Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. torched CNN’s Dana Bash in a blistering interview Sunday morning on State of the Union. It was ugly.
The episode ran as measles outbreaks ripped across multiple states, and public health authorities warned that unvaccinated populations were fueling the spread of the disease to levels not seen in decades. You can trace such outbreaks back to the presidency of Joe Biden, when his government allowed millions of illegal immigrants to flood across the southern border and bring illnesses like measles back into towns that had all but wiped them out.
During the interview, Bash repeatedly pressed Kennedy to look “into the camera” and advise parents to get their kids vaccinated for measles. Kennedy did.
He told her what she wanted to hear.
Then Bash kept talking and the interview went off the rails.
The argument soured into a dispute over how the media portrayed skeptics and anyone who dared criticize the Biden administration’s COVID-era public health guidelines during the pandemic.
“You tweeted in 2024 [that] [Trump] allowed bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci to shut down the whole country. And again the president had the upper hand,” Bash told Kennedy.
As you may recall, Trump wanted to eliminate the lockdowns. “I think the one thing that did the most damage to our country was the lockdowns,” he said. “Anthony Fauci was mismanaging the COVID pandemic and he was doing it under the Biden Administration. Trump wanted the lockdowns to end. And indeed, Anthony Fauci’s diaries, he talks about how President Trump was contacting him every day, trying to convince him to open the country,” he continued.
Bash pressed on with another charge. “You are the HHS secretary and you are talking about things that are causing vaccine hesitancy in this country. And it’s something that causes problems for people when there is not anything.”
Kennedy didn’t buy it.
“Let me ask you something,” he continued. “Is your job to end vaccine hesitancy or is your job to tell the truth to the American people?”
“It’s my job to tell the truth,” Bash added. “There’s study after study after study,” she continued. ‘It’s one of the most studied things in the science.
Kennedy leaped at the opening. “You’re saying it like a parrot,” he repeated, for emphasis, twice.
“So are you,” Bash shot back.
Kennedy wouldn’t have it.
“Actually, I read the science,” he said. “You don’t want to come back here and debate science.
Kennedy then went on to undermine the very assumption CNN had based its entire story on: that believing government “experts” is the same thing as trusting the truth. “All you know how to do is repeat things people told you and say, trust the experts,” he said. “That’s what you did during COVID. Now we know that Anthony Fauci, the “expert,” lied about everything, about masks, about social distancing, about natural immunity, about the vaccine transmission, about the source of COVID. He lied and you were penalizing individuals for not trusting the experts. And now you’re bringing in the ‘experts’ again to talk about something you don’t know anything about yourself.
Bash attempted to explain herself. “That’s my job, talking to people,” she remarked. But Kennedy wasn’t finished. “Your job is to tell the American people the truth,”
