MANCHESTER, N.H. - Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont says if Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn't step down as Health and Human Services secretary in President Donald Trump's administration, Americans will need to speak out.
"We've got to rally the American people. This is a huge issue," Sanders told Fox News Digital on Monday.
Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said, "I'm not a scientist, I'm not a doctor, but I do talk to scientists, and I do talk to doctors, and the evidence is overwhelming. It's not contestable. Vaccines work. They save millions and millions of lives."
And the progressive champion and 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential nomination runner-up warned that "if Kennedy and his friends are able to make people think that vaccines are not safe, it will be a real public health crisis for America."
Sanders is among a growing list of politicians and officials who warn that Kennedy, the longtime environmental activist and vaccine skeptic who Trump picked late last year as his health secretary in his second administration, is jeopardizing the health of Americans with his controversial moves.
"Mr Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office, President Trump and Mr Kennedy have done exactly the opposite," Sanders wrote this past weekend in an opinion piece in the New York Times.
And Sanders said that "despite the overwhelming opposition of the medical community, Secretary Kennedy has continued his longstanding crusade against vaccines and his advocacy of conspiracy theories that have been rejected repeatedly by scientific experts."