RFK Jr.: How to destroy vaccination

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

(Image credit: Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

published 23 June 2025

"America's anti-vaccine era is truly beginning," said Katherine J. Wu in The Atlantic. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist, last week abruptly removed all 17 members from the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice (ACIP), which vets scientific data to help set vaccine policy and determine which vaccines insurers must cover. Kennedy promised during his confirmation hearing to leave the committee alone, but he suddenly claimed its members had to go because they would "enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy." He's appointed eight new members, most of whom are known for questioning vaccine safety. The ACIP largely determines our "future preparedness against infectious disease," and appointing anti-vaxxers to a respected committee is "an especially effective way to sanewash extremism." Scientific consensus and government policy are now diverging, and "Americans may soon have to choose between following the science and following what their nation's leaders say."

Kennedy's hijacking of this committee will only give his critics more fuel, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Two of his appointees served as paid expert witnesses in lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, and though Kennedy described one as a George Washington University professor, the school said he hasn't taught there in eight years. Another is an MIT business professor with no medical credentials who has vocally opposed Covid vaccines. Kennedy argued that re-making the ACIP "would restore public trust in vaccines," but "he's on a path to do the opposite."

"He's playing the long game," said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. Kennedy aims to reduce the demand for, and supply of, vaccines, "and he's going about it in a perfectly rational way." Insurers are required to cover shots recommended by the ACIP, so scaling back its approvals could threaten children's and adults' access to free vaccines, making shots available only to those who can pay. But we'll all suffer if vaccination rates for measles, polio, chicken pox, and other illnesses fall below herd immunity, and diminished demand discourages manufacturers from developing vaccines for new threats like bird flu. "We've just hit Code Red," said Michael Mina in The New York Times. Kennedy is shattering "the firewall between science and politics," using pseudoscience to cancel mRNA vaccine development, falsely link autism to vaccines, and normalize his quackery. The consequences "will be viral: a resurgence of dangerous infectious diseases."