Bill Cassidy

WASHINGTON – U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy backed the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a narrow vote Thursday morning that forwarded Dr. Erica Schwartz’s nomination to the full Senate.

On a 12-10, party-line vote, the Senate Health Education Labor & Pensions Committee, which Cassidy chairs, advanced Schwartz’s nomination for the full Senate to consider her final confirmation to the CDC post in Atlanta. The CDC tracks, researches, and addresses preventable health threats.

The panel then, also on narrow votes, approved the nominations of Sean Kaufman to be Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response for the Department of Health and Human Services; and Keith Sonderling to be Secretary of Labor.

The backing of Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, was up in the air and considered necessary – particularly after disagreements over the political meddling of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Last week, Cassidy said Schwartz’s support for vaccinations and her assurances that the alleged link between vaccines and autism would be removed from CDC’s website allowed him to back her nomination. The scientific consensus is that that vaccinations do not cause autism, despite claims by Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again movement.

The CDC webpage now says scientists “have not identified the root causes” of autism.

“We can’t have perfection. My wife learned that when we first began to date. You sometimes don’t get the nominee you’d like to have but you get a nominee you have to have if you’re going to address serious issues,” Cassidy said.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont and the ranking minority member on the HELP committee, said he was impressed by Schwartz’s resume – the 54-year-old is a doctor and a lawyer – and her commitment to public service. She’s been deputy surgeon general and had a career in the U.S. Coast Guard.

But Sanders said his worry was whether she would stand up to Kennedy. During her hearing earlier this month, Schwartz promised to be guided by science but ducked questions about specific Kennedy policies.

“The question we have to deal with here is not complicated. We have a secretary of Health and Human Services who forces and propagates conspiracy theories on vaccines and other important issues,” Sanders said.

“Are nominees prepared to stand up to those conspiracy theories those dangerous theories?” he asked. “I do not think Dr. Schwartz is prepared to do that.”

Vaccine-skeptic Kennedy last year persuaded Cassidy, a physician who has studied the efficacy of vaccines, to back his controversial nomination as secretary of the Department of Health & Human Services based, the senator says, on a series of promises. One of Kennedy’s vows, Cassidy says, included that Kennedy would not change the nation’s childhood vaccine recommendations.

Kennedy attempted to rewrite those recommendations and drop a number of required inoculations. A federal judge blocked implementation.

At the time of Kennedy’s confirmation, Cassidy was seeking reelection and counting on President Donald Trump not to get involved in that campaign effort, even though Cassidy voted to convict the president on impeachment charges stemming from the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump, however, endorsed U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, R-Baton Rouge, and Cassidy eventually lost in May’s closed party primary.

He has since become one of Trump’s loudest critics among Republican senators.