(DCNF)—Contentious hearings to consider Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services this week have shined a spotlight on some of Washington’s most powerful lobbies.
Senators aiming critical questions at Kennedy this week found their contributions from the health care industry and their personal investments in the pharmaceutical industry and companies that make highly processed food being spotlighted on X to millions of views. The dynamic has pitted Kennedy’s legion of online supporters against senators critical of Kennedy’s skepticism of vaccines.
At a Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing Thursday, several senators directly addressed the popular support of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
Senate HELP Committee Chair Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a Republican, was highly critical of Kennedy’s prior statements about the measles vaccine and Hepatitis B vaccine, but conceded that his phone “blows up” with his supporters.
As the hearing concluded Thursday, Cassidy said that he was struggling with whether to vote to confirm Kennedy.
“My responsibility is to learn, to try to understand if you can be trusted to support the best public health: A worthy movement called MAHA to improve the health of Americans, or to undermine it, always asking for more evidence and never accepting the evidence that is there,” Cassidy said. “That’s my dilemma, man. So you may be hearing from me over the weekend.”
Meanwhile, Kennedy and his supporters have raised questions about the corrupting influence of political contributions from the health care industry on the confirmation process.
“Our kids are getting sicker and sicker. All of the people here who are defending this current system, and defending these pharmaceutical profits, are taking huge amounts of money from the pharmaceutical industry,” Kennedy said Thursday. “This is not making our country healthier. It’s making our country sicker. We need to get rid of these conflicts.”
There has been particular scrutiny on the drugmaker money that has accrued to members of the committees that oversee many health issues — the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate HELP Committees.
The nonpartisan watchdog group OpenSecrets has tracked the top donors to the members of these committees, both their campaign committees and leadership PACs, over the past five years. The figures include both donations from individuals in each of those industries and corporate PACs. They show that, even when only considering recent election cycles, the committees have a major conflict of interest.
Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat, has received $749,316 from health professionals, $652,004 from insurers, $539,242 from health services and HMOs and $502,063 from the pharmaceutical industry between 2019 to 2024. His top donors include the insurers Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Centene Corporation.
Cassidy received $1,623,298 from health professionals and $996,737 from the pharmaceutical industry from 2019 to 2025, according to OpenSecrets.
Cassidy’s top donors include Ochsner Health System, a health system based in Louisiana.
Even Democrats who have been critical of the pharmaceutical industry in the past found their health care donations under scrutiny.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts expressed concern Wednesday that Kennedy’s lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies could “bankrupt” vaccine manufacturers.
Warren has received $498,074 from health professionals, $126,056 from the pharmaceutical industry and $109,065 from hospitals and nursing homes over the same period. Massachusetts is home to Moderna, the manufacturer of an mRNA SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, which was just awarded a $590 million by Biden’s HHS to combat H5N1.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an Independent, has received $115,690 from the pharmaceutical industry and $159,233 from the food and beverage industry.
Kennedy called out Sanders’s contributions from individuals in the pharmaceutical industry during his 2020 presidential run, amounting to $1,417,633, making him a top recipient of the industry’s donations.
“The problem of corruption is not just in the federal agencies. It’s in the Congress too. Almost all the members of this panel, including yourself, are accepting millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry and protecting their interests,” Kennedy said.
“I ran for president like you. I got millions and millions of contributions. They did not come from the executives, not one nickel of PAC money from the pharmaceutical industry. They came from workers,” Sanders said.
Democrats and Republicans alike who are skeptical of Kennedy’s nomination have seen their donations scrutinized.
Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the ranking member of the Senate HELP Committee, received $776,760 from the pharmaceutical industry, $674,934 from health professionals and $270,319 from health services and HMOs.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has received $675,461 from health professionals, $426,145 from hospitals and nursing homes and $315,798 from the pharmaceutical industry.
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has received $421,580 from health professionals, $147,727 from the pharmaceutical industry, and $157,493 from the food and beverage industries.
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia has received $579,094 from health professionals, $452,276 from the pharmaceutical industry and $244,269 from hospitals and nursing homes.
Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia has received $379,886 from health professionals, $340,090 from hospitals and nursing homes, and $306,632 from the pharmaceutical industry.
Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada has received $1,646,670 from health professionals, $630,475 from the pharmaceutical industry and $544,517 from health services and HMOs.
However, the influence of the health care and food and beverage industries is pervasive, and senators who support Kennedy’s nomination have received contributions from those industries too.
For instance, Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee was among Washington’s top recipients of the pharmaceutical industry from 2023 to 2024.
Yet Blackburn at the Senate Finance Committee hearing Wednesday said that she strongly supported Kennedy.
“It’s time to confirm RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary. He is ready to MAHA,” she said.
In addition, recent financial disclosures show that members of the committees that oversee health issues, including Kennedy’s confirmation, have investments that could be impacted by the aims of the “Make America Health Again” movement.
A recent disclosure by Wyden shows his spouse owns stock valued at $50,000 to $100,000 in Restaurant Brands International Inc. which owns American fast food restaurant chains including Burger King, Popeyes and Firehouse Subs, and an investment worth between $15,001 to $50,000 in Starbucks. She also has an investment worth between $1,001 and $15,000 in Pfizer.
Collins’s spouse also owns a number of stocks in industries that could see new rules if Kennedy were to be confirmed, each worth between $15,000 and $50,000: EcoLab Inc.; The Hershey Company; Johnson & Johnson; Merck & Co.; and Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc.
Warner has invested between $1 million to $5 million in Health Velocity Capital I, LP, a hedge fund that invests in health care technology and between $250,000 and $500,000 in Health Velocity II, LP, venture capital fund managed by Health Velocity Capital.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
Bypass Big Tech Censors
JD’s manually curated links for God-fearing MAGA patriots
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
