RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine crusade comes under fire

What happened

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced mounting resistance to his anti-vaccine campaign this month, after a contentious congressional hearing in which he faced sharp bipartisan questioning about the chaos he has created in the nation’s public health agencies. Kennedy was combative during the three-hour hearing, as he was grilled about his contradictory statements on vaccines and accused of lying in his confirmation hearings when he vowed not to restrict vaccine access. “You promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.). “Since then, I’ve grown deeply concerned.” Kennedy doubled down on false claims that mRNA vaccines are “deadly” and dismissed concerns about people being unable to get Covid vaccines as “crazy talk.” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Kennedy is deluded by “junk science and fringe conspiracies,” and warned, “Kids are going to die because of it.”

The Senate health committee was set to hear testimony from Susan Monarez, whom Kennedy fired just 28 days after she was confirmed as CDC director. Monarez has accused Kennedy of waging “a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public health system and vaccine protections.” She said she was forced out after refusing his demand that she rubber-stamp in advance the recommendations of a vaccine panel Kennedy has stocked with people with anti-vaccine views. Four top CDC officials resigned over her ouster and other Kennedy actions, which include firing the CDC’s entire 17-member vaccine advisory panel, canceling $500 million in research on mRNA vaccines, and severely limiting access to Covid shots. More than 20 health associations and medical groups and nine former CDC directors have called on Kennedy to resign; the latter said his assault on science “should alarm every American.”

In Florida, the anti-vaxxer Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said the state would become the first in the nation to end vaccine mandates for schoolchildren. He called Covid vaccines “poison” and likened the mandates to slavery. President Trump publicly backed Kennedy but expressed unease with growing restrictions on vaccines. “I think you have to be very careful,” he said. “Pure and simple, they work.”

What the editorials said

Kennedy’s quackery puts every American “at risk,” said The Philadelphia Inquirer. In just months this “snake oil salesman” has peddled misinformation about lifesaving vaccines, cited studies that do not exist, “gutted” medical research, and replaced federal experts “with unqualified lackeys.” His “willful pigheadedness” was on full display in the Senate hearing, as he responded to bipartisan concern “with bluster and disdain, but no facts or science.”

The CDC needs “sensible reform,” said the New York Post, but that’s not Kennedy’s goal. With his “tinfoil hat blocking out all sense,” he aims to “burn down the public health apparatus and rebuild it in his image.” That means letting “anti-vax idiocy” run rampant while purging “any person, policy, or idea at odds with his warped worldview.”

What the columnists said

Kennedy told the Senate panel that every American who wants a Covid vaccine can access one, said David Ovalle and Paige Winfield Cunningham in The Washington Post. “But many Americans are finding the opposite.” Amid new FDA rules that approve the vaccine only for those 65 and over or with underlying conditions, “confusion is rippling through the healthcare system.” Chain pharmacies in some states now require prescriptions, some aren’t stocking the shots, and many Americans don’t know whether they qualify or if shots “remain free as in years past.”

Kennedy actually wants to create confusion, said vaccine specialist Paul Offit in The New Yorker, because it will “lessen vaccine uptake.” After “shouting from the sidelines for decades,” anti-vaccine activists are now “making public policy.”

Kennedy is even kookier and more radical than most people realize, said Noah Smith in his Substack newsletter. In his writings and interviews, he “has expressed doubt about the germ theory of disease itself.” Modern medicine began with the discovery of viruses and bacteria and the use of antibiotics and vaccines to combat them. But Kennedy instead embraces the antiquated “miasma theory,” which blames disease on pollution and poor health, and calls for fortifying the immune system through “healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” As the nation’s top health official, RFK Jr. “is already putting his medieval peasant theories into practice.”

Kennedy’s aggressive recent actions “may just be the opening salvo,” said Katherine J. Wu in The Atlantic. He’s reportedly eager “to yank mRNA Covid vaccines off the market.” This month his handpicked vaccine advisory panel could vote to restrict more immunizations, including those protecting infants against mumps, measles, rubella, and RSV. The formidable public health infrastructure that keeps Americans safe from infectious disease “took decades to build.” Now, experts say, America’s “defensive shields against disease are shattering, in ways that could take decades, even generations, to mend.”