Kennedy Pledged To Divest From Vaccine Suit, Senate Now Asks If He Kept A Cut

…(cont) On September 17, Kennedy returned to the anti-vaccine group he used to chair and delivered the keynote, reviving concerns about vaccine injuries from the stage. That appearance answers neither the Samoa question nor the divestiture pledge. It does put the secretary of Health and Human Services back in front of the exact subject matter the ethics agreement was written to wall him off from, eight days before the next filing.

That filing arrived September 25. A group of Senate Democrats say Kennedy may have arranged to keep collecting money from a settlement with the vaccine manufacturer he pledged to divest from, and that the arrangement was not disclosed. Lay the two documents side by side: one says the money stops, the other raises the question of whether it kept moving. The size of that gap is not written down anywhere in either filing. That is not an oversight. Divestiture pledges do not come itemized; they come as a promise, and the follow-up paperwork confirming a promise was kept is the one document this file does not contain.

Reconcile it the plain way, hon: a pledge to stop collecting, a report that he may not have stopped, and between them the confirmation that would settle it either way, still missing from the record. The Samoa answer has sat at DOJ since August 28 without a finding. The keynote happened regardless. The pledge remains the only sentence in this file that both sides agree Kennedy signed, and it is the sentence the September 25 filing exists to ask about.