Key quotes from Senator Kim’s remarks as prepared include:  

“Mr. President, I rise today because I have met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I have questioned Mr. Kennedy in committee. I have read his statements and examined his record. And I want to say here on the floor of the Senate that he is not someone I can trust with my kids’ health, and in good conscience, I cannot vote for him.” 

“What you will hear from his supporters is a story of an advocate for change…But unfortunately like most things coming out of this current Administration, we are seeing corruption and conspiracy disguised as false promises of change. It’s important that we take this moment to call it out and to expose it.” 

“This is not just someone who can walk in and just say we need to be healthy again – this is someone who will be tasked with operating programs on a day-to-day basis that mean the very life and death of over a third of all Americans.” 

“Mr. President, my reason for opposing Mr. Kennedy’s nomination doesn’t just come from the concern I have for my children, it comes from an understanding I have from my parents…My father was a polio survivor. My mother struggled with Lyme Disease. They have had their fair share of health struggles. Through them I have seen the common denominator that our public health system only work when we have people working together with trust, and that we the public in turn, trust them.” 

“But when I hear Mr. Kennedy said this about Lyme disease: ‘Another thing that keeps us from enjoying the outdoors and keeps us locked inside and the idea that this may have been, is highly likely to have been a military weapon, and we cannot say 100 percent for sure, but we do know that they were experimenting with ticks there. The ticks, as you show, are an epidemic because of what happened at Plum Island and the other labs…We also know that they were experimenting with diseases of the kind, like Lyme disease, at that lab, and they were putting them in ticks and then infecting people.’”  

“When it came to the disease Polio that disabled my father since he was a baby, Mr. Kennedy had this to say about the vaccine that nearly eradicated polio from the face of this planet. He said the vaccine for a period of time may have led to cancers due to a contamination with a virus that ‘killed many many many many many more people than polio ever did.’ So with the polio vaccine, he said: ‘Did it cause more deaths that it averted, I would say, I don’t know.’ He said this just a year and a half ago.” 

“Our health care is far from perfect, and we do need major reforms to get it in a place where it can better serve the American people. We do need massive changes in the way our healthcare, childcare, eldercare and nutrition systems are run – but not without trust.” 

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