In April 2023, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his presidential bid in Boston, promising to “Make America Healthy Again.” Since becoming President Donald Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has made a mockery of this promise, undermining decades of public health consensus.

His tenure recently reached its lowest point, with the explosive departure of Director Susan Monarez from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Four other officials left the CDC over Kennedy’s leadership, with one accusing him of “weaponization of public health.”

Kennedy’s gutting of the U.S. vaccine infrastructure is his most glaring failure. A longtime vaccine “skeptic,” Kennedy has spent much of his career spreading vaccine misinformation concerning safety and long-term side effects. In 2005, he published an infamous article in Rolling Stone and Salon titled “Deadly Immunity.” The piece argued a common anti-vaccine trope, supposedly identifying a link between vaccines and autism. Though this piece was later retracted, the damage was done.

Public health experts were aghast at Kennedy’s recent attacks on mRNA vaccines and his decision to cut $500 million in funding for future mRNA projects. It is rare in politics to find a position that requires almost no nuance; Kennedy’s policy is guided by pure misinformation. As Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, put it, Kennedy’s rhetoric on vaccines is “simply not true.”

Kennedy has found virtually zero public health professionals to support his crusade against vaccines. Instead of reflecting on why this might be, in June, he fired all 17 members of the U.S. Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

ACIP was responsible for creating U.S. vaccine policy, providing the framework for routine vaccines. Kennedy said the complete shake-up of ACIP was “necessary to re-establish public confidence in vaccine science.” The truth is likely much simpler; Kennedy deemed it necessary to remove the qualified experts previously sitting on ACIP to free his hand on vaccines.

Kennedy’s new ACIP is busy vandalizing public health. A conference at the end of June on the influenza vaccine saw the new ACIP vote to recommend that Americans get flu vaccines only in single doses, free of a mercury-derived preservative called “thimerosal.” Concerns around thimerosal are rooted in historic misinformation on a debunked link between vaccines and autism. Public health experts at the conference recognized as much; Dr. Jason Goldman, the head of the American College of Physicians, said during the public comments section of the conference, “Many statements have been made today without support of science or evidence but merely opinion.”

Vaccine confidence in the United States has fallen since the COVID pandemic — primarily thanks to the misinformation peddled by Kennedy and his ilk — and this is having a real effect on communal immunity for preventable diseases like measles. The percentage of U.S. school-age children receiving the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine fell from 95 percent in 2019 to 92 percent in 2023. Dr Robert H. Shmerling, a senior faculty editor at Harvard Health Publishing, wrote recently that the 92% figure is below the standard required to protect individuals and their communities from measles.

Kennedy has repeatedly undermined the MMR vaccine. In an interview with Fox News in March, he falsely claimed that the MMR vaccine led to “deaths every year” and spread misinformation about how quickly the protection from the vaccine fades.

Only a few weeks later, a second child died in Texas after contracting measles. This prompted Kennedy to issue an overdue corrective: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” As Texas officials declared the outbreak in Texas over in late August, Jennifer Nuzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, said the outbreak was controlled “despite” Kennedy.

From flu season to containing a measles outbreak, Kennedy has proven himself utterly unfit to lead the department tasked with offering Americans safe and transparent advice on vaccinations. He and his unqualified ACIP will continue to put their own ideology above the vast scientific consensus. It is well past time for the adults to be brought back to the Department of Health and Human Services; may Kennedy’s tenure be as short as his presidential campaign.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Mackenzie France is the director of strategy at the Pinsker Centre. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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