In recent months, the United States has found itself in the throes of a public health crisis that few could have predicted just a year ago. At the center of this storm stands Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose controversial tenure as head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has drawn fierce scrutiny from politicians, scientists, and medical professionals alike. His longstanding skepticism toward vaccines and public statements that contradict decades of scientific research have set off alarms across the nation’s health infrastructure, as reported by MedCity News, Tribune News Service, and The Conversation.
From the very beginning, Kennedy’s appointment was mired in controversy. Senators from both sides of the aisle grilled him for eight hours during his confirmation hearings, expressing deep skepticism about his anti-vaccine past. Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician and chair of the Senate HELP Committee, voiced what many were thinking when he said, “Your past of undermining confidence in vaccines with unfounded or misleading arguments concerns me.” According to MedCity News, Kennedy’s history of contradicting the overwhelming scientific consensus—particularly the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism—cast a long shadow over his suitability for the role.
Despite these concerns, Kennedy managed to reassure enough senators to secure his confirmation. He insisted during his hearing, “I have never been anti-vaxx,” even though just two years earlier, in a Fox News interview, he had declared, “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” This contradiction did not go unnoticed by lawmakers or the public, but Kennedy’s promises to set aside his personal views in favor of evidence-based policy ultimately swayed a majority.
However, as MedCity News and Tribune News Service detail, the optimism surrounding Kennedy’s appointment quickly faded. Just six months into his tenure, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views began to shape federal policymaking in ways that many experts describe as aggressively detrimental. In June 2025, he made the unprecedented move of firing the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), replacing its members with his own hand-picked allies known for their skepticism toward vaccines.
The new ACIP wasted no time in recommending the removal of thimerosal, a vaccine preservative that Kennedy has long targeted despite its proven safety. The decision, based on what many experts call “hocus-pocus data,” has had immediate and alarming effects. As The Wall Street Journal reported, American parents are now more uncertain than ever about vaccinating their children, fueling a nationwide decline in immunization rates.
The consequences of this shift are already visible. The United States is experiencing a 33-year high in measles cases—a disease that was declared eliminated in the country in 2000. Public health leaders warn that such a resurgence signals a dangerous regression, one that could open the door to the return of other preventable diseases like polio. The scientific consensus remains firm: vaccines are safe and effective, and their benefits far outweigh the risks.
Current research continues to reinforce this point. A recent Danish study involving 1.2 million children over two decades found no increased health risks from aluminum ingredients in vaccines, a finding that childhood vaccination experts hail as the best available evidence on the subject. Yet Kennedy dismissed the study as “a deceitful propaganda stunt,” a response rooted more in rhetoric than in scientific evidence, according to MedCity News.
Kennedy’s approach has not stopped at policy changes within the CDC. He has also publicly attacked the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) for its guidance recommending COVID-19 vaccination for children under age two. As Tribune News Service recounts, Kennedy accused the AAP of “kowtowing to corporate benefactors while ignoring the clear evidence that such vaccines are safe for children and can prevent serious illness.” This stance stands in sharp contrast to the CDC’s own guidance, which under Kennedy’s leadership rescinded its previous recommendation for vaccinating young children against COVID-19.
Critics argue that Kennedy’s anti-vaccine outlook is not just a personal quirk but a public health hazard. The Tribune News Service editorial contends that his actions are “detrimental to public health” and that his Make America Healthy Again movement, while sometimes raising legitimate concerns about the pharmaceutical industry’s profit motives, ultimately undermines the very scientific practices that safeguard the nation’s health. As the editorial puts it, “The solution to a system incentivized to occasionally misuse science for its own ends is not to simply reject science altogether.”
One of the most damaging aspects of Kennedy’s leadership, according to his critics, is his conflation of pharmaceutical companies with independent professional organizations like the AAP. While it is true that the pharmaceutical industry has a history of questionable practices—Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis being a notorious example—equating these companies with medical associations that rely on rigorous peer-reviewed research is, as the Tribune News Service notes, a sign of “deeply conspiratorial thinking.”
Kennedy’s influence extends beyond rhetoric and policy. His decision to exclude recommendations for childhood vaccinations from federal guidelines has far-reaching implications. As Tribune News Service points out, this exclusion affects insurance coverage, making it harder for parents who do wish to immunize their children to access vaccines. By cutting funding for vaccine research and narrowing parental choice, Kennedy is, in effect, making decisions on behalf of millions of families—a move that critics say will lead to “predictable and preventable illnesses and deaths among children and adults.”
Fact-checking Kennedy’s claims has become a full-time job for many in the medical community. The Conversation highlights several of his recent public statements that are factually incorrect. For example, on June 12, 2025, Kennedy told Fox News viewers that 97% of federal vaccine advisers are corrupt and that children receive 92 mandatory shots—both claims that do not stand up to scrutiny. In reality, the typical number of required shots is about 30 to 32, and no state mandates COVID-19 vaccination for children.
Moreover, Kennedy’s assertion that only COVID-19 vaccines have been tested against placebos is simply wrong. Of 378 controlled vaccine trials catalogued by researchers, 195 used placebo controls, including the landmark 1954 Salk polio trial involving more than 600,000 children. The U.S. also operates multiple surveillance systems—such as the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and the Vaccine Safety Datalink—that monitor hundreds of millions of vaccine doses for rare side effects, making vaccines among the most closely watched medical interventions in history.
On the issue of conflicts of interest, Kennedy’s oft-repeated claim that 97% of CDC vaccine advisers are compromised is based on a misreading of a 2009 federal audit. That audit covered 17 different CDC committees and found that 97% of disclosure forms contained only routine paperwork errors, not hidden financial ties. According to Reuters, only 41% of the dismissed ACIP members had received more than token payments from drugmakers, and all were required to divest relevant stock and recuse themselves from conflicted votes.
Finally, Kennedy’s warnings about “immune deregulation” allegedly caused by vaccines have no basis in immunology. As infectious disease experts point out, vaccines actually train the immune system, while diseases like measles can wipe out immune memory and leave children vulnerable to other infections for years. Preventing these diseases protects, rather than harms, the immune system.
The evidence is overwhelming: vaccines have averted hundreds of millions of illnesses and saved more than a million lives in the past three decades. Under Kennedy’s leadership, however, falling vaccination rates, preventable disease outbreaks, and the dismissal of scientific research now threaten to reverse decades of public health progress. As the nation grapples with these consequences, the debate over science, leadership, and trust in public health has never felt more urgent—or more consequential.
