Ever since I learned that longtime antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had been nominated as the Secretary of Health and Human Services (a development I called an “extinction-level event” for public health), I’ve been warning that he’s definitely coming for your vaccines, to the point where prior to this post there have been ten installments (plus a couple of related posts setting the stage) making this very argument. Indeed, way back in February 2025, I predicted how RFK Jr. would go about eliminating vaccines or, failing that, marginalizing them as a public health tool to the point where they might as well be eliminated. Depressingly, I’ve been fairly accurate, although admittedly not perfect, in my predictions, although where I erred tended to be more about emphasis rather than the broad strategies used to chip away at the CDC’s vaccine infrastructure and recommended schedule, while being both pleasantly surprised at how much pushback there has been and even more depressed at how much RFK Jr. has accomplished. When last I wrote about this topic nearly four months ago, RFK Jr.’s ally, antivax attorney Aaron Siri was basically bragging about how RFK Jr. planned to add more “injuries” to the list of vaccine complications and injuries for which compensation can be awarded by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP).
Since then, with the midterm elections in full swing, RFK Jr. has been soft-pedaling his antivax policies because they are very unpopular and the Trump White House has instructed him to back off. As a result, there has been a lot less in the news about RFK Jr. and vaccines; that is, until Reuters published a report last week by Yasmeen Abutaleb, Dan Levine, and Bo Erickson entitled Inside RFK Jr.’s push to dismantle decades of U.S. vaccine policy. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall. Fortunately, I can access it through my Apple News subscription, and I’ll quote it more extensively than I quote the usual article, for the benefit of those without a subscription to Reuters or Apple News.
Let’s just say that what Reuters has reported is entirely consistent with what I expected. However cynical and power-hungry RFK Jr. might be, however much he might be hungering to run for President to succeed Donald Trump in 2028, there is one thing that must be emphasized about him. When it comes to being antivax, RFK Jr. is more than just a true believer. He’s a fanatical true believer. I base that assessment of him on having written dozens, if not hundreds, of posts about him since he first “came out” as antivax in 2005. As pediatrician and vaccine scientist Dr. Paul Offit is quoted as saying in the news report:
“He’s an anti-vaccine activist. That’s who he is. That’s who he’s been for 20 years. To expect that as secretary of Health and Human Services he’d be anything other than that is wishful thinking,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a long-time immunization adviser to the CDC.
Kennedy’s efforts to cast doubt on the safety of shots for common diseases are making it harder to curb outbreaks, including the biggest U.S. resurgence of measles in more than three decades, Offit said.
“He scares people about vaccines, which only causes them not to get them,” Offit said. “We’re screwed.”
Exactly. Anyone who thinks that this leopard has changed his spots (or never really had any spots) is delusional. Likely these are the same people who are shocked when that selfsame leopard decides to eat their faces. In any event, let’s give a preview of Reuters’ findings, and then I’ll step back a bit:
A U.S. health secretary prepared to spend billions to seek a link between vaccines and autism. Vaccine skeptics shaping policy. A proposal to eliminate the entire federal immunization schedule for American children.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought a series of once-unthinkable public-health proposals to the highest levels of the Trump administration since becoming health secretary early last year, according to Reuters interviews with 16 current and former officials with direct knowledge of the discussions.
Yes, you read that right. RFK Jr. proposed getting rid of the entire CDC-recommended childhood vaccination schedule. Other tidbits include his wanting to remove the MMR and polio vaccines from the CDC schedule. I’ll get into all of that more later, as these suggested policy changes wouldn’t necessarily mean the physical elimination of vaccines, but it is still, as I like to say, plenty bad, man.
First, however, let’s do what I like to do in every post in this series: a list of what I predicted that RFK Jr. would do in February 2025, so that I can discuss where the revelations in this Reuters article fit in. I first put these into a formal “listicle” in this post, and I’ll update it now:
- Influence the Vaccine Court and the NVICP to compensate “vaccine injuries” that antivaxxers believe in but that are not supported by science. Failing to eliminate it completely in favor of letting plaintiffs sue vaccine manufacturers directly without having to go through the special Vaccine Court first, antivax lawyers have long wanted to undermine NVICP, in essence bankrupting it, by adding so many conditions to the “table” listing adverse events due to vaccines that are automatically compensated by the NVICP that the system collapses, thus putting pressure on Congress to “reform” (i.e. eliminate) the system to allow them to sue vaccine manufacturers directly without the extra step of the Vaccine Court, thus driving them out of the US market due to liability concerns.
- Co-opt the CDC to change its evidence-based policy-making apparatus to policy-based evidence-making designed to fuel antivax messaging. Over the last year and a half, I’ve provided multiple examples, and it’s only getting worse.
- Co-opt the NIH to direct research funds away from vaccines and towards studying “vaccine injury” and other antivax narratives (to support the policy-based evidence-making). Examples include defunding NIH grants to study mRNA vaccines, COVID-19, and the like. Similarly, putting antivaxxer David Geier in charge of a study to “find the causes of autism” is another example. (Spoiler alert: He’ll find that it’s the vaccines.)
- Remake ACIP as an antivax committee, in order to remove recommended vaccines from the CDC recommended immunization schedule and refuse to approve new vaccines. It was inarguable that he’d already done this; that is, until the legal ruling earlier this year that put a stay on RFK Jr.’s efforts to remake ACIP and rewrite the CDC recommended vaccination schedule. Whether that ruling will stand after appeal remains to be seen.
- Take control of the vaccine safety monitoring systems, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and the Vaccine Safetylink Database (VSD), to cherry-pick evidence designed to portray vaccines as dangerous. Under any other administration, I probably wouldn’t have been too bothered by the plan to consolidate VAERS with other drug safety databases into something called the Adverse Event Monitoring System (AEMS). However, this HHS is run by RFK Jr., a longtime antivaxxer; therefore, color me…suspicious…particularly given that HHS wants it to have a heavy contribution of AI to identify “injuries.”
- Co-opt the FDA to make approval of new vaccines more difficult and issue black-box warnings based on antivax fear-mongering for existing vaccines. It is unclear how this will proceed, given that, with Dr. Marty Makary being recently forced out as FDA Commissioner for, of all things, his refusal to approve vaping products, and Dr. Vinay Prasad having left as head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), the part of the FDA responsible for approving and regulating vaccines and biologics.
Now, let’s move on to the Reuters story.
RFK Jr. is, unsurprisingly, RFK Jr. when it comes to vaccines
One characteristic of the Trump White House, both in his first term and this one, is that it leaks like a sieve, and thank heaven for that. Reuters was able to get 16 current and former officials to speak on the record, albeit anonymously. The overall takeaway message of this report is summarized thusly:
The officials, from the U.S. health department and White House, shared details of internal discussions on condition of anonymity. Their first-hand accounts of Kennedy’s previously unreported efforts reveal a tenacious activist who has pushed through some of the biggest changes to U.S. vaccine policy in decades – and who sought to go much further than previously known to dismantle the status quo.
Again, as Dr. Offit pointed out and I point out every time I write about him, RFK Jr. is an antivax activist, and a fanatical one at that. He has been an antivax activist since at least 2005, when Salon.com and Rolling Stone, to their eternal shame, co-published a conspiracy-mongering bit of dreck written by him entitled Deadly Immunity. He’s also a lawyer and has become a politician. Of course he hid the true extent of his ambition to remake the US vaccine schedule from the public. He knew how unpopular his true views were. Indeed, even the watered-down version of what RFK Jr. was trying to accomplish was sufficiently unpopular among the public that the White House told him to cool it with the antivax rhetoric and initiatives before the midterms.
I’ve written before about how RFK Jr. wanted to “make America Denmark” in a great example of antivax policy-based evidence-making? Basically, his proposal was to change the CDC vaccination schedule to be the same as Denmark’s, not because of any science but simply because Denmark has way fewer vaccines on its health department-recommended schedule. It turns out that that was almost certainly a fallback position from what he really wanted to do:
Last summer, though, Kennedy and Spear had bigger ambitions, according to three people with direct knowledge of their plans: to eliminate the entire childhood schedule.
They wanted to tell families that the use of the vaccines for all 17 diseases could be left to “shared clinical decision-making,” meaning parents would decide with their healthcare providers which shots, if any, to give their children. They expected that state health officials and medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics would provide their own guidelines to fill the gap, the three people said.
The idea of abandoning the whole schedule alarmed several health officials, including then-FDA commissioner Marty Makary and Tracy Beth Høeg, one of his top deputies, four sources said. Makary and Høeg created a list of “core essential vaccines” in an effort to steer the health secretary away from the extreme path. They ranked the recommended immunizations in order of importance and showed which ones were also considered crucial by peer nations.
Spear in the above passage is Stefanie Spear, his closest advisor. RFK Jr. and Spear go way back to 2011, when they partnered together on an environmental website called Ecowatch, with Spear later joining RFK Jr.’s antivax org Children’s Health Defense in 2020 and then serving in 2024 as his press secretary for his presidential run. At HHS, according to Reuters, she is basically RFK Jr.’s spokesperson and “often speaks for Kennedy even when he is present,” with RFK Jr. having told his underlings to “run everything” through Spear.
In any event, who knew that the “make America Denmark” initiative for the CDC schedule was really the result of Makary and Høeg being appalled at what RFK Jr. really wanted to do and successfully talking him down…for the moment. Fortunately, because of the way that the “make America Denmark” vaccine schedule changes were made, they are currently, the new vaccine schedule has been put on hold by a federal judge as a result of a lawsuit by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups and professional societies. That’s good, for the moment, but it’s no guarantee that the new schedule won’t take effect as this case wends its way through the federal courts and additional legal rulings are made.
But let’s look at the proposal itself. Those with libertarian tendencies might ask: What’s so bad about it? Why does the federal government even create and update a recommended immunization schedule? For one thing, it’s to discourage exactly what RFK Jr. seems to want, namely a patchwork that can vary widely from state to state. After all, infectious disease does not respect state (or national) borders, and states vary widely in the resources they can afford to devote to public health. It is therefore good policy to harmonize the recommended vaccine schedule for the entire nation. Another issue that many might not be aware of, but the presence of a vaccine on the CDC schedule means that insurance companies have to cover that vaccine. Yes, states could pass laws requiring the coverage of vaccines on their recommended schedules, but, again, states vary widely in their ability and willingness to do that. Then, of course, there is the issue of the Vaccines for Children program, which covers children whose families might not be able to afford routine vaccines. Children on Medicaid are automatically eligible, as are uninsured and underinsured children, as well as Native American and Alaskan children. Vaccines for Children automatically covers “vaccines recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and approved by the CDC, which includes vaccines for children ages 18 years and younger.” What would happen to the Vaccines for Children program if the ACIP-recommended CDC schedule were eliminated in favor of a “parental freedom” model like this? I think you can guess the answer:
If ACIP votes to exclude a vaccine from the VFC, more than half of US kids would lose access to that immunization, said Offit, a former member of ACIP. That could deprive children of lifesaving vaccinations without an explicit ban.
This is, of course, an integral part of RFK Jr.’s plan. Also, if the CDC were to stop recommending vaccines and leave it to “shared decision-making,” he knows damned well that the end result will be a massive decline in vaccine uptake, which would be worse in some states than in others. States and professional societies are just not equipped to take up the slack if the CDC abandoned making and updating an evidence-based vaccine schedule.
Moreover, none of the pushback apparently stopped RFK Jr. from at least seriously considering removing some major vaccines from the schedule:
Still, the health secretary kept changing his mind on what to remove.
Kennedy and his advisers debated eliminating the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot in the fall, according to the three people. He did not move forward because of possible political blowback, with a measles outbreak raging in South Carolina at the time, they said.
Some of his other suggestions – including removing the polio vaccine from the schedule – were discarded after pushback from White House officials, the three people said. HHS spokeswoman Spencer said that removing MMR and polio shots “had never been considered.”
Again, you read that right. RFK Jr. wanted to remove the MMR vaccine from the schedule last fall, even as the largest outbreaks of measles this century had been raging all over the country since early 2025. You might wonder why on earth RFK Jr. would want to do something that, from a public health standpoint, is obviously such a disastrously stupid thing to do. If you know RFK Jr. you know why. As I will discuss in the next section, his belief in the disproven hypothesis that MMR (and other vaccines) cause autism is unshakeable and fanatical. As for the denials from HHS that removing the MMR and polio vaccines from the schedule “had never been considered,” let’s just say that lying liars lie. RFK Jr.’s history since 2005 makes it very plausible that he would want to use his power to get rid of the MMR vaccine from the schedule.
One of the strategies that I predicted that RFK Jr. would use to eliminate vaccines or, failing that, the vaccine schedule was that he would remake ACIP into an antivax committee. He did that, but ACIP has been basically irrelevant for several months after US District Court Judge Brian Murphy paused his reconstitution of the committee, ruling that he had violated federal law by making vaccine policy changes that were “arbitrary and capricious” and concluding that 13 of RFK Jr.’s handpicked ACIP members “appear distinctly unqualified.” In response, RFK Jr. simply rewrote the ACIP charter to broaden the qualifications needed from the previously required high degree of expertise in infectious diseases, vaccine safety and efficacy, and public health to include, well, cranks.
I will admit here that I did not foresee that RFK Jr., facing obstacles to reshaping ACIP to his will (and also running into just how incompetent the antivax cranks whom he appointed to ACIP turned out to be when given responsibility), would take direct personal control over dictating vaccine policy and the CDC’s vaccine schedule. I will have to update my list of strategies to account for that. Given the enormity of the Department that he runs, his focusing so much on vaccine policy personally should tell you that he is indeed a committed antivax ideologue. Indeed, The New York Times recently reported that RFK Jr. “demonstrated little interest in managing his sprawling department as he focuses on food and vaccine policies,” reporting that he is “single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.” He is often out of town, and when he is in town, his workday is not exactly what we would call long or hard, with HHS staff reporting that”he exercises at his gym before work, then usually arrives at about 10 a.m. and leaves by 4 p.m.” Basically, if the NYT reporting is accurate—and I have no reason to believe that it is not—other than for the issues of vaccines, pesticides, and food, HHS is running on autopilot. RFK Jr. angrily denies that he’s checked out, but, again, I don’t believe him. Lying liars lie.
Again, it’s RFK Jr. being RFK Jr. He is antivax.
Policy-based (and ideology-based) evidence making
One of the other big revelations from the Reuters report is just how far RFK Jr. wanted to go to generate “gold standard science”—yes, that’s sarcasm—supporting his idée fixe that vaccines cause autism, and, let me tell you, it’s further than even I had thought:
Early this year, Kennedy went to his director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, with a costly proposal, according to two officials familiar with the request: The research agency should spend $5 billion studying the link between vaccines and autism. That would have dedicated more than a tenth of the NIH’s annual budget to investigating a hypothesis already refuted by scientists worldwide.
Kennedy ultimately dropped the plan, which likely would have required congressional approval, after Bhattacharya convinced him the agency had dedicated enough resources to researching autism’s causes, including a $50 million effort launched in September, the officials said.
Again, you read that right. The total NIH yearly budget is less than $50 billion, and RFK Jr. wanted to devote over 10% of a yearly budget to “studying the link between vaccines and autism. It’s not clear from this report how he wanted to allocate this funding or over how many years, but, strictly on a basis of research initiatives suggested by science, this is akin to spending $5 billion on researching whether homeopathy or reiki works. (I know, I know, don’t give MAHA ideas, and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health has already funded such studies in its previous incarnation as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.) By way of comparison, the entire budget of the National Cancer Institute is on the order of $7 billion, meaning that RFK Jr. wanted to devote nearly as much funding to studying the nonexistent link between vaccines and autism as the NIH spends on researching cancer every year. Given the number of antivax cranks that RFK Jr. has hired (e.g., David Geier), I’m sure he could arrange for this money to go to friendly “scientists” who would produce the “gold standard science” he desires that appears to “prove” a link between vaccines and autism.
Even having failed to obtain such a massive amount of funding, RFK Jr. is still using the levers of power behind the scenes to try to chase a fantastical link between vaccines and autism:
Beginning this year, Spear and other Kennedy aides asked officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration numerous times for access to the FDA’s Sentinel BEST safety system to help HHS staff conduct studies, including into rates of autism and other conditions among vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, according to four people familiar with the request.
The database is designed to monitor the safety of FDA-approved products including vaccines after they hit the market by tracking the health insurance claims and medical records of more than 100 million Americans. Access to such systems, which contain sensitive information, is highly restricted even within HHS, typically limited to a small number of career officials and experts.
The FDA initially refused Spear and other aides’ requests for access out of concern that Kennedy and Spear were on a “fishing expedition” for information to back up their autism argument, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Again, this falls under my prediction that RFK Jr. would weaponize vaccine safety monitoring systems in order to manufacture apparent evidence supporting his beliefs that vaccines cause autism, as well as all manner of harms, such as neurological and autoimmune conditions. It’s very similar to what David Geier did over 20 years ago when he and his late father tried to go beyond their approved protocol in accessing the Vaccine Safety Datalink in order to link protected health information (PHI)—i.e., patient-identifiable data—with autism, leading
the Kaiser Permanente Northern California institutional review board to suspend their study. Only this time it’s at the federal level, ordered by the HHS Secretary himself.
Again, I predicted activities of this sort from the very beginning: that RFK Jr. would try to hijack the NIH, as well as vaccine safety monitoring systems, to manufacture evidence to support his antivax views.
What this story tells us beyond (yet again) that RFK Jr. is rabidly antivax
An interesting question has popped up regarding the role of Marty Makary and Tracy Beth Høeg in, if this story is to be believed, talking RFK Jr. down to a much “less radical” option than going full “health freedom” libertarian and just scrapping the CDC immunization schedule altogether. This question comes from the reaction of myself and fellow SBM blogger to Dr. Jeremy Faust’s Substack post, These guys did a good thing on vaccines recently. It’s important that we acknowledge it, the “these guys” being Marty Makary and “Podcast Jay” Bhattacharya. Quoth Dr. Faust:
Dr. Makary and his deputy, Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, managed, according to Reuters, to “steer the health secretary away from the extreme path” on the changes to the pediatric vaccine schedule last year. In that context, their aiding and abetting of the unfortunate changes that were made (before a court blocked them), while still troubling, might now be understood as harm reduction.
Separately, Dr. Bhattacharya convinced Kennedy that the NIH need not spend $5 billion on a desperate attempt to link vaccines and autism.
Standing up for vaccines is, in Secretary Kennedy’s HHS, a fireable offense. So, these were important contributions, worthy of acknowledgment and praise. Brave actions are all the more important to highlight.
Dr. Faust even sent emails to Makary and Bhattacharya saying “nicely done” and “well done,” respectively. I’m going to be honest here. I’m torn on this one. Makary and Bhattacharya have done so much damage to public health over the last several years, both as social media influencers before Trump was elected again and then as officials in the second Trump administration, that I’m hard-pressed to give them much of the benefit of the doubt here, feeling similar to, for example, our very own Dr. Jonathan Howard reposted this on Bluesky:
Nor were Pandemic Index or Dr. Howard alone:
In fairness, Dr. Faust made the point that dropping the $5 billion plan to research vaccines as a cause of autism happened last fall, before President Trump told RFK Jr. to cool it with the antivax stuff until after the midterms, which is true. However, the “make America Denmark” pivot happened earlier this year, after the White House had started to become alarmed about RFK Jr.’s antivax activities. In any case, Dr. Faust made the argument that he was trying to incentivize good behavior. Somehow, I doubt that patting Makary and Bhattacharya on the heads for doing the right thing in this one case is much of an incentive.
In fact, one wonders—certainly I do—whether Makary and Bhattacharya themselves were among the 16 current and former officials who spoke with Reuters. It is certainly not implausible to suspect that they were both worried about their reputations after their time with the Trump administration came to an end, and that is why they acted the way they did in the incidents described in the Reuters report. It is also plausible that, when a Reuters reporter came sniffing around, they saw an opportunity to get their story out in such a way that they come off looking pretty good. It wouldn’t even surprise me if Tracy Beth Høeg herself was the one who told the reporter that she and Makary had come up with a list of “essential vaccines” and the idea of making America Denmark in order to forestall what RFK Jr. really wanted to do from the beginning when nominated as HHS Secretary. Certainly, such a scenario is at least very plausible. Makary and Podcast Jay are nothing, if not highly opportunistic and cynical, and Podcast Jay has been reported as telling an NIH scientist who asked him a question that he views his job as political. In the end, I think my opinion falls more towards Pandemic Index’s response to Dr. Faust:
The way I look at it is that, in their quest for power and continued access to it, Makary and Podcast Jay were willing to go pretty far, but not quite as far as eliminating the vaccine schedule and wasting $5 billion trying to prove that vaccines cause autism. I suppose that’s something, but, weighed against their history, it’s not much. I also like to look at it this way. Deeds, not words, matter more. If, for instance, Makary were to take concrete actions to repudiate the actions he took as FDA Commissioner that damaged public health, I’d be more willing to forgive and, warily, let him back into the fold under very careful supervision until he fully proved himself. As for Podcast Jay, the only way he could accomplish that would be to resign. By serving as NIH Director and acting CDC Director, he is still deeply embedded in and complicit with all the Trump administration’s non-science-based policies demolishing federal public health programs.
Finally, it’s rather interesting to see how RFK Jr.’s old antivax org Children’s Health Defense reacted to this story. Let’s just say that they are mostly pleased, entitling their “rebuttal,” Reuters Ran a Hit Piece on RFK Jr. — and Revealed How Hard He’s Worked to Reform Vaccine Policy. CHD cited antivax physician Dr. Meryl Nass, who posted a marked up version of the Reuters report with a headline proclaiming that “LOOONG *Reuters* hit piece against RFK, Jr. will actually endear him to his followers. RFK did not sell out, as some have claimed,” Nass also noting (of course!) that “James C. Smith, the CHAIRMAN of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, is a member of the Board of Pfizer,” also telling CHD:“RFK did not sell out, as some have claimed,” Nass wrote. She separately told The Defender that the Reuters report is the first article she has seen “that discusses many of the efforts that Kennedy has made that have been thwarted.”
“We can see that he has many enemies within the White House staff and the HHS staff, and this article gives us a peek into the cauldron in which he has found himself,” Nass said.
Meanwhile, antivax attorney Aaron Siri was also not unhappy:
Attorney Aaron Siri, cited in the story for his role advising Kennedy on vaccine-related issues, agreed. He told The Defender he was “pleased” with the story’s coverage of Kennedy’s efforts to reform the VICP.
Reuters acknowledges that Kennedy “has pushed through some of the biggest changes to U.S. vaccine policy in decades” and has “sought to go much further than previously known to dismantle the status quo.”
Wheels within wheels. Now I’m wondering if RFK Jr. was perfectly happy to let this story be published because it serves to signal to his followers who are disappointed that he hasn’t gone far enough yet dismantling the federal vaccine system that he’s really still fighting hard to implement an antivax policy agenda but has been stymied by “deep state” pro-vaccine ideologues.
I’ll stop now, as I don’t want to risk going down a rabbit hole and risk becoming that which I oppose, a bat-guano-level conspiracy theorist. What I do want to conclude by saying is that RFK Jr was definitely coming for your vaccines. It’s just that it turned out to be more difficult than he thought it would be, which is why he has disappointed his antivax followers so far. But he’s still trying. He’s likely just laying low until after the midterms, after which he will most definitely be coming for your vaccines again, his endgame being to eliminate the vaccine schedule and to eliminate the sale and use of as many vaccines as he can before 2029 dawns. As for all of the denials by RFK Jr. that he’s antivax or that he wants to eliminate vaccines, well, lying liars lie.