In November, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made light of people’s concerns about his decades-long crusade against vaccination. If he were to be nominated for a role in the Trump administration, he told NBC News, he wouldn’t “take away anybody’s vaccines.” Now, as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Kennedy is steadily dismantling our national vaccine infrastructure, a system that has all but eliminated once-devastating diseases from the United States—until now.
In May, Kennedy announced a change to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Covid-vaccine recommendations: boosters are no longer recommended for otherwise healthy children and pregnant women. The next day, HHS canceled a contract with Moderna to create an mRNA bird-flu vaccine, citing uncertainty about the safety of mRNA technology (the same technology used to create most Covid vaccines). But the most consequential decision Kennedy has made so far is firing all seventeen members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on June 9. ACIP, a nonpartisan board, advises the CDC about which vaccinations should be officially recommended to the public and determines vaccine schedules. (The committee’s recommendations are nonbinding, but the CDC almost always makes them official.) If the CDC recommends a vaccine, insurance companies are required to cover it under the Affordable Care Act.
In an op-ed at The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy said he was remaking ACIP so as to “restore public trust” in vaccines. The board’s old members, he claimed, had conflicts of interest. There is a lengthy process to appoint someone to ACIP as their qualifications and potential conflicts are investigated. But no such process was initiated for the eight new members Kennedy immediately appointed to the board, at least four of whom are publicly skeptical of vaccines. Robert Malone, one of the appointees, is a self-described anti-vaxxer who has claimed that Covid vaccines cause AIDS and once called the deaths of two children from measles “misinformation.” Another, David Geier, was disciplined for practicing medicine without a license and insists, against all available evidence, on a link between vaccines and autism.
What will it look like to have people like Malone and Geier making decisions about our national vaccine policy? If they don’t recommend a vaccine and insurance companies are no longer required to cover it, then many people will have to pay for it out of pocket, at a price of about two hundred dollars per shot. Immunity from preventable diseases will suddenly become unaffordable, and many poor children will go unvaccinated. Some of those children will get sick, and our herd immunity will also take a hit. If vaccination rates fall, clinics and pharmacies may stop stocking vaccines entirely. Dr. Fiona Havers, a vaccine expert who resigned from the CDC in protest of the ACIP firings, summarizes bluntly what all of this will mean: “A lot of Americans are going to die as a result of vaccine-preventable diseases.”
As of this writing, the newly reconstituted ACIP is holding a meeting with a revised agenda. The previous group’s plan for this meeting had been to vote on making the HPV vaccine, which is nearly 100 percent effective at preventing cervical cancer, cheaper and more accessible. Instead, the board will vote on recommendations for the flu and RSV vaccines and discuss the use of thimerosal in some flu vaccines. (Kennedy has claimed thimerosal causes brain damage, but studies have never found its use to be unsafe.) The new ACIP will also consider whether the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine should be given to children under five, even though we have decades of data demonstrating its safety. If Kennedy’s goal is to “restore public trust” in vaccines, he has found a very strange way to go about it.
