Invoice Cassidy didn’t need to speak about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Final month, as we shuffled via the U.S. Senate subway, a subterranean hall connecting lawmakers’ workplaces to the Capitol, the senator from Louisiana was fielding rapid-fire questions from reporters about two of his favourite matters: drug pricing and faculty sports activities. However I requested him about his least favourite: Did he remorse confirming Kennedy as well being secretary?
I used to be wanting to know as a result of, regardless of that call, Cassidy could also be wanting on the finish of his political profession. This weekend, after 11 years within the Senate, he’s headed right into a Republican main election with polls trending out of his favor. His vote final 12 months at hand the keys of America’s immunization coverage to one in all America’s most distinguished vaccine skeptics now hangs over him as a political transfer that will not have been sufficient to save lots of his life in politics.
Cassidy—who was one of many few Republicans to initially balk at confirming Kennedy—is pro-vaccine. As a liver specialist in a crowded Baton Rouge charity hospital on the flip of the brand new millennium, he noticed firsthand the consequences of hepatitis B, a vaccine-preventable illness; he later arrange a school-based program in Baton Rouge that inoculated tens of hundreds of kids towards the virus. At Kennedy’s affirmation listening to, Cassidy justified his vote by claiming that Kennedy may assist restore religion within the medical institution. It was, by all obvious measures, a vote towards his values, an tried olive department to the brand new administration.
Cassidy has since criticized a few of Kennedy’s actions as secretary, particularly his determination to stack the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee with vaccine skeptics. Cassidy was additionally amongst a gaggle of Republican senators who declined to publicly endorse the surgeon-general nominee Casey Means—a Kennedy ally and wellness guru. (Trump introduced a brand new candidate for the job late final month.) However Cassidy refuses to acknowledge that he made a mistake by confirming Kennedy. Within the months because the vote, his workers has repeatedly declined my requests for a sit-down interview. Within the Senate subway that day, he sidestepped. “I’m a health care provider. Making a decision, you progress on,” he instructed me. “You don’t sit round and say, ‘Oh my gosh, that was a fantastic determination. Oh my gosh, that was a foul determination.’ No, you simply transfer on.”
In Louisiana, being anti-Kennedy means being anti-Trump. And the issue for Cassidy is that a lot of his constituents already see him as each.
Cassidy’s profession in authorities has been predicated on the declare that he has approached politics as a health care provider first. One in every of his earliest marketing campaign adverts for Senate, in 2014, featured him in scrubs and a white coat decrying the Inexpensive Care Act, which he stated would give politicians energy over Louisianans’ well being care. As soon as elected, he established himself because the health-policy wonk of the Republican caucus. Cassidy’s efforts to switch the Inexpensive Care Act failed, however since then, he has ushered main health-care reforms via Congress, together with legal guidelines focusing on shock medical payments and fentanyl trafficking. A Louisiana medical faculty and several other facilities for well being training and analysis have not too long ago gotten multimillion-dollar makeovers due to Cassidy, and he has taken credit score for tucking greater than $200 million in funding for the state’s rural well being care into the tax invoice Republicans handed final July.
Cassidy stays effectively preferred amongst main Republican donors, as evidenced by the truth that he has far outpaced his opponents in fundraising. However Louisiana voters are shunning him. In February 2021, he was one in all seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump of inciting the January 6 riot. The Republican Get together of Louisiana censured him, and one of many state’s most distinguished conservative-talk-radio hosts dubbed him “Psycho Invoice.” 5 years later, a subset of Republican voters nonetheless speak about him as if he had set hearth to the French Quarter. At an occasion for one in all Cassidy’s challengers, John Fleming, I met Linda Verzwyvelt, a former real-estate agent from Lafourche Parish. Verzwyvelt was wanting to strike up a dialog with me, providing me snacks and introducing me to her neighbors. However when the subject turned to her sitting senator, her demeanor shifted. “I need to simply strangle him,” Verzwyvelt instructed me.
Cassidy’s challengers have sought to foment that anger, framing themselves as extra loyal to Trump. “I simply assume he’s ineligible to serve once more due to what he did,” Fleming instructed the gang at his occasion. He touted his personal service within the first Trump administration, throughout which he rose to be an adviser to the president. In her campaign-launch video, Julia Letlow, a present Home consultant for Louisiana and Trump’s choose for Cassidy’s Senate seat, features a montage of images of herself alongside the president. She declares, “A state as conservative as ours—we shouldn’t should marvel how our senator will vote when the strain is on.”
Lots of the state’s Republican activists, together with members of highly effective GOP ladies’s golf equipment and native Republican Get together workplaces, have deserted Cassidy. Once I spoke with a gaggle of ladies exterior of the month-to-month luncheon for the Republican Girls’s Membership of Jefferson Parish, just one instructed me she was undoubtedly voting for Cassidy. One other, Linda Doyle, instructed me that the primary time she ever knocked doorways for a marketing campaign was to get Cassidy elected, however now she will’t belief him due to the Trump vote. I heard one thing comparable from Jacques Migues, an lawyer from Iberia Parish who serves on the realm’s Republican Government Committee. Cassidy “can’t be a trusted member of the staff,” he instructed me. The ladies’s membership has not formally endorsed a candidate, however the Iberia committee has endorsed Letlow.
With the first lower than every week away, Cassidy has an actual danger of dropping: A current survey from Emerson Faculty discovered him in third place. Trump has not too long ago attacked Cassidy, blaming him for stopping Means’s affirmation. Kennedy and his allies seem out for revenge too. “Invoice Cassidy as soon as once more did the soiled work for entrenched pursuits in search of to stall the MAHA motion and shield the very establishment that has made America the sickest nation on earth,” Kennedy wrote on X after Means’s nomination was pulled. MAHA Motion, the political arm of Kennedy’s “Make America Wholesome Once more” motion, has pledged $1 million to unseat Cassidy.
Cassidy is anti-abortion, pro-gun, and hard on immigration. He’s additional left than a few of his get together, however he actually isn’t liberal, and he hasn’t modified a lot since he was elected to the Senate in 2014. As an alternative, Louisiana has. Cassidy’s predecessor within the Senate was a Democrat, Mary Landrieu, who had served for practically 20 years. Over Cassidy’s tenure, the variety of registered Republicans within the state has grown by 30 p.c. Now Republican voters need a lawmaker who displays their MAGA views, not a reasonable.
That features their views on vaccines. Ever since COVID pictures turned obtainable, Louisiana’s uptake has been among the many lowest within the nation; as of January, solely 10 p.c of Louisiana adults had obtained a 2025–26 booster. When Louisiana tried to require COVID vaccinations for schoolchildren in 2021, Kennedy, then the chair of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Youngsters’s Well being Protection, got here to the legislature to oppose the transfer, calling the shot the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” The mandate was by no means applied. (HHS declined to remark for this story.)
The specter of COVID has light, however many Louisianans stay fixated on the concept that mandating public-health measures, equivalent to vaccines, infringes on their freedom. In 2022, roughly three dozen anti-vaccine payments have been launched within the state legislature. Final 12 months, Ralph Abraham—then Louisiana’s surgeon common—banned the well being division from selling seasonal vaccines or conducting mass-vaccination drives. Once I visited the state capital in April, three committees have been concurrently contemplating vaccine-related payments. One would outlaw financial incentives for docs to manage vaccines; one would elevate the college requirement for immunization towards meningitis; and one would ban Louisiana organizations and companies from denying companies to the unvaccinated.
These actions come as Kennedy pushes to cement vaccine skepticism into nationwide coverage. Along with stacking the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel with skeptics, he has pledged to transform the federal government system that tracks suspected vaccine accidents, and has used the CDC’s web site to forged doubt on the scientific consensus that vaccines don’t trigger autism—all of which, in keeping with Cassidy, Kennedy promised to not do throughout the affirmation course of. Based on The New York Instances, Kennedy is at present overseeing a CDC inquiry into whether or not, as he believes, immunization could be linked to persistent illnesses together with autism.
A lot of the payments in Louisiana haven’t grow to be legislation, and a decide has invalidated a lot of HHS’s most dramatic anti-vaccine actions. However the give attention to the purported harms of vaccines—in Washington and Baton Rouge alike—has raised suspicion towards immunizations, in keeping with a number of Louisiana docs I spoke with. When Mikki Bouquet, a pediatrician in Baton Rouge who additionally serves on the board of Louisiana Households for Vaccines, was beginning out in drugs, mother and father refusing to vaccinate their newborns towards hepatitis B, as an illustration, have been uncommon. “Now it’s like day by day I’ve one, perhaps two mothers out of 10 infants that aren’t for it, and so they received’t also have a dialog,” Bouquet instructed me.
Many Louisianans nonetheless see advantages to vaccination. A current ballot sponsored by Louisiana Households for Vaccines discovered that 80 p.c of voters within the state nonetheless assist faculty vaccine mandates. Once I caught up with Bouquet, she had simply completed testifying towards a invoice that might elevate the college requirement for meningitis immunization and was being swarmed by a gaggle of scholars who thanked her for her testimony. However in recent times, vaccination charges have been dropping throughout the state. As of 2024, simply 44 p.c of kids 2 and beneath in Concordia Parish, which had the bottom vaccination fee within the state, have been absolutely up-to-date on their pictures. The Washington Publish not too long ago reported that not a single parish in Louisiana has kindergarten vaccination charges excessive sufficient to succeed in herd immunity towards measles, mumps, and rubella.
In late 2024 and early 2025, Louisiana was hit with one other vaccine-preventable illness: whooping cough. The outbreak was the worst in three many years; two infants died. In September, Cassidy requested Kennedy to name for fogeys within the state to get their youngsters immunized. However Kennedy gave no public response.
The Louisiana Senate race isn’t primarily about vaccines, or about Kennedy. However Cassidy’s tumultuous relationship with the well being secretary gives Trump with one more approach he can assault the senator, whom he as soon as known as a “disloyal light-weight.” Kennedy’s supporters appear completely satisfied to contribute to the senator’s demise. Cassidy does, in any case, have some energy to be a examine on Kennedy’s agenda, as evidenced by his function in canceling Means’s nomination. And whereas he received’t acknowledge any remorse about confirming Kennedy, he has contradicted a few of Kennedy’s claims. Once I requested him throughout our transient hallway interview final month about Kennedy’s affect on efforts to vaccinate American kids, Cassidy instructed me that the “confusion” and “combined messages” round vaccines “has actually not been useful.”
The result’s that Cassidy has developed a popularity because the rabidly pro-vaccine candidate that folks ought to concern. Once I spoke to Charles Owen, who represents Vernon Parish within the Louisiana Home, he claimed that Cassidy supported going door to door checking folks’s vaccination standing. Working towards “well being freedom” in that approach, he instructed me, is a dropping difficulty in Louisiana.
However Cassidy’s document suggests he wouldn’t be in favor of that form of coverage. He vocally backed a plan within the Senate to dam COVID mandates throughout the Biden administration. Each of his opponents toe the same line. “I’m not towards vaccines, however I’m for knowledgeable consent and towards mandates,” Fleming, who can be a medical physician, instructed me. After Letlow’s husband died of COVID in late 2020, she urged People to get their pictures, calling herself “an enormous proponent of the vaccine.” And she or he has absolutely vaccinated her personal kids, in keeping with Abraham, the state’s former surgeon common who’s now Letlow’s marketing campaign chair. In a press release, Letlow’s marketing campaign additionally instructed me, “Congresswoman Letlow believes vaccines must be a private determination made between people, mother and father, and their trusted medical suppliers. She doesn’t assist authorities vaccine mandates and by no means has.”
On the time of Kennedy’s affirmation, Cassidy overtly struggled in making his determination. “If there’s any false be aware, any undermining of a mama’s belief in vaccines, one other individual will die from a vaccine-preventable illness,” Cassidy instructed Kennedy throughout the listening to. The senator’s public waffling offered proof to his constituents that he was solely reluctantly a member of the president’s staff. “The way in which that he held out, that was pathetic,” Lisa Neal, a self-described health-freedom advocate, instructed me on the Fleming meet and greet.
Most Louisiana voters aren’t as vehemently towards public-health mandates as Neal, however many are indignant at Cassidy for a similar purpose: Within the age of Trump, there are not any half-gestures of loyalty. You’re MAGA otherwise you’re not. Cassidy traded his legacy for an tried present of loyalty by voting in Kennedy. However it appears to not have even registered with many citizens in his state.
