Back during his early February confirmation hearing before the United States Senate, now-Health and Human Services (HHS) Director Robert F Kennedy Jr. called out woke politician Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) for his having taken a great deal of campaign funding from pharmaceutical companies, alleging that corruption was shown by that decision.
Doing so, Mr. Kennedy referred to data from the election funding watch site OpenSecrets showing that Sen. Sanders received a huge amount of money from people employed in the pharmaceutical field. Sen. Sanders tried to claim that the data didn’t apply because he received the funding from people employed in the field, not businesses or PACs associated with the field.
Namely, over the 2019-20 Congressional funding cycle alone, data from OpenSecrets shows that Sen. Sanders’s campaign received $1.4 million from people employed in the “pharmaceuticals/health products” field, and another about $400,000 from those employed in the pharmaceutical manufacturing field. That was by far the most received from employees of the field than any member of Congress.
In any case, during the hearing, RFK Jr hammered the matter of corruption and lawmakers accepting industry-connected money, saying, “Bernie, the problem of corruption is not just in the federal agencies; it’s in Congress too. Almost all the members of this panel … including yourself, are accepting millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry and protecting their interests.”
Sen. Sanders freaked out in a massive way, turning red face and berserkly yelling that his pharmaceutical money came from pharma workers. He 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.”
Mr. Kennedy, pushing back on Bernie’s attempt to deflect blame, noted that data shows a great amount of his funding came from pharma-connected sources in the 2019-20 cycle, as shown by OpenSecrets data on employee contributions. Mr. Kennedy said, “In 2020, you were the single largest receiver of pharmaceutical money.”
Sen. Sanders freaked out again and tried to claim it wasn’t evidence of his corruption for him to opposed RFK Jr over his stance on the medical complex because his pharma-connected donations cae from workers rather than PACs. He shouted, “Because I had small contributions from workers from all over this country. Workers. Not a nickel from corporate PACs. … They came from workers.”
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Bernie continued freaking out after the incident, even posting on X (formerly Twitter) about it. In one post, for example, he said, “0 donations from pharma CEOs. 0 donations from Wall St. CEOs. 0 donations from oil company CEOs. 8 million from working people giving $27 at a time. I am very proud of that fact.”
Ignored in that obviously anger-induced post is that regardless of how much he had come from various sources is that a great deal of his money came from pharma employees. Commenters on his post mocked him over it, saying things like “Wow RFK Jr really got to you 
” and “RFK Jr. cooked you in beef tallow my man”
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video