Sen. Alsobrooks on RFK Jr.’s Year of Running HHS

Today marks Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s first year in office as the nation’s health secretary and evidence of his tenure is everywhere.  A surging measles outbreak in South Carolina is nearing 1,000 cases. The childhood vaccination schedule has been whittled down from 17 recommended childhood vaccines to 11, against the vehement objections of major medical organizations. Path-breaking research has been cancelled summarily, clinical trials halted and thousands of employees have been purged from the nation’s health agencies. The American Academy of Pediatrics has become a voice of resistance.  

From the very beginning of Kennedy’s tenure, Senator Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), a former prosecutor and Prince George’s County Executive, has made it her singular mission to remove him as health secretary. As a member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), her face-offs with him have gone viral. 

The committee chairman Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician and liver specialist, extracted promises from Kennedy to preserve the vaccine infrastructure and publicly wrestled with his conscience, before casting the deciding vote to advance Kennedy’s nomination.  

That decision plunged Maryland’s newly elected junior senator into the fray. The National Institutes of Health, headquartered in Bethesda, are staffed by her constituents. As scientists were fired, her phone was “jumping off the hook,” as she puts it, with agency whistleblowers calling her office.  

She was the first to issue a no confidence resolution against Kennedy in May, which only four of her colleagues signed onto.  Since then, she and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) have kept a running list of what they call the “Costs, Chaos and Corruption” of his leadership, released today in a 71-page report, which she hopes will provide a blueprint for reversing the damage once he’s out of office.  

Now, 28 senators have co-signed the no confidence resolution and joined her “Sick of It” campaign, premised on the idea that removing him as health secretary is a matter of life and death for the American people.  

A spokesman for Secretary Kennedy, Andrew Nixon, offered a robust defense of his leadership, saying that HHS was “exercising its full authority to deliver results for the American people” and had “confronted long-standing public health challenges with transparency, courage and gold-standard science.” Pointing to actions from investing in rural health to lowering drug prices to eliminating petroleum-based dyes from the food supply, Nixon said, “HHS will carry this momentum into 2026 to strengthen accountability, put patients first, and protect public health.”

Rolling Stone talked with Sen. Alsobrooks about what has motivated her quest. Our discussion has been edited for clarity and brevity.  

It has been a year with Kennedy in office as health secretary.  Could you summarize what you feel the impact of his leadership has been on America?  

His leadership has been absolutely disastrous, and it has almost single-handedly worked to dismantle the public health system in our country and many of the gains that we’ve made in research, science, and medicine. America’s exceptionalism really rests on our prowess in the areas of science, research, and medicine. And what he has done will really set our country back in terms of our [worldwide] standing.

What led you early on to conclude that he was a danger to Americans’ health and to act on those concerns? 

I came to a meeting with him very early on. I was there to interview and meet with a number of the nominees. I said to him, given that he was unqualified, with no background whatsoever in research, science, or medicine, ‘Do you intend to substitute your judgement for the judgement of scientists and doctors who have worked in these areas for decades?’ And he said, without hesitating, ‘I will replace bad scientists with good scientists.’ And I knew then that we were really in a lot of trouble. So, that’s how it started.  

Let me ask you about an interaction you had with him that went viral. In his confirmation hearing before the HELP committee, where he was making a claim that African Americans have a different immune system, you pointedly asked him, ‘Should someone like me get different vaccines?’ And his response led you to say that his answer was very dangerous. What were the dangers you saw at that moment?  

He grossly mischaracterized a study, which he said stood for the proposition that African Americans should have a different vaccination schedule than others.  Immediately following the hearing, the doctor who actually published the study came out and said that what the secretary said is simply not supported by the study or by science.  

I have a daughter, and I know there are a number of younger parents who need to be able to rely on the information and advice that comes from the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and to hear him give information like that, information that was refuted immediately by the doctor who actually wrote that study? It has been my real mission to make sure parents understand they can’t trust anything that comes out of his agency leadership and that the misinformation he has continued to spread is very dangerous to them and the health of their children, and they should be checking with their doctors and pediatricians.    

You’re saying he’s lying.  Do you view him as somebody who’s lying out of an ideological agenda, or somebody who is simply confused about the science?  

I think he definitely has an ideological agenda, and I think that agenda is for him to be proven correct about these theories that he claims. But I also believe that if you tell a lie often enough, then you might even believe it. 

Do you think that Senator Cassidy regrets his vote, and do you think it was a violation of his Hippocratic oath to vote for Kennedy?  

Senator Cassidy is a liver doctor and the hepatitis vaccination is important to him. He offered his support, almost in a conditional way, based on the representations of Secretary Kennedy, who, again, really lied in that confirmation hearing. I think [Kennedy] should be held to account what he has done.

When you started your Sick of It campaign, and you filed a resolution of no confidence, you were first out of the gate with that, and now you appear to have built support for it. Can you talk a bit about why you did that and where things stand now?  

When I originally filed the resolution of disapproval, there was very little support for it. In fact, only four others signed on. It came about as I was watching all the mayhem and chaos happening inside these agencies. People inside NIH told me they were rationing gloves. The supplies were so scarce they had to break paper towels in half and were rationing bleach. The mass firings now total about 20,000 from the health agencies and those are just the numbers we have. We’ve been requesting additional data from the end of last year.  We knew that the decisions he made were going to make Americans sick.  

Given the South Carolina measles outbreak that shows no sign of abating, do you think there is any kind of line we could cross as a nation that would lead Republicans to join you in calling for his resignation?  

I think whatever it is, we’ve already crossed the line. We have a number of physicians on the health committee. I think they can see the danger: the resurgence of measles, the kind of flu season we just had, all these illnesses that everyone understands are ones that we had been able to successfully contain. There’s nothing partisan about the health of our country.

Recently, Dr. Mehmet Oz called for Americans to get a measles vaccine. Do you think that is a signal that the White House and others inside HHS believe Kennedy has failed by not more vocally supporting vaccination?  

I think they obviously disagree with the direction that he’s taking the agency. If you’re asking people to vaccinate, it’s acknowledgement that this is an issue that needs to be addressed. It also speaks to the urgency of it. It is the reason that it’s important for me and others to continue to ring the alarm and to help parents to understand that they cannot trust a single word that comes out of this guy’s mouth or his administration, and that they need to talk to their healthcare providers. It is a matter of life and death.