During remarks on the Senate floor Thursday, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) spoke about HHS Secretary RFK Jr. requiring placebo testing for new vaccines.
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00:00Mr. President, yesterday the Health Secretary, RFK Jr., announced that the department would
00:07subject all new vaccines, including vaccines for children and vaccines for well-researched
00:13diseases like measles and polio, to placebo testing. So what does that mean? It means
00:19that they would take a bunch of kids, divide them into two groups and give some of the
00:24kids the vaccine for rubella and mumps or polio, and then they would take the other half and
00:30give them a placebo. A dummy vaccine that doesn't work. It's not supposed to work. And
00:40then they would study how the kids fared to let the disease process continue. Let me tell
00:47you something about my father. My father was the only doctor on the record for the first
00:53couple of years after the Tuskegee experiments on African American men, in which they withheld
00:59life-saving medicine from hundreds of African American men, believing that they were expendable
01:07to, quote, observe the disease process. What they are contemplating, and I don't know how
01:13serious this is, but what they are contemplating is that at scale with children. I am hoping
01:20that the department clarifies today that's not what they meant. That is fake news. But as
01:27of now, they are contemplating population-wide experiments on children to see how the disease
01:37process progresses, there should be 100 United States senators opposed to that. And I pray
01:50that they back off of this by the end of the day. Mr. President, I ask consent that the following
01:56remarks appear in a separate part of the record. Thank you, Mr. President. The Trump environmental
02:02agenda revolves around one thing and one thing only. How do we make fossil fuel companies even
02:08richer while raising costs for everybody else? You know, people voted for Trump for all kinds
02:15of reasons. But I don't know anybody who voted for Trump hoping that their kids and their neighbors
02:21would be more exposed to the most toxic pollutants like mercury and lead that cause cancer, cause brain
02:28damage, and cause birth defects. But through their continued rollback of fundamental environmental
02:33protections, that's what we are about to do in 10 minutes. For decades, these regulations have made
02:42our communities safer and healthier. You can step outside without, you can step outside or have your
02:48kids play at the park without worrying about the air being polluted by harmful toxins. There is no
02:53reason that we should trust polluters chasing profits to responsibly self-regulate. There are lots
03:00of problems in the government, and there are even some regulations that don't make any sense. But the
03:05Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, it's been very, very successful over the many, many decades. And what the
03:14Republicans are moving forward with today is a rollback of the thing that has protected our kids, our family members, our
03:23community members, just to make sure this isn't even a climate thing, that you're not breathing in the kinds of toxic
03:29chemicals that cause brain damage and cause cancer. Protecting our communities is one of the most basic jobs as a United States
03:39Senator. And this resolution does the opposite. And for that very simple reason, I urge my colleagues to vote against it.