The Secretary of Health, RFK Jr., quotes the words of the father during the defense of the reshuffle of the CDC

The Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., quoted his father, Robert Kennedy, former American prosecutor and New York senator, while testifying on Capitol Hill on the reactions on the efforts of the Trump administration to reform the centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The head of the Ministry of Health and Social Services (HHS) reported a spectacular course correction at the CDC several days before the hearing, which came in the midst of the administration’s decision to dismiss the director of the CDC Susan Monarez. Monarez’s dismissal prompted the Democrats who complained that the efforts of the administration to reform the CDC, including through staff and budget cuts, politicized public health and knew scientific integrity.

“The people of the CDC who supervised (the attenuation process of COVID-19), who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will leave,” said Kennedy during his opening remarks, shortly after the audience was briefly interrupted by a heckling. “This is why we need a new bold, competent and creative leadership at the CDC. People who are able and willing to trace a new course.”

RFK JR and Top Dem compete during the animated audience of the Senate: “ These are children ”

“Like my father Once said, “Progress is a beautiful word, but change is its motivator. And change has its enemies. “” The Secretary of Health, who is also the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, continued: “This is why we need new blood in the CDC.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. invokes his father’s democratic heritage during a stormy hearing from Capitol Hill on the Trump administration’s health policy reforms. (Getty Images)

The brief moment of Thursday when Kennedy invoked his father, who was shot dead when he was an American senator in 1968, would not be the first time that the Kennedy family has been invoked in the approach of the Secretary of Health for Governance. In the confrontation of President Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kerry Kennedy, criticized him for supporting Trump and “Deecrat (ING) and Trampl (ING) and put on (Ting) in the memory of their father.

The quote from the father of RFK Jr. comes from a speech he delivered at the Conference of Mayors of the United States in Chicago in 1963. The remarks came when he was a prosecutor general under the former president of the Democratic Party Lyndon B. Johnson.

Kennedy’s speech in Chicago discussed contemporary economic stress and poverty in the early 1960s, noting that they had resulted in an “undesirable stock of young idlers”, according to a copy of the discourse shared by the Ministry of Justice (DoJ). The general at the time suggested that the question was exacerbated by a lack of equal access to education, a training in vocation and poor housing that were performing at the time.

Robert F. Kennedy saw his brother take care of his brother, former president Robert F. Kennedy, in Capitol Hill. (Getty Images)

“The most difficult task is to appoint and integrate into our work a group of men and women with the power and the will to look at our community difficulties, dissect them, criticize the fields of gap and make significant suggestions,” Kennedy said during his speech at the Conference of Mayors. “Sometimes also, it is difficult to accept this kind of recommendation. Because, sometimes, it leads to an announced or implicit criticism of programs that have failed us in the past. The change means that someone’s professional feathers will be ruffled, that an office under glass could be moved to another office or abandoned, that PET programs could die.”

RFK Jr denies having told the former CDC director to approve vaccination recommendations

“Progress is the beautiful word we like to use. But change is his motivator. And change to his enemies,” continued Kennedy. “The desire to confront this change will determine how much we will really do for our youth and how much our efforts will be significant.”

The secretary of the Department of Health and Social Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy, defended mass layoffs during the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the hearing of the Senate finance committee on September 4, 2025. (Wi McNamee / Getty Images)

In the midst of the reshuffle of the CDC, led by RFK Jr., more than 1,000 current and old health officials wrote a letter this week calling for the resignation of the HHS secretary, arguing that it was “in danger (ING) the health of the country”. After the ousting of Monarez, several other senior CDC officials resigned to protest against the Trump administration policies on public health.

Meanwhile, Kennedy wrote an editorial earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal echoing his remarks on Capitol Hill on Thursday that changes from the CDC restore confidence in an agency that has lost public confidence due to his response to the COVVI-19 virus.

Previous CDC directors accuse RFK JR. To endanger all Americans in the NY Times test

“Most of the CDC’s basic employees are honest officials,” wrote the Secretary of Health. “In this renewed mission, they can do their work as scientists without bowing to politics.”