Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s relentless anti-vaccine agenda is getting reined in as Republicans warn that further attacks on lifesaving vaccines could harm the party during the midterms, according to a report by The Washington Post.
The Post reported Wednesday that Kennedy’s hand-selected committee of vaccine advisors—who share his anti-vaccine views—have abruptly abandoned plans to attack mRNA vaccines in an upcoming meeting.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is scheduled to meet March 18–19. While no agenda has been published for the meeting, a Federal Register notice stated that the meeting would include discussion of “COVID-19 vaccine injuries,” and may include a vote to change the CDC’s vaccine recommendations. Sources close to the committee told the Post that Kennedy’s advisors have been looking for ways to remove mRNA COVID-19 vaccines entirely from federal recommendations. And according to clearly stated goals in a meeting of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine allies earlier this week, the long-term goal is to eliminate all childhood vaccine recommendations and remove the shots from the market.
Kennedy’s anti-vaccine record
Kennedy has long railed against mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and mRNA vaccine technology in general. He has falsely claimed that COVID-19 vaccines have killed children and that the vaccines are the “deadliest vaccine[s] ever made.” In May of last year, Kennedy unilaterally restricted the use of COVID-19 vaccines in children and during pregnancy. The decision conflicts with scientific evidence and was made without consulting ACIP, which at the time was populated by esteemed vaccine experts.
In June, Kennedy fired all 17 ACIP members and began installing anti-vaccine allies. In August, he unilaterally terminated nearly $500 million in funding for the development of mRNA vaccines that could thwart future pandemic threats. And in September, Kennedy’s new ACIP nixed the CDC’s general recommendation for COVID-19 vaccines and replaced it with guidance that people aged 6–64 get vaccinated based on “shared clinical decision-making.” One of the new ACIP members who heads a working group on COVID-19 vaccines, Retsef Levi—whose expertise is operations management—has publicly stated that he believes COVID-19 vaccines should be taken off the market.
Kennedy’s plans were only getting started. The staunch anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist made his most brazen attack on vaccines in January, slashing the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule from 17 immunizations down to 11 to be in line with recommendations of Denmark, a much smaller country with a relatively homogenous population and universal health care. The US is now an outlier among peer nations for recommending so few childhood vaccines.
Conspiracy theories and political risks
While these and other changes to vaccine recommendations by Kennedy and his underlings have been widely decried by medical and public health experts, they are still not enough for his rabid anti-vaccine followers, who, in no uncertain terms, want all vaccines abolished.
On Monday, the MAHA Institute, a think tank stemming from Kennedy’s Make America Health Again movement, held an event brimming with prominent anti-vaccine activists. Those include Del Bigtree, a prominent conspiracy theorist who leads the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network, and Mary Holland, who is CEO of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy founded.
The event was focused on an alleged “Massive Epidemic of Vaccine Injury,” a nonexistent health crisis the MAHA institute wants to sell to the American public, branded as the catchy term “Mevi.” The six-hour event was essentially an extravaganza of anti-vaccine talking points, with false claims, misinformation, and disinformation about immunizations, including that vaccines cause autism and autoimmune diseases and COVID-19 vaccines are deadly.
At the start of the event, MAHA Institute President Mark Gordon laid out his grand belief that the medical community has orchestrated an elaborate, global, decades-long conspiracy to hide the dangers of vaccines, which he called poisons, and falsify data showing their benefits. “Vaccines are the greatest scam in medical history,” one of his slides proclaimed.
He concluded that “the childhood vaccination schedule needs to be eliminated and all vaccines need to be removed from the market.”
While Gordon and the other speakers were not concerned about the popularity or political ramifications of their beliefs, the Trump administration appears to be. The Post noted that Trump’s top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, has concluded that vaccine skepticism is “rejected by most voters,” and skepticism of vaccine requirements is “politically risky.” His polling data, like many others, have found broad support for vaccines and vaccine requirements. Fabrizio warned in a December memo that politicians supporting eliminating vaccine recommendations “will pay a price in the election.”
