Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Deadly Obsession

Vaccines have saved millions of lives. But for decades, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pursued a single-minded crusade against them. Numerous scientific studies have debunked his false claim that vaccines cause autism. But now he’s weaponizing the nation’s public health system to promote his ideological quackery.

Once a Crackpot, Always a Crackpot – But Now Possessing the Power of Life and Death

In a 2021 podcast, Kennedy urged Americans to “resist” CDC guidelines on when kids should get vaccines.

In 2021, Kennedy said, “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, better not get them vaccinated.”

In a video promoting his non-profit organization’s anti-vaccine sticker campaign, Kennedy appeared onscreen next to a sticker that declared “IF YOU’RE NOT AN ANTI-VAXXER YOU AREN’T PAYING ATTENTION.”

In a July 2023 podcast, he said, “There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a physician, knows that Kennedy’s anti-vaccine claims are bogus. But Kennedy assured him that he would protect “the public health benefit of vaccinations” and maintain without changes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). That committee of outside experts reviews the most recent data on all vaccines to assess safety, efficacy, and clinical need. It develops a recommended guidance schedule for all vaccines, including seasonal flu shots and COVID boosters. Physicians rely on that guidance in counseling patients, and insurance companies and government programs use it to determine the vaccines they will cover.

Based on Kennedy’s promises, Sen. Cassidy cast the deciding vote to confirm him as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Timeline of Destruction

In RFK Jr.’s mission to spread his lies, he has systematically gutted the world’s premier public health organization.

In March, Kennedy announced that he would conduct a study to find the cause of autism by September – an absurd mission with a nonsensical end date.

Leading his autism “study” is David Geier, a discredited vaccine skeptic who isn’t a physician. In 2012, the Maryland State Board of Physicians pursued charges against Geier, alleging that he had engaged in the unlicensed practice of medicine while working on autistic kids with his father, who was a physician at the time. His father’s medical license was suspended following claims that he had “endangered autistic children and exploited their parents by administering a treatment protocol that has a known substantial risk of serious harm and which is neither consistent with evidence-based medicine nor generally accepted in the relevant scientific community.”

• In May, Kennedy announced new rules that delay vaccine approvals and impose severe limits on the availability of Covid vaccines.
• On May 28, Moderna announced that Kennedy had terminated a $590 million award for late-stage development of a bird-flu vaccine and other pre-pandemic vaccine candidates.
• On June 9, Kennedy fired the entire CDC’S ACIP committee – all 17 of them.
• On June 11, Kennedy named eight replacements to ACIP. Among them were anti-vaccine activists, conspiracy theorists, vaccine misinformation promoters, and a co-author of and a signatory to the pandemic-era Great Barrington Declaration that recommended widespread exposure to COVID as the strategy for dealing with the outbreak (instead of widespread vaccination).
• On August 5, Kennedy cut $500 million in funding for mRNA vaccine research. That research had produced Trump’s Operation Warp Speed Covid vaccine that saved more than three million American lives and is the best hope for fighting the next pandemic.

Paging Sen. Cassidy

On August 25, Kennedy demanded that newly-confirmed CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez fire career CDC officials and commit to backing his advisory committee if it recommended restricting access to proven vaccines. She refused.

That evening, Dr. Monarez called Sen. Cassidy, who then called Kennedy. The next day, an angry Kennedy reiterated his ultimatum to Dr. Monarez. Again, she refused. The next day, she received a call from the White House personnel office telling her that she was fired.

Four of the highest-ranking CDC officials resigned in protest: Dr. Debra Houry (deputy director and chief medical officer), Dr. Demetre Daskalakis (director of the National Center on Immunization and Respiratory Diseases), Dr. Daniel Jernigan (director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases), and Dr. Jennifer Layden, (director of the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology).

In his resignation letter, Dr. Daskalakis warned that the current environment “treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public's health.” He wrote that the administration’s “desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults.” In an email to colleagues, he denounced “the ongoing weaponization of public health.”

On August 27, Trump presided over a televised, three-hour North Korea-style cabinet meeting. He asked Kennedy about autism, and RFK Jr. responded, “We are doing very well. We will have announcements as promised in September. We’re finding interventions, certain interventions are clearly, almost certainly causing autism. And we’re going to be able to address those in September.”

Trump then rambled for several minutes, revealing that he had no understanding of the complexity behind the increase in autism diagnoses and concluding, “I think we maybe know the reason and I look forward to being with you in that press conference.”

Kennedy was offering Trump a simple and incorrect solution to a complex problem.

But Sen. Cassidy knows that the answer to the autism puzzle isn’t simple – and it isn’t vaccines. On August 28, he called for a delay in the CDC’s upcoming vaccine advisory committee meeting. He said that if the meeting proceeds, “any recommendations made should be rejected as lacking legitimacy” given concerns about the panel “and the current turmoil in CDC leadership.”

The same day, Kennedy named Jim O’Neill as acting director of the CDC. O’Neill, a former Silicon Valley biotech executive, is not a physician or a scientist.

The Reckoning Ahead

Until it affects them personally, most Americans don’t—or won’t—the magnitude of ruinous government action. The long run is always somebody else’s problem. Along with the public’s short attention span, Trump relies on that principle to govern.

So have Senate Republicans. Abdicating their constitutional responsibilities to reject Trump’s unfit nominees for critical government posts, they have put incompetent ideologues like RFK Jr. in charge of life-and-death decisions.

But eventually, the long-run arrives. And when it does, millions of Americans will pay the ultimate price.