WASHINGTON — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. drove viewers of his contentious congressional hearing to distraction Thursday with his loud breathing, prompting an aide to quietly tell him that he should shut his mic off when not speaking.
Kennedy, 71, was in the middle of questioning by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) of the Senate Finance Committee when an unidentified woman approached the HHS chief and whispered in his ear.
The cabinet member smiled in response to the apparent admonition and pressed a button to cut off the speaking device.
“May I have my time back, Mr. Chairman?” Bennet quipped in the direction of panel leader Mike Crapo (R-Idaho). “Thank you.”
RFK Jr. suffers from spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological disorder that causes spasms in the vocal chords.
The condition causes the voice of a sufferer to be shaky and raspy, and can also lead to heavy breathing.
The secretary has spoken openly about his condition for decades, saying in 2004 on National Public Radio’s “The Diane Rehm Show”: “I have a tremble in my voice … particularly when I first start talking.”
Kennedy told the same show in 2005 that he was receiving Botox shots about every four months as treatment for his vocal chords.
During Kennedy’s short-lived independent 2024 presidential campaign, he revealed that the condition took hold of him in the mid-1990s.
“At that time, I was making a lot of my income doing public speaking, and I could speak to large halls without any amplification,” he said last year.
“When I was 42 years old, I got struck with a disease, a neurological disease, an injury called spasmodic dysphonia, and it makes my voice tremble,” he said. “I think it makes it problematical for people to listen to me. I cannot listen to myself on TV.”
That assessment was echoed by some social media users during the hearing.
“Whoever has their mic on, and is either breathing heavy or snoring in to it during this RFK Jr hearing, is driving me insane,” one X user wrote.
“I tried but this was unwatchable because RFK sounds like Darth Vader breathing into the mic 100% of the time he isn’t speaking,” wrote another.
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