U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R. Ala. asked health secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. what his plans were regarding vaccines, the banning of Red Dye No. 3, and medicating ADD in minors at this morning’s confirmation hearing for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Tuberville began his line of questioning by asking Kennedy how he planned to resolve what the senator believes to be an overprescription of medications for attention deficit disorders in American minors.

“You know I coached for forty years,” Tuberville said.

“And in the last four or five years I coached; I’d never seen like the run-on drugs our young people are being given by doctors across this country.”

He went on to attribute the “attention deficit problem” in the U.S. to parenting choices.

“You know, attention deficit, when you and I were growing up, our parents didn’t use a drug,” he said.

“They used a belt and whipped our butt and told us to sit down.”

Tuberville continued, “nowadays we give them Adderall and Ritalin, like candy across college campuses and high school campuses.”

“Mr. Kennedy, what are we going to do about that?” he asked.

Kennedy said U.S. leadership needs to take a stand against large pharmaceutical companies and use “good science” to figure out the best options to make the country healthier.

He agreed with Tuberville that “there’s clearly a major problem with overprescription” for people of all ages in the U.S. and said that 15% of all American minors are currently on Adderall.

But according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 7 million (11.4%) U.S. children aged 3–17 years have ever been diagnosed with ADHD, and even fewer of those children are medicated, varying largely by state.

Kennedy also went on to cite a 2014 article by Danish medical researcher Peter C Gøtzsche which said that prescription drugs are the third largest cause of death in the U.S. and Europe.

However, according to the most recent data from the CDC and the European Union Drugs Agency, the majority of overdose deaths are attributed to opioid use.

Tuberville continued, thanking Kennedy for previous conversations he said they had had surrounding vaccines and empowering scientists to “do their job.”

“Let’s go by what they do, let’s don’t just do something for the pharmaceutical companies,” Tuberville said.

He added that his family was expecting a granddaughter in the next few weeks and said, “she’s not going to be a pincushion.”

Tuberville concluded his time by asking Kennedy to elaborate on the need to ban Red 3 dye, and said he was receiving more questions about that than anything else.

“If you eat a McDonald’s French fry in this country, it has eleven ingredients,” Kennedy said.

“You eat the same product in Europe, it has three.”

“We are allowing these companies because of their influence over this body, over our regulatory agencies, to mass poison American children.”

“And that’s wrong, it needs to end,” he continued.

“And I believe I’m the one person who’s able to end it.”