It's the Brian Marrissau on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. 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.

As NPR's morning edition reminded us today, 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 and New York Post, have also come out against confirmation. The post,

for example, says Kennedy is, quote, still a radical left lunatic, which Trump wants to call

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,

...