1. United States
2. Iowa
3. Letter

Subject: Request for Oversight of HHS Data Integrity and Confirmation Commitments I am a constituent of yours, and I am writing to ask that you support congressional oversight of how Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has characterized federal vaccine safety data, both before and during his time in office. This is a request about data integrity and institutional accountability, not a partisan attack. In December 2021, Kennedy stated that the COVID-19 vaccine was "the deadliest vaccine ever made," based on raw counts from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS accepts unverified reports from anyone, and the system's own administrators are explicit that a report being filed is not evidence the vaccine caused the event. The claim also does not account for the unprecedented number of doses administered in a short window, which mechanically increases raw report totals regardless of actual safety. Nonpartisan fact-checking organizations rated the claim false at the time. This matters now because of what happened during his 2025 Senate confirmation process. Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician and a Republican who had expressed reservations about the nomination, voted to advance Kennedy's confirmation after securing specific commitments: that Kennedy would work within the existing vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems and would not undermine confidence in those systems without new evidence. When directly questioned in that same hearing about the "deadliest vaccine" claim, Kennedy defended it using the identical uncorrected reasoning that had already been publicly debunked years earlier. I am not asking you to take a position on vaccines. I am asking a narrower, factual question: is the Secretary upholding the specific commitments that earned him the votes needed to be confirmed? If a Cabinet official told a Senate committee he would operate within established scientific and safety standards, and has since continued to cite data in a way the data's own custodians say is invalid, that is a question of follow-through and institutional credibility that should concern members of any party. Specifically, I ask that you: 1. Request a hearing or formal briefing examining whether Secretary Kennedy's public statements on vaccine safety data are consistent with the commitments he made during his confirmation process. 2. Ask HHS's Office of Inspector General or another appropriate oversight body to review whether his statements have affected the agency's vaccine safety communications or public trust in CDC and FDA data. 3. Press for a clear, public accounting from the Secretary of how he reconciles his past and recent statements with the standards he agreed to uphold. Whatever your views on vaccine policy, federal officials should be held to the commitments they make to secure confirmation, and federal agencies should use safety data the way it was designed to be used. I ask you to take this request seriously and let me know what steps you intend to take. Thank you for your attention to this issue.