RFK Jr. Lied His Way Into Office and American Health Is the Victim
He is pushing quackery as science as health secretary
Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, chairs and is the face of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP). A physician, Cassidy has been a vocal advocate of vaccines and even ran a vaccination campaign in his home state. “After seeing patients die from vaccine preventable diseases,” Cassidy said in a speech, “I dedicated much of my time to vaccine research and immunization programs. ... Put simply, vaccines save lives.”
He also cast a key vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a fervent anti-vaccine advocate, as HHS secretary last year.
It’s not like Cassidy can claim ignorance of Kennedy’s track record. Cassidy and every other Republican who voted for Kennedy had all the information they needed to see that he would be a disaster for public health in the United States, from his decades-long crusade against vaccines to his history of fevered conspiracism. Cassidy acknowledged that he studied Kennedy’s record “exhaustively” and took his decision “very seriously.” According to Cassidy, Kennedy “has been insistent that he just wants good science to ensure safety” and claimed he would “work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems.” Cassidy said Kennedy also promised to “maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes” and that the CDC “will not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism.”
Kennedy has broken every single one of these promises.
Now that Kennedy is working to systematically dismantle America’s public health infrastructure from within, some of his enablers like Cassidy are horrified. But they have only themselves to blame. Meanwhile, the rest of us suffer the consequences of installing into our federal government’s top health position someone who isn’t merely unqualified but actively contemptuous of science and medicine.
Institutionalizing Vaccine Hesitancy
According to Cassidy, Kennedy promised to maintain the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a powerful body responsible for making recommendations about who should get vaccines and when. Last summer, Kennedy fired all 17 members of that committee and added eight new members—some of whom, such as Robert W. Malone, have been extremely critical of vaccines. Cassidy complained that these members “lack experience studying new technologies such as mRNA vaccines, and may even have a preconceived bias against them.” This is a severe understatement.
Under the heading “Autism and Vaccines” on the CDC website, one of the key points is: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Setting aside that it is not possible to prove a negative, this claim is directly contradicted by a heading just below it, which reads: “Vaccines do not cause autism.*” The asterisk leads to a footnote explaining that this claim remains on the site only because of a deal with the Senate HELP Committee chair—in other words, Kennedy kept his promise to Cassidy by technical compliance while hollowing out the meaning of the statement entirely.
American parents who want information about childhood vaccinations will now find two starkly contradictory messages from the CDC—the old message that there’s no proven link between common childhood vaccines and autism, and the new one that declares, “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
South Carolina is in the middle of its largest measles outbreak since the disease was eliminated over two decades ago. Nearly 1,000 people have been infected and 21 have been hospitalized. Cases of measles in North Carolina, Washington, and California have been linked to South Carolina. There was also an outbreak in Texas last year, which led to two deaths. For years, Kennedy has argued that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine—which most American children receive—can cause autism.
The U.S. might lose its measles elimination status when the Pan American Health Organization meets in April and makes a decision. CDC Principal Deputy Director Dr. Ralph Abraham has downplayed the significance of the outbreak: “It’s just the cost of doing business,” he said, “with our borders being somewhat porous.” But measles is spreading domestically—it isn’t primarily a border issue. It’s a vaccine issue: in 2025, the CDC found that 97% of the people who got measles were unvaccinated. Abraham’s response? “We have these communities that choose to be unvaccinated. That’s their personal freedom.” But these Americans are putting others at risk by refusing the vaccination. Kennedy echoes this claim when he says the decision to vaccinate children is a “personal one” because there is “a lot of mistrust of the vaccines.” Kennedy would know—he’s spent his career fueling that mistrust.
It would be bad enough if Kennedy were merely prioritizing a reckless endorsement of personal freedom over public health. But he has a long history of being the most prominent source of anti-vaccine propaganda in the country. He has only tempered his rhetoric due to obvious political constraints—as late as August 2024, Kennedy stated unequivocally, “Autism is caused by vaccines.” At a time when America desperately needed a champion for vaccination, it got the precise opposite—a lifelong anti-vaccine crusader running the nation’s public health apparatus.
Manufacturing a Public Health Crisis
Kennedy has overseen drastic changes to public health policy in the United States. On Jan. 5, the HHS released a memo announcing a sweeping shift in routine vaccine recommendations for children. The number of targeted diseases has been slashed from 17 to 11, while the number of routine vaccines has been cut from 13 to 7. The six vaccines no longer recommended for all children in the U.S. are for rotavirus, COVID-19, influenza, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and meningococcal disease.
While vaccines will still be covered by insurance, the decision to rescind recommendations will likely lead to lower levels of vaccination; given Kennedy’s record, it’s reasonable to think this is the goal. State and local governments could loosen vaccine requirements for school attendance to align with federal guidance—or even follow Florida’s lead and try to eliminate them entirely. There will likely be more parents consulting with doctors over which vaccines to take, which means going through an extra step to choose vaccination. That might not be entirely bad if it leads parents to make more informed and independent decisions. But conflicting messages from state health authorities and the federal government will lead to public confusion. It would have been far better if the government had simply gotten out of the business of issuing guidance rather than hijacking an official channel to inject quackery in the public discourse.
On Jan. 2, HHS published the reasoning behind the significant reduction in recommended childhood vaccinations, in the form of an assessment that compares the U.S.’s immunization schedule to other countries. This document repeatedly cited Denmark—which “immunizes children against 10 diseases with a total of 30 doses”—as a model for the U.S. to emulate. The U.S. and Denmark are now outliers among peer countries in the low number of diseases they inoculate against.
It makes little sense to use Denmark as a model for U.S. public health policy. Denmark has a population of just six million compared to the U.S.’s 342 million, and the two countries have completely different demographics, cultural characteristics, disease profiles, and healthcare systems. Denmark achieves vaccination rates exceeding 95% for its core vaccines—but it does so as a small, homogeneous nation with a deep cultural trust in public health institutions that the U.S. cannot simply import.
But Kennedy isn’t interested in the type of exhaustive review that would normally precede such a drastic change in public health policy—the desired outcome (fewer childhood vaccinations) took precedence over the evidence. In December, Trump ordered HHS to consider aligning the immunization schedule with “best practices from peer, developed countries.” Less than a month later, HHS issued guidance calling for a sharp reduction in childhood vaccines.
Vaccine hesitancy has surged in the U.S. over the past two decades—in 2001, 94% of Americans regarded childhood vaccinations as very or extremely important, a proportion which collapsed to 69% by 2024. Now that the U.S.’s top public health official is an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who has spent decades fearmongering about the risks posed by vaccines, this decline in trust is likely to accelerate.
Kennedy’s irresponsibility is not new: During the COVID pandemic, Kennedy said unvaccinated Americans were worse off—meaning more persecuted—than Jews during the Holocaust. He claimed that the Covid vaccine is the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Partisanship was a major predictor of vaccination status during the pandemic, and the mortality and hospitalization rates for unvaccinated Americans were far higher than for those who received the shot. Imagine the catastrophic consequences if Kennedy had been in charge of the country’s public health during the pandemic—or how disastrous it will be if there is another pandemic during his tenure.
As vaccination rates are declining across the country, the ongoing measles outbreaks show us the future of Kennedy’s policies. MMR coverage has fallen to 92.5% nationally, below the 95% threshold necessary to stop the transmission of measles (just 10 states have coverage over 95%). It’s no wonder that the U.S. is suffering its largest measles outbreak in decades. MMR coverage decreased among kindergarteners in the 2024-2025 school year, as did coverage for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (DTaP), and varicella.
Polio coverage has dropped as well, and is now at 92.5%. Kennedy’s new ACIP chair, Dr. Kirk Milhoan, says the U.S. is prioritizing “individual autonomy,” and he questions the value of polio vaccination: “As you look at polio, we need to not be afraid to consider that we are in a different time now than we were then.” He said it’s time for an “evaluation of whether this is worthwhile of taking a risk for a vaccine or not.” The eradication of polio in the U.S. was one of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century. Parents no longer had to confront the horrors of the disease, which killed thousands of children every year and left many more paralyzed. With Kennedy in charge at HHS, the risk of polio and many other diseases spreading once again in the U.S. is increasing by the day.
Destroying America’s Public Health Infrastructure
Kennedy’s assault on vaccination policy is only part of the picture. He has simultaneously hollowed out the institutional infrastructure that makes any public health response possible.
Beyond firing all of ACIP’s members and installing vaccine skeptics as replacements in the committee, Kennedy’s HHS also announced firings, resignations, and layoffs resulting in a “total downsizing from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees.” While it might make sense to streamline the department’s workforce, we have ample evidence that Kennedy cannot be trusted to make these decisions on the basis of sound scientific reasoning. In August, Kennedy fired CDC Director Susan Monarez just weeks after she had been confirmed by the Senate, leading to the resignation of other top CDC officials. Monarez was forced out when she refused to accept changes to vaccine protocols from ACIP, or to fire leaders at the CDC. These officials were part of a general exodus of experienced scientists and civil servants from public health agencies over the past year.
Officials who haven’t left or been forced out are just being ignored. Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned as head of its National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases after Monarez’s firing, said Kennedy hadn’t asked for any input from the center: “No subject matter expert from the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases has ever briefed the secretary on anything. We have not briefed him about vaccines. We have not briefed him about measles. We have not briefed him about Covid.”
Weeks before Kennedy ousted Monarez, HHS announced that it was terminating 22 research projects focused on the development of mRNA—the revolutionary technology that enabled the creation of the COVID vaccines and saved millions of lives. Not only did Kennedy cancel $500 million worth of mRNA projects, but HHS also announced that “no new mRNA-based projects will be initiated.” Thanks to mRNA research, the COVID vaccines were developed and administered more quickly than any vaccine in history. Instead of building upon this research to prepare for future pandemics, Kennedy claims that HHS is “moving beyond the limitations of mRNA and investing in better solutions.”
“We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” Kennedy said. But it has been clear for decades that Kennedy has his own ideas about what constitutes science and expertise. He believes Wi-Fi causes cancer and that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. He claimed that Covid was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while the “people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” His standards for evidence have always been warped by paranoid conspiracism. In his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy claimed that COVID ushered in an age of “medical totalitarianism” in the U.S. and accused Fauci of a “coup d’état against democracy” and a “pre-planned demolition of the American Constitution.” We can presume that the irony—given his current boss—is lost on Kennedy.
Kennedy’s defining obsession has always been what he regards as the immense dangers posed by vaccines. His promises that he just wants “evidence-based science and medicine” are as hollow as the promises he made to Cassidy. It’s no coincidence that the first year of Kennedy’s tenure has resulted in a drastic reduction in the number of recommended vaccines and the elimination of mRNA research. Kennedy’s HHS is focusing on what it regards as promising frontiers of research, such as a “comprehensive assessment of the causes of autism, including investigations on plausible biologic mechanisms and potential causal links.” As Kennedy has purged career scientists and civil servants from HHS, he has promoted anti-vaccine ideologues and lackeys to positions of power in the agency. He has already inflicted severe harm on America’s public health, and he’s only been in charge for a year. It’s chilling to imagine what damage three more years will reveal.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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"Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a fervent anti-vaccine advocate"... Just awful to see you run this trope. He is his father's son, a reluctant—tried to decline—witness and ultimately voice in the wilderness. In his case, for families plunged into vaccine-injury terrain; newly traumatized families being gaslighted to boot. The making of a real live horror movie families are living right here right now.
In the same vein, He did not want to look at the evidence that Sirhan did not fire the bullet that killed his father but in deference to his father's dear friend, Paul Schrade (who also got shot that day) who pressed him, RFKJr did as he was asked to do and read the Robert Kennedy coroner's report. Once you have seen it, you cannot unsee it. That is RFKJr's life. Walk a mile in his moccasins. He has been tempered and honed for the magnitude of what would be asked of him in this life.
Rfkjr is 1 thing & 1 thing only: Rfkjr is a American Death Maker.