On September 4, 2025, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., made several false or misleading statements during a Senate Finance Committee hearing, including claiming that “there’s no clinical data” to support Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy people and that “nobody knows” how many Americans have died from Covid.
Multiple studies on the vaccine’s efficacy have been published, including recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data showing that the 2024-2025 Covid vaccine was 33% effective against emergency department visits among adults 18 and over and 45%-46% effective against hospitalizations among immunocompetent adults 65 and over.
Kennedy also suggested that the number of deaths is unknown due to flawed data collection by the CDC, telling the committee, “I don’t know how many died… I don’t think anybody knows that, because there was so much data chaos coming out of the CDC and there were so many perverse incentives.” According to the CDC website, over 1,200,000 Americans have died from Covid since January 2020.