Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, says Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is « not following the science, » like he said he would during his confirmation hearings earlier this year.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced fierce questioning from members of both parties during a Senate Finance Committee hearing Thursday, including sharp criticism from Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, who called him a « charlatan. »
Cantwell criticized Kennedy’s decision to cancel hundreds of millions in research funding for future mRNA vaccines, saying the research was needed for future pandemic preparedness.
Kennedy responded to Cantwell saying « I’m happy to have a detailed discussion with you about it. You’re so wrong on your facts. »
But even Republicans took Kennedy to task for the defunding of mRNA vaccine research. Kennedy has come under intense scrutiny from Democrats and the medical science community for actions taken since the start of the second Trump administration, including firing the entire vaccine advisory panel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Earlier this year, the newly appointed panel revealed plans to study the safety of some childhood vaccines — a move that some health professionals worry is meant to question decades of vaccine safety research.
During a contentious three-hour hearing, Kennedy defended changes made at the CDC saying they were « necessary adjustments to restore the agency to its role as the world’s gold standard public health agency. »
In an interview with Morning Edition, Cantwell accused Kennedy of « not following the science. »
She continued: « We just can’t have a health care system being undermined by the chief architect of what our health care delivery system should look like. »
Speaking to NPR’s Michel Martin, Cantwell discussed the Senate hearing and why she is worried about the direction of health care in the U.S. under Kennedy’s direction.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Interview highlights
Sen. Maria Cantwell: Well, when I was looking at the huge cut that he is making to help us prepare for the next pandemic and drilled down on all the things he said about vaccines, the word came into my head that this is a guy who’s a charlatan. He’s falsely claiming expertise, knowledge, producing none of the data, and then putting us into this unbelievable disadvantaged position. As I prepared for the hearing, the word popped into my head.
Martin: By disadvantaged position, you mean compared to other countries? Compared to our preparedness for a future pandemic? What did you mean by that?
Cantwell: The five-year estimate on what COVID cost the global economy is $82 trillion. Go online and look at Bill Gates and his TED Talk in 2014. He basically said as a country, we need to prepare for pandemics. That was when Ebola was on the front. We didn’t know that COVID was going to hit us right hard in the United States, and yet it did. So you have to prepare for these things. And what Kennedy is doing by pulling back this money is saying, ‘I’m not going to be prepared. We, the United States, is not going to be prepared for the next pandemic.’ So that’s the problem.
Martin: Do you think that the moves that Secretary Kennedy has made since he was confirmed are at variance with what he said during his confirmation hearings? Do you feel that he misled the Senate about his intentions?
Cantwell: Well, absolutely. He said he was going to be the gold standard for science. And obviously he’s giving us the bottom of the barrel. He’s not giving us the gold standard for science. He’s not producing information or individuals. He’s basically trying to refute over 100 years of history on vaccines. And that’s what I presented at the hearing, a chart that showed the 20th century. Here’s what it looked like with all of these issues — measles, polio and a lot of things being eradicated. And yet he’s now saying, ‘I don’t know if you should take the measles vaccine.’ He’s promoting a notion that maybe we shouldn’t be using these vaccines. So we now have a 400% increase over last year. We’re not even halfway through the year, a 400% increase in the number of measles cases. So this is not the gold standard. This is somebody who is undermining the health care system.
Martin: Some of your Republican colleagues also questioned the secretary’s actions since he took office. You’ve said you’re not going to share whatever they say to you in private. But if a significant number of you and your colleagues feel misled by what he said during his confirmation hearing and what he’s done since, what can they do about it?
Cantwell: Well, we have two doctors in the Senate Republicans who basically called into question his same cutting of these funds, his lack of support for important vaccines for children. And I hope that they will prosecute this case. I hope that they will go to the president and continue to push the fact that this particular nominee did say that he was going to follow science and he’s not following science. And we just can’t have a health care system being undermined by the chief architect of what our health care delivery system should look like.
Martin: So based on what Kennedy said yesterday and his recent actions, like placing anti-vaccine activists on a CDC advisory panel, like terminating many research grants or promoting unproven treatments during a deadly measles outbreak, what are your concerns about the long term impact on the country’s vaccination system?
Cantwell: Well, again, go back to, you know, Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have done a lot of this work because they have a global footprint. But when you look at this, what we found with Ebola was we have to start fighting wherever it outbreaks. So the point is, you have to have a system.Why would we want to disarm for being prepared for the next pandemic and then have to rely on some foreign country to help us out if a contagion happens?

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.
— Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.
The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.
The company has agreed to pay authors about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.
“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”
A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude.
A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.
If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.
“We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms.
Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, “will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.”
“We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” said Aparna Sridhar, the company’s deputy general counsel.
As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.
Books are known to be important sources of data — in essence, billions of words carefully strung together — that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Alsup’s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it “knew had been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.
Debut thriller novel “The Lost Night” by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the Books3 dataset.
Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.
The Authors Guild told its thousands of members last month that it expected “damages will be minimally $750 per work and could be much higher” if Anthropic was found at trial to have willfully infringed their copyrights. The settlement’s higher award — approximately $3,000 per work — likely reflects a smaller pool of affected books, after taking out duplicates and those without copyright.
On Friday, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called the settlement “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it.”
The Danish Rights Alliance, which successfully fought to take down one of those shadow libraries, said Friday that the settlement would be of little help to European writers and publishers whose works aren’t registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
“On the one hand, it’s comforting to see that compiling AI training datasets by downloading millions of books from known illegal file-sharing sites comes at a price,” said Thomas Heldrup, the group’s head of content protection and enforcement.
On the other hand, Heldrup said it fits a tech industry playbook to grow a business first and later pay a relatively small fine, compared to the size of the business, for breaking the rules.
“It is my understanding that these companies see a settlement like the Anthropic one as a price of conducting business in a fiercely competitive space,” Heldrup said.
The privately held Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, said Tuesday that it had raised another $13 billion in investments, putting its value at $183 billion.
Anthropic also said it expects to make $5 billion in sales this year, but, like OpenAI and many other AI startups, it has never reported making a profit, relying instead on investors to back the high costs of developing AI technology for the expectation of future payoffs.