WASHINGTON — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was skewered by members of both parties Thursday over his ouster of US public health officials — including the nation’s top immunization panel — during a fiery, three-hour Senate hearing.

Most of the clashes with members of the Senate Finance Committee centered on the 71-year-old Kennedy’s recent dismissal of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Susan Monarez — and the subsequent resignations of four other senior officials — as well as changes to US vaccination policy.

However, RFK Jr. also drew the ire of lawmakers by:

In one headline-grabbing exchange, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) dramatically accused Kennedy of refusing COVID-19 vaccines to Americans who need them.

Cassidy, a licensed gastroenterologist who cast a decisive vote to advance the HHS secretary’s nomination earlier this year, read out emails from Georgia-based conservative radio host Erick Erickson and another friend who said they or their loved ones had been left in the lurch by restricted immunization guidance.

“I would say, effectively, we’re denying people vaccines,” Cassidy said.

“You’re wrong,” responded Kennedy.

Erickson, whose wife Christy suffers from Stage 4 lung cancer, responded on X, saying: “Kennedy says I’m wrong, but my wife literally went to get the vaccine and CVS could not give it to her.”

Asked directly by committee ranking member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Kennedy also stated that he removed politics from decisions about the federal vaccine schedule by booting all 17 members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

“I didn’t politicize ACIP — I depoliticized it,” he claimed, adding that he had made sure to include some “pro-vaccine” officians on the revamped panel.

When pressed by Cassidy about whether some of the new committee members should be kept on given their involvement in lawsuits against pharmaceutical manufacturers, Kennedy argued their “bias” was no problem if it was disclosed publicly.

“We are the sickest country in the world. That’s why we have to fire people at CDC,” Kennedy declared, citing skyrocketing chronic disease rates in the US. “They did not do their job. This was their job to keep us healthy.”

The HHS chief went on to claim that now-former CDC bosses “failed to do anything” about COVID-19 and promised “people who at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.”

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Cassidy and Kennedy also locked horns over cuts to mRNA research, the technology that powered President Trump’s successful Operation Warp Speed to create COVID-19 vaccines during the 2020 pandemic year.

While Kennedy said the president deserved a Nobel Prize for the quick rollout, Cassidy pressed the vaccine skeptic about past positions he’d held while working with the group Children’s Health Defense.

“You engaged in multiple lawsuits attempting to restrict access to the COVID vaccine,” Cassidy charged, referring to Kennedy’s work as an attorney for the organization.

“It surprises me that you think so highly of Operation Warp Speed when as an attorney, you attempted to restrict access to the COVID vaccine,” added the GOP senator, whose vote to confirm Kennedy was premised on “assurances about vaccines and his platform to positively influence Americans’ health.” 

Since then, Kennedy has announced COVID-19 vaccines would no longer be recommended for healthy children and pregnant women, a change followed weeks later by his purge of ACIP.

“I can’t tell where you are on Operation Warp Speed,” admitted Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), one of several lawmakers to ask Kennedy about the firing of Monarez, who claimed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday she was ousted after she refused to preapprove the new vaccine panel’s recommendations ahead of its next scheduled meeting later this month.

“I told her she had to resign because I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ and she said no,” Kennedy told a flabbergasted Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) when she asked about Monarez’s claims. 

“So you are saying she is lying?” Warren asked, to which the secretary answered, “Yes.”

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), an orthopedic surgeon before entering politics, admitted he had also “grown deeply concerned” with Kennedy’s tenure at HHS.

“In your confirmation hearings, you promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines,” Barrasso said, noting recent restrictions placed on access to mRNA vaccines and a deadly measles outbreak in Texas.

“Americans don’t know who to rely on,” Barrasso told Kennedy. “There are real concerns that safe, proven vaccines like measles, like Hepatitis B, could be in jeopardy. That could put Americans at risk and reverse decades of progress.”