There’s a popular fable about the person who shows pity to an ailing venomous snake after securing its promise not to bite. When the snake ultimately strikes its rescuer, it’s unapologetic: “You knew what I was when you picked me up.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., knew who Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was when he voted to confirm him as health secretary earlier this year. But Cassidy, after voting to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, also thinks that he can win a third term in the U.S. Senate. That fanciful belief caused Cassidy to hand Kennedy the power to do what he did Monday: apparently violate a promise he’d made to Cassidy by firing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
Cassidy, after voting to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial, thinks he can win a third term in the U.S. Senate.
It should surprise no one, least of all Cassidy, that Kennedy believes the committee, as he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Monday, is “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest” and is a “rubber stamp” for vaccine approvals. We should all feel anger at what Kennedy is doing, but only Cassidy should feel like a sucker.
Long before coming to the Senate, Cassidy was a physician who spent his career working at a hospital for poor and uninsured people and who once launched a laudatory vaccination program for some of Louisiana’s most vulnerable people. Kennedy’s nomination presented him with a dilemma. He had to have known that he couldn’t derail one of Trump’s Cabinet nominees and expect a Louisiana Republican Party already angry with him to support him in a Senate re-election campaign in 2026. But nor could he, as a physician, endorse Kennedy’s vaccine antagonism.
So he got the country’s most notorious critic of vaccines to pinkie swear that, if confirmed, he’d be something other than the country’s most notorious critic of vaccines. Specifically, Cassidy announced in February, prior to casting the deciding vote on Kennedy’s nomination in the Senate Finance Committee, that he got Kennedy to promise that he would “maintain” the 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices “without changes.”
Rather than admit he was had, Cassidy rewrote history, telling reporters Monday that Kennedy’s promise was about not “changing the process, not the committee itself.”
He’s laboring to express his disapproval without acknowledging his culpability or accusing Kennedy of deceit.
“Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion,” Cassidy wrote on X on Monday. “I’ve just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I’ll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case.”
A conversation. That’s what Kennedy got — and that’s what Kennedy is going to get — for getting rid of all the experts on a vaccine advisory committee. A conversation with someone who didn’t use his power to stop him when he could have stopped him and who has no power to stop him now.
When Cassidy was asked by a reporter Tuesday if he’s sure Kennedy will appoint people to the committee who support vaccinations, he answered, “I can’t answer that because I haven’t seen the names.” To a follow-up question — “Why would you trust him?” — an aide interjected, “Thank you, guys; that’s enough.” Cassidy had an incentive to put his trust in Kennedy. Opposing his nomination would have meant abandoning his hope of winning next year. The obvious problem, though, is that his getting re-elected isn’t in the public’s interest. A public health infrastructure that makes decisions based on science, and not on pressure from a charlatan like Kennedy, is. Once Cassidy saw that he’d made himself a pariah among Louisiana Republicans, it would have been better if he had given up the idea of winning in Louisiana again and been guided with the same sense of purpose that led him to start those vaccination clinics so long ago. He should have acted with the same sense of integrity that led him to say, with bracing clarity, “Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty.” It would have been better if Cassidy had given up the idea of winning in Louisiana again. The public’s health is more important than one person’s appointment. Ensuring that the Department of Health and Human Services wasn’t put into the hands of someone hostile to its mission would have been a career-ending decision for Cassidy, but he would have left the Senate with his dignity. Instead, he extracted a worthless promise from a man who maintained a slipperiness throughout his confirmation hearings about the extent of his anti-vaccine opposition and advocacy. What ought to make us especially angry is that Cassidy was the one who got Kennedy to promise to do right — but we’re the ones getting bit.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune. 
