RFK Jr. made in the aforementioned 2005 conspiracyfest Deadly Immunity. Recall that the central claim in RFK Jr.’s article, co-published by Rolling Stone and Salon.com (to their eternal shame), was that there was evidence that thimerosal in vaccines was associated with a highly elevated risk of autism in children but that the CDC, at a meeting in 2000, “covered it up.” This is a claim that I like to call the Simpsonwood conspiracy theory, after the conference center where the meeting was held, an example of the central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement (at least in the US), one I’ve deconstructed in the past. Weldon, even though he’s a physician, fell for the Simpsonwood conference conspiracy theory. No wonder RFK Jr. likes him.
• Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for Director, National Institutes of Health.  Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, that famous anti-public health manifesto calling for a “let ‘er rip” approach to the pandemic—in October 2020, before there was a vaccine!—with the futile goal of achieving “natural herd immunity,” with a poorly defined strategy of “focused protection” that would supposedly keep those most vulnerable to severe disease and death from COVID-19 while the presumably young and healthy died at a much lower rate than the elderly and ill as the virus rampaged through the population. It was a tendentiously libertarian and profoundly social Darwinist approach to “open up the economy” at the expense of disease and death that never would have worked and ultimately caused enormous damage to public health. His appointment is symptomatic of the upending of the longtime bipartisan support that the NIH has enjoyed and a prelude to unprecedented political meddling. As was posted in a lab research group on Reddit, “NIH director is usually someone that A) has an entire career dedicated to biological and medical research and B) is a leader in their field and has extensive administrative experience. Bhattacharya has an MD but is health care economist, is appointed because he is a COVID skeptic, not because of his academic and research qualifications. Harold Varmus and Francis Collins changed the world of research and medicine, this guy posted on Twitter.”
• Dr. Martin “Marty” Makary for Commissioner, Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Makary first came to my attention as one of the foremost promoters of the myth that medical errors constitute the third leading cause of death in the US, all based on a risibly incompetent study that used unjustifiable extrapolation from small numbers to conclude that 250,000 deaths occur each year in hospitals due to medical error. Basically, Dr. Makary started out semi-reasonable on COVID-19 but was, as our very own Jonathan Howard has long documented, quick to be captured by his audience and fully embrace the “let ‘er rip” approach to the pandemic in a futile effort to achieve “natural herd immunity,” which, he promised, was always no more than six months away, after which he rapidly pivoted to fear-mongering about COVID-19 vaccines.
• Dr. Janette Nesheiwat for Surgeon General. Again, Dr. Nesheiwat is a physician and Fox News pundit. She’s generally pro-vaccine, although she did ultimately turn anti-mandate. She also sells her self-branded line of vitamins, because of course she does.

Wow. Reading summaries of all of Trump’s picks as a bulleted list just reinforces how awful all but one of them are.

In any event, assuming that there are actually confirmation hearings—not a done deal yet, given Trump’s pressure on the Senate to let him appoint his cabinet members by recess appointments—there is a possibility that one or more of these nominations will fail to win confirmation. For example, RFK Jr. isn’t exactly popular, even among Trump’s Republican allies in Congress, which produces hope (in me, at least) that there is a real possibility that he carries enough baggage for his confirmation to fail. Of course, I fear that Trump probably has someone waiting in the wings, should RFK Jr.’s nomination fail, likely Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the America’s Frontline Doctors quack who’s been Florida’s Surgeon-General since 2021, but that’s getting ahead of myself.

Let’s propose some questions for this rogues’ gallery of nominees. I’ll start with questions that each nominee should be asked and then do a section for each individual nominee. Truth be told, the section listing questions that I think all nominees should be asked will likely be the largest section, but certainly I will have some “personalized” questions for the others. For instance, one can ask Dr. Bhattacharya about the Great Barrington Declaration (which he co-authored) and Dr. Makary about his repeated failed predictions that the pandemic would end soon, as well as his risibly bad science about medical errors. Also, if you have any suggestions, please add them in the comments!

Confirmation questions for all nominees

Here are some proposed questions for all nominees, with comments (as appropriate). Note that, to be effective, Senators can’t let the nominee waffle and need to press the nominee for clear and specific answers. I’ll start with some very basic questions that would help demonstrate whether a nominee believes in conspiracy theories and pseudoscience and then proceed to more general medical questions, some followed with additional brief commentary:

1. What would you do about falling uptake of childhood vaccines, which is predisposing some states with particularly low uptake to the resurgence of once-controlled childhood diseases, like measles and whooping cough, with there even being a possibility that polio might return? Obviously, those who suggest that we should weaken school vaccine mandates would not help this problem.
2. Based on your knowledge of the scientific evidence, do you believe that childhood vaccines cause autism, yes or no? Here’s a quick example where you can’t let someone like RFK Jr. waffle, because waffle he will, in spite of his past comments. If any of them try to waffle, Senators need to bring the receipts, which are easy to find for RFK Jr. and Dave Weldon. Heck, they’re easy to find for all of them, save maybe Dr. Nesheiwat. Then follow up with…
3. What is the explanation for the increase in autism diagnoses over the last three decades? Hint: The answer is not vaccines, as, when consistent diagnostic criteria are used, autism prevalence hasn’t changed in at least two decades. It’s likely a combination of diagnostic substitution, increased screening and awareness, and less stigma associated with a diagnosis of autism.
4. Does SARS-CoV-2 cause COVID-19? Seriously, there are the usual virus denial conspiracy theories out there that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t cause COVID-19, some of which claim that it’s a “misdiagnosed” bacterial pneumonia. A followup question would be: Is a positive PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 a reliable indicator that a patient has COVID-19?
5. Was SARS-CoV-2 a bioweapon? If yes, where was it created and how did it get out of the lab? I realize that a lot of people think that “lab leak” is a plausible origin for SARS-CoV-2—it’s possible, but not very plausible at all—but even the “reasonable” lab leakers generally don’t “go there” when it comes to claiming that SARs-CoV-2 is a “bioweapon. If someone answers yes, they’re a crackpot, pure and simple, and RFK Jr. has said that SARS-CoV-2 is an ethnically targeted bioweapon designed to spare Jews and Asians.
6. Which vaccines do you generally recommend to everyone who doesn’t have a specific contraindication to them? This is one of my favorite questions to put antivaxxers on the spot. If they’re antivax, they’ll generally waffle or try to avoid giving a straight answer.
7. What nonpharmaceutical interventions (e.g., masking, school closures, business closures) measures would you advocate instituting if a new pandemic caused by a novel respiratory pathogen (e.g., bird flu that became easily transmissible between humans) for which there was no safe and effective vaccine? What would you do if the new pathogen was more severe than SARS-CoV-2, with an infection fatality rate of, say, 10%? What if hospitals became overwhelmed with victims, to the point that they were in danger of having to shut down?
8. How do you reconcile the MAHA imperative to decrease chronic diseases, some of which are environmental in nature, with the other imperative of the new administration to increase oil production, industry, and the like? By way of context, when saying he’d let RFK Jr. “go wild” on health at a rally before the election, DonaldTrump specifically excluded letting him do anything related to oil drilling, and I doubt that he’ll let you go after industrial pollution given his promise to deregulate, particularly when it comes to environmental regulations.

I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of possibilities. Also, I realize that individual Senators favoring science-based medicine and public health will have to pick, choose, and prioritize, given how little time they each get to question nominees. I also realize that they might end up choosing based more on political considerations on what might most effectively discredit each nominee. With that in mind, let’s move on to some individuals.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I could come up with dozens of questions, but I’ll limit myself to just a few:

1. Do you want to take away people’s vaccines? Then, when he predictably answers no, follow up with…
2. You have likened the childhood vaccination program to a “holocaust,” not just once, but multiple times dating back to 2013, one time even likening the autism that you claimed vaccines cause to Nazi death camps. While it’s true that you did apologize once, you’ve also said at various antivaccine conferences where you’ve spoken over the years that the CDC is a “fascist enterprise that knowingly hurt children”, likened its handling of data about vaccines to the Catholic priest pedophilia scandals, and called for the jailing of vaccine scientists and throwing away the key. Your apology for the “holocaust” remarks notwithstanding, do you still think the vaccine program is a “holocaust,” that being autistic is like being in a Nazi death camp, and that the CDC is a fascist enterprise? Do you still think vaccine scientists should be jailed and the key thrown away? How about Anthony Fauci? How would you accomplish this as HHS Secretary? Would you, for instance, call for an investigation to put Dr. Paul Offit in prison, as you said at an Autism One conference in 2013? How are these ideas consistent with the health mission of being Secretary of HHS?
3. You have referred to yourself multiple times as “fiercely pro-vaccine,” starting with an appearance on The Dr. Oz Show a decade ago. Yet, it has been reported by people who have observed you for 20 years that they have never heard you say anything positive about vaccines. Indeed, recently you said, and I quote: “There’s no vaccine that is…safe and effective.” How is that not antivaccine, and please don’t use your previous risible response about how you “can say right now there’s no medicine for cancer that’s safe and effective” and that ” It “doesn’t mean I’m against all medicines.” Instead, name a vaccine (or, preferably, several vaccines) that you consider sufficiently safe and effective that you recommend them in general to people who don’t have a contraindication.
4. Given your previous views and that members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is appointed by the HHS Secretary, can you name some potential people whom you would pick to replace outgoing members of the committee? (Remember, one way that RFK Jr. could stop any new vaccines and start removing vaccines from the recommended schedule would be to start putting antivaxxers on ACIP.)
5. How will you prepare for a new pandemic? Let’s say that there is a pandemic due to a new virus that is transmitted like SARS-CoV-2 or the flu? Given that you have attacked masking, social distancing, and business and school closures, what strategies would you pursue to slow the spread of the disease?
6. Does HIV cause AIDS? (There’s a lot of HIV/AIDS denial, in addition to antivax fear-mongering in RFK Jr.’s book The Real Anthony Fauci.)
7. Do you still believe that SARS-CoV-2 is an “ethnically targeted bioweapon” designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people?
8. What qualifies you to run an organization as large as HHS, which encompasses more than a trillion dollar budget and innumerable institutions, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, given that you have never run an organization larger than Waterkeeper Alliance or Children’s Health Defense before?

I’d be half tempted to ask RFK Jr. about the dead bear cub that he dumped in Central Park a decade ago or the dead whale that he decapitated to take the head home, but I’m sure those incidents will come up.

Dr. Dave Weldon

Again, make no mistake, Dr. Weldon was one of Congress’ go-to people for the antivax movement back in the day, and there’s no evidence that he’s changed his stripes. Even so, in addition to the questions for everyone, because of his distant profile, his most recent public activism being something like 15 years ago, there are only a couple of questions for him:

1. Your primary concern about vaccines and vaccine safety when you were in Congress was that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal was responsible for an “autism epidemic.” Considering that thimerosal was removed from childhood vaccinations in 2001 and it is 23 years later, are you now satisfied that the vaccines on the childhood schedule do not cause autism? (Anyone want to bet that he isn’t?)
2. Statisticians, scientists, and epidemiologists tell us that the studies showing no link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism were well-designed and turned out to be negative. What specific scientific, medical, and epidemiological expertise qualifies you to question their design or conclusions to the point of saying they are wrong?
3. As has been noted, infectious disease is far from the only public health threat to Americans. Indeed, the number one cause of death among children is not infectious disease thanks to vaccines, but rather trauma, and not just any trauma but gun-related trauma. What will you do to address the problem of childhood deaths due to gun violence?
4. Your boss, RFK Jr., has said that the CDC is a fascist organization. Do you agree? If yes, what about it is fascist? If no, how will you protect the CDC’s independence from a boss who is so hostile to it and its mission?
5. Another public health threat is environmental pollution. Yet your boss-to-be, President-Elect Donald Trump, has put oil and gas drilling off-limits and promises to roll back environmental regulations. How will you deal with this? What would you say to President-Elect Trump to try to change his mind about the importance of studying environmental pollution as a public health threat?
6. You say you are not antivaccine. Please list the vaccines that you personally consider safe and effective enough to recommend generally to people without specific contraindications to them.

Dr. Mehmet Oz

Dr. Oz is a bit of a difficult one. Superficially, he’s very slick, and there is no doubt that he was once an accomplished academic surgeon before he turned into “America’s Quack.” However, there are a few pointed questions that would show his lack of qualifications:

1. One of the missions of CMS is to ensure that the medical tests, treatments and services covered by Medicare and Medicaid are, at minimum, evidence-based and safe. In 2014, when The Dr. Oz Show was riding high in the cultural zeitgeist, a study was published examining 40 random episodes of your show that found that, for the recommendations on your show, evidence supported 46%, contradicted 15%, and was not found for 39%. This is not a good record. How will you ensure that Medicare and Medicaid funds are used only on services with a strong evidence base supporting them?
2. You have supported “alternative” medical therapies with little or no evidence behind them and a lot of evidence against them, such as homeopathy, on your show. Again, given your track record, how can we be assured that you will ensure that Medicare and Medicaid do not cover non-evidence-based treatments or even outright quackery? (Are you sensing a theme here?)
3. You promoted hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 early in the pandemic based on some highly dubious studies by a man named Didier Raoult. We knew within months of the pandemic’s start that hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work against COVID-19. More recently, researchers representing sixteen French organizations wrote that Raoult and his subordinates engaged in “systematic prescription of medications […] to patients suffering from Covid-19 […] without a solid pharmacological basis and lacking any proof of their effectiveness,” and that those drugs continued to be prescribed “for more than a year after their ineffectiveness had been absolutely demonstrated”, and a number of his papers have been retracted for ethical breaches. Once again, how can we trust you to make sure that CMS only endorses and reimburses services that are evidence-based, given that you clearly couldn’t identify poor quality and misleading studies then?

Dr. Marty Makary

Dr. Makary is being tasked to run the FDA. However, his track record on the pandemic and various issues is not great. So let’s suggest a few questions:

1. You estimated that medical error is the third leading cause of death, accounting for 250,000 deaths per year. However, the methods of the paper in which you came to that estimate have been sharply criticized. Critics noted specifically that, if your estimate were true, then 35% of in-hospital deaths would be due to medical error, which is highly implausible (and your upper estimate was 400,000 deaths) while citing other studies showing that the true estimate, while still too high given that one error is too much, is likely at least ten-fold lower. First: Do you still believe that medical error is the third leading cause of death? Based on what, other than your flawed study, which is clearly a wild extrapolation?
2. In February 2021, you published an article entitled “We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April” and predicted that “Covid-19 will be mostly gone by April.” Clearly that was not the case, given the rise of the Delta and Omicron variants, neither of which stopped you from claiming that we were at herd immunity when we clearly were not. You repeatedly got it wrong about herd immunity. Why should we trust you to make sure that only the most rigorous evidence is used to determine drug approval?
3. You are an executive in the telehealth company Sesame, which connects consumers to physicians who can prescribe compounded weight-loss drugs. Isn’t that a conflict of interest just like the ones you complain about with respect to pharma? After all, one might expect that you would be sympathetic to loosening regulations with respect to compounded drugs and compounding pharmaceutical pharmacies. What is your position with respect to compounding pharmacies, which are sometimes misused to sell inferior versions of FDA-approved medications?
4. RFK Jr. has suggested that he wants a lower standard of evidence when it comes to interventions like stem cell therapies, peptides, botanicals, and the like. How will you resist political interference in the drug approval process?
5. In fact, given that you advocate for a higher standard of evidence for FDA approvals and recommendations, how will you try to make sure that your boss RFK Jr. doesn’t interfere in FDA approval deliberations on new vaccines to put requirements beyond reasonable scientific requirements under the Kefauver-Harris Amendments that require the FDA to demonstrate efficacy and safety?

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

I would ask Dr. Bhattacharya similar questions about herd immunity, but in particular I would focus on his being a coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, that October 2020 manifesto by three scientists brought together by a right-wing think tank that recommended opening up the economy by letting the virus rip among the “young and healthy” population while offering vague platitudes about the “focused protection” of the elderly and those at high risk for severe disease and death from COVID-19:

1. You were a coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, published in 2020. This declaration recommended two things: first, to let the virus spread among the young and healthy, the better to reach “natural herd immunity” faster, specifically stating: “Those who are not vulnerable should immediately be allowed to resume life as normal. Simple hygiene measures, such as hand washing and staying home when sick should be practiced by everyone to reduce the herd immunity threshold. Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume. People who are more at risk may participate if they wish, while society as a whole enjoys the protection conferred upon the vulnerable by those who have built up herd immunity.” Elsewhere, the GBD made a couple of minor suggestions for “focused protection” of the elderly but blithely added that “a comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals,” while suggesting that herd immunity could be reached in 3-6 months. Yet you have denied that the GBD was a “herd immunity” strategy. What is the GBD if not a herd immunity strategy? (One has to be prepared to follow up when the usual dissembling occurs.)
2. Given #1, why should you be put in charge of determining the sorts of research that the NIH will fund and do in order to determine how best to respond to a new pandemic?
3. You Tweeted in 2022, “Next, they [a coalition of regular people] will hold accountable the people who pushed the lockdowns to answer for the destruction they caused.” What, precisely, do you think this accountability should entail? Trials? Imprisonment? I note that you were a senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, which published an article calling for retribution against “lockdowners” that featured a menacing image of a guillotine. Do you support such calls for “retribution”?
4. RFK Jr. has suggested that 600 people at the NIH would be fired on day one. Do you support this?
5. RFK Jr. has suggested that there should be an eight year “pause” on drug development for infectious diseases. Do you support this proposal?
6. The NIH is one of the few federal agencies that has long enjoyed strong bipartisan support. For example, its budget was doubled starting under the Clinton administration in the late 1990s, and the Bush administration completed that doubling in the early 2000s. Yet, you are perceived as highly political, associated with right-wing resistance to lockdowns and vaccine mandates. How will you keep the NIH as nonpartisan as possible and keep its bipartisan support?
7. RFK Jr. proposes making chronic disease 50% of the NIH budget. This would, of course, require congressional approval in the 2026 budget, the first one you would be responsible for putting together as Director. How, specifically, would you define “chronic diseases”? And what diseases and Institutes would you take money away from in order to shift it to the study of “chronic diseases”?
8. You recently suggested that you would withhold research funding from schools that are too “woke” and “lack academic freedom.” What, exactly, did you mean by that? What do you mean by “too woke,” and how is this any different than Lysenkoism?

Dr. Janette Nesheiwat

To be honest, I don’t have much to ask her beyond the common questions for everyone, other than:

1. You have called the COVID-19 vaccine a “gift from God.” Do you still believe that? How do you reconcile your belief with the doubts about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy promoted by nearly all the other nominees, such as RFK Jr., Dr. Makary, and Dr. Bhattacharya? What would you say to them about their numerous statements casting doubt on the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines?
2. You have said that the MMR vaccine is safe and effective. What would you say to RFK Jr. and Dave Weldon, who clearly don’t share that view, to try to persuade them that they are mistaken?
3. As Surgeon-General, you will be in charge of the US Public Health Service (USPHS) Commissioned Corps, which consists of 6,000 uniformed officers who are public health professionals. What will you be instructing them to do in terms of promoting vaccination and other public health imperatives?

As I said, the Surgeon-General doesn’t have much real power, which makes me less worried about Dr. Nesheiwat, anyway.

Conclusion

I don’t pretend that my suggested questions are the best, but they can start a conversation. (I hope.) I might add more questions later as I think of them, and I encourage you to suggest questions in the comments. As for my part, I will conclude by asking: Senators, there’s a whole crew of science-based scientists, physicians, and bloggers who are more than willing to assist your staffers in writing probing questions. I hope you’ll take advantage of us. After all, RFK Jr. and his antivaxxers, cranks, and grifters do indeed represent an existential threat to public health in the US.