Lawmakers in the United States Senate grilled Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr during a hearing focused on the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back vaccine access.

During Thursday’s hearing, Kennedy criticised CDC recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic tied to lockdowns and masking policies, and claimed that they “failed to do anything about the disease itself”.

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“The people who at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving,” Kennedy said. He later said they deserved to be fired for not doing enough to control chronic disease.

In a series of combative exchanges, Democrats accused Kennedy and the administration of playing fast and loose with public health by pushing unscientific policies that decrease public faith in vaccination.

“If we’re going to make America healthy again, we can’t allow public health to be undermined,” Republican Senator John Barrasso told Kennedy. “I’m a doctor. Vaccines work.”

Kennedy’s tenure at the helm of HHS has been marked by controversy, as he seeks to reshape the agency by purging officials and scientists who have pushed back against his promotion of policies that fly in the face of decades of scientific consensus.

“It’s been exceedingly contentious, not only from Democrats but from some Republican members of the Senate committee as well,” Al Jazeera correspondent Mike Hanna reported from the US Capitol.

“Kennedy came under specific attack by a number of the members of the committee for his stance on vaccines,” he added.

The Trump administration official and longtime anti-vaccine activist positioned himself as an outsider taking on a corrupt scientific and public health establishment beholden to corporate interests.

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The Senate hearing came days after the removal of Sue Monarez, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In his opening remarks, Kennedy tore into the CDC’s actions during the COVID pandemic, accusing the agency of failing “miserably” with “disastrous and nonsensical” policies, including masking guidance, social distancing and school closures.

“We need bold, competent and creative new leadership at CDC, people able and willing to chart a new course,” he said, touting the health department’s new focus on chronic disease and promoting prevention.

Monarez, the CDC director whom Kennedy previously endorsed, accused the secretary of a “deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday.

Kennedy’s explanation for her firing – as he told Senator Elizabeth Warren – was simply: “I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ And she said, ‘No.’”

In the US, access to healthcare is limited due to sky-high insurance costs and a lack of affordable public options. Alternative sources of information on health and wellbeing, many of them online figures who promote dubious remedies and unverified ideas, have filled a vacuum created by declining trust in the country’s healthcare system.

Once a respected environmental lawyer, Kennedy emerged in the mid-2000s as a leading anti-vaccine activist before being tapped by President Donald Trump as health secretary in his second administration.

Appearing on multiple podcasts in the run-up to this year’s election, RFK Jr became a symbol of the Trump administration’s embrace of such figures and ideas, which it has sought to promote even as it slashes funding for healthcare programmes that serve low-income communities most likely to suffer from health issues.

Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado entered into an angry exchange with Kennedy after pointing out that the HHS secretary had purged a body of experts tasked with making recommendations about vaccination and replaced them with figures closer to Kennedy’s own beliefs.

Bennet said that one such figure appointed to the panel had promoted the false idea that the COVID-19 vaccine could result in people contracting AIDS.

“Should parents and schools in Colorado be prepared for more measles outbreaks as a result of that [politicising vaccine recommendations]? How about more mumps outbreaks?” Bennet asked.

“This is not a podcast,” he added angrily. “It is the American people’s health that is on the line here.”

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