On the campaign trail last October, President Trump promised to let his Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “go wild on health.” A year later, that promise is being fulfilled.
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine skeptic, is unmaking federal immunization policy and running roughshod over decades of efforts to keep the anti-vaccine movement from sowing doubt over the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
He has appointed a raft of anti-vaccine activists or critics to federal health positions, and prioritized research into finding any possible harm from vaccines, promoting some theories that have been long debunked.
Last week, anti-vaccine talking points were on full display during a meeting of an influential Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory group handpicked by Kennedy.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) eventually voted to roll back a decades-old recommendation that all newborns receive a birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine.
That same day, the White House ordered health officials to “fast-track” a review of the pediatric vaccine schedule and align it with other countries, effectively giving Kennedy and his allies a green light for further changes.
“Thank you, Mr. President. We’re on it,” Kennedy wrote in a social media post.
This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it is investigating possible deaths in adults from the COVID-19 vaccine, expanding on an existing investigation into possible pediatric deaths. The agency is also looking at the safety of newly approved treatments for RSV.
According to both critics and supporters, the moves show the nation’s health agencies are being remade into Kennedy’s image.
President Trump “has released his Secretary of Health to disrupt the vaccine-industrial-academic complex,” Robert Malone, vice-chair of ACIP, wrote in a post on his blog.
“Without a doubt, the last few days have seen the most profound threats to the power of the academic-industrial-government vaccine complex in my lifetime,” Malone wrote.
Vaccine experts and public health officials said they are alarmed at how quickly Kennedy has undermined longstanding institutions.
“I think I was naive in thinking how quickly systems could be broken,” said Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition.
Michelle Taylor, Commissioner of the Baltimore City Health Department, said she is worried about what’s to come.
“If we start looking at the overall vaccination schedule, it is going to be detrimental to an already confused public who, for years, for decades, have been vaccinating their children and sending them to school healthy every single day,” Taylor said.
With Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda pushing ahead unimpeded, outside health groups are launching efforts to counteract the impact of future actions of HHS under his rule, particularly the reevaluation of preventive viral treatments.
“We will be announcing soon … new evaluation processes for different vaccines and anticipating that they are going to be the ones that will be challenged at ACIP,” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said in a briefing.
Among medicines that are expected to be challenged are the recently approved preventive products for RSV. The FDA approved two monoclonal antibodies for RSV in the past two years, and it was announced this week that the agency had launched a safety review of both. The two biologics are Beyfortus from Sanofi and Enflonsia from Merck.
“At this time, no safety issue has been identified from clinical studies of nirsevimab or from post-marketing experience with more than six million babies immunized worldwide, while preventing an estimated 70,000 hospitalizations and emergency room visits in the US alone. All of this continues to show the benefits of Beyfortus in preventing severe RSV,” Sanofi said in a statement to The Hill.
The FDA will also be looking into whether the COVID-19 vaccinations were associated with any deaths, a move that a pro-MAHA group called “overdue.”
“The FDA owes the public a clear accounting of what it knows, what it does not yet know, and what steps it will take to strengthen vaccine surveillance and safety moving forward,” Joseph Varon, president of the Independent Medical Alliance, said in a statement applauding the news.
“We believe HHS and Secretary Kennedy and the MAHA agenda are just getting started,” Varon added in a statement to The Hill.
“I think we’ll look at all sorts of prescription drugs and begin to apply stark warnings and limits that end America’s addiction to pharmaceuticals. We also look at processes that have been considered ‘standard’ like mammograms and other screenings that may, in fact, be causing the very diseases they seek to detect,” he said.
During the ACIP’s meeting last week, frequent comparisons were made between the U.S. and countries such as Denmark, where certain vaccines such as the hepatitis B shot are not included in childhood immunization schedules.
Opponents to Kennedy’s rhetoric have argued that while Denmark is similarly a wealthy nation like the U.S., its health system and population make it a poor comparison.
MAHA allies expect HHS to continue aligning the U.S. with European polices.
“We have a philosophy in the United States that says earlier [vaccination] is better, and I think it’s worth looking at some of those other countries,” said Monique Yohanan, a senior fellow for health policy at Independent Women, a conservative health group supportive of the changes Kennedy has brought in at HHS.
“There are always going to be trade-offs with any kind of public health campaign,” she added.
Yohanan foresees Kennedy giving a voice to more groups who have felt “unheard” by the scientific establishment until now, particularly women and mothers.
“I do think it’s important to remember that there are a lot of moms in particular who felt like they were unheard, that their concerns weren’t being listened to,” she said.