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A top doctor who served as the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator forcefully pushed back after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched into an unhinged rant about Covid-19, vaccines, and scientific research.
Moments after CNN’s Dana Bash wrapped up her fiery interview with Kennedy on State of the Union, Dr. Ashish Jha delivered a point-by-point rebuttal, accusing the HHS secretary of spreading falsehoods.
“There was a lot of information that Secretary Kennedy said that just isn’t true. It’s just factually not true,” said Jha, who was part of the Covid-19 response under President Joe Biden.
While Kennedy insisted Trump bore no responsibility for the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jha offered a starkly different account.
“First, in 2020, I was advising a lot of governors and mayors. I was actually speaking to the Trump White House,” Jha said.
“The one thing that was always clear to me was that the buck stopped with the leaders.”
He told host Dana Bash: “My advice was exactly that; advice. Same thing with Dr. Fauci; he gave advice. Some people listened, some people didn’t.
“But at the end of the day, accountability has to be with our political leaders, not with scientists who are giving advice.”
He then touched on Kennedy’s oft-repeated conspiracies linking childhood vaccinations to autism.
“This has been an issue that we have settled over and over again. There is zero link between vaccines and autism,” he said. “This stuff does get a little bit tiresome.”
While saying he was “heartened” over Kennedy’s support for the MMR vaccine, Jha ventured that a lot of fault still lies at the feet of the MAHA movement.
“The truth is that the last two years we‘ve had more measles cases than the entire rest of the 21st century. The last 25 years, we‘ve had fewer cases combined than the last two,“ he said.
“Maybe that’s a coincidence, Dana. I don’t think it is. I think the administration has not done enough to promote vaccines, has not done enough to highlight the harms that come from measles.”
Jha’s cool and collected interview came in direct contrast to Kennedy’s earlier appearance.
During Kennedy’s time on the show, the incensed secretary accused Bash of being a “parrot” of information told to her, being “flustered” by her job, and being to blame for anti-MAGA media coverage of health crises.
