From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Wednesday, January 29th.

Today we have a special edition of our show, listening in on the confirmation hearing for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be Secretary of

Health and Human Services. His confirmation is definitely not guaranteed, according to news organizations

doing Senate headcounts. HHS, so you have some background, has an annual budget of more than a

trillion dollars. It includes the National Institutes of Health,

the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare

and Medicaid services. Front and center, obviously, will be Kennedy's decades-long campaign

against vaccines and the implications for children's health, which has been very much in the news,

but also their parents and grandparents' health, depending on if and how Kennedy changes things.

Kennedy compared the COVID vaccine mandate to Nazi Germany, even though, if I may say,

the mandate was intended to prevent mass death, while the

Holocaust was, of course, imposed to cause mass death. Interestingly, Kennedy has opposition

on the right, as well as the left. Mike Pence's current advocacy group is recommending

senators vote no because of Kennedy's support for abortion rights. There is

reporting, and I assume he'll be asked about this, that he's made a deal with Trump not to speak

about his position on abortion rights or push them in any way through HHS policy. We'll see

if he's asked about that. And the Rupert Murdoch newspapers, the Wall Street Journal in New York

Post, have also come out against confirmation. The Post, for example, says Kennedy is, quote,

still a radical left lunatic, which Trump once called him last year on Truth Social. The New York Post

says Kennedy led the campaign to shut down the Indian Point nuclear facility in New York,

thinking it could all be replaced by green energy.

Yet, hypocrite that he is, he opposed a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod,

...