WASHINGTON – The 27-member Senate Finance Committee voted to send Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Health and Human Services (HHS) nomination to the full Senate floor. 

The 14-13 approval came along party lines, despite RFK Jr’s often heated exchanges with Republican and Democratic Senators during two confirmation hearings last week. Kennedy weathered accusations of profiting from lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, refusing  to deny that vaccines cause autism, and recanting his pro-abortion stance. 

Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) voted to advance the nominee, even though the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) chairman expressed grave concerns over Kennedy’s anti-vaccine statements. 

Kennedy could not afford to lose Cassidy’s vote, and the two met over the weekend for “intense conversations,” Cassidy said in a statement after the vote. Cassidy, a medical doctor, appeared conflicted in last week’s hearing after he asked Kennedy to “convince” him that “you will become the public health advocate, but not just churn old information so that there’s never a conclusion” – a question Kennedy sidestepped. 

“With the serious commitments I’ve received from the administration and the opportunity to make progress on the issues we agree on like healthy foods and a pro-American agenda, I will vote yes,” Cassidy said.

The Senator, who is from a state where President Trump won by 22 points, could lose his party’s nomination in the next election if he continues to have a “strained relationship” with the President’s backers, reports Politico. 

Finance chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) urged his committee members to vote in favor of the nomination, saying Kennedy “has spent his career fighting to end America’s chronic illness epidemic and has been a leading advocate for health care transparency, both for patients and for taxpayers.” Indeed, Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, gained a large national following for his campaign to “Make America Healthy Again.”

However, the Committee’s Democratic members remained unconvinced. Ranking member Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) stated “last week, Mr Kennedy was given ample opportunity on a bipartisan basis to recant his decades-long career peddling anti-vaccine conspiracies.

“Instead, he dodged and weaved, and gave no indication that if confirmed as HHS Secretary, he would stand by the long-settled science surrounding routine vaccinations…Peddling these conspiracy theories as the nation’s chief healthcare officer will be deadly for kids across the country.”

“He’s not qualified, and I daresay everyone here knows it,” said Senator Ralph Warnock (D-Georgia) in a short statement before the vote. “Mr Kennedy appears more obsessed in chasing conspiracy theories than in chasing solutions to lower healthcare costs for working families in Georgia.”

Now that RFK Jr has cleared the Finance Committee with a “favorable” recommendation, the entire Senate will vote whether to confirm him. His nomination is one of several of President Trump’s high-profile picks, and Kennedy could only afford to lose three Republican votes if Democrats unite against the nominee. 

The three Republican senators who voted against Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense, could potentially vote against Kennedy as well, according to the Hill. But Kennedy appears to have cleared the major hurdle in convincing the Finance Committee members that he is “pro-safety” and pro-life. No date has been set yet for the vote.