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'Dangerous Anti-Vaccine Fanatic' RFK Jr. Shredded by Medical Experts After Pulling Support for mRNA Research
"RFK Jr. is systematically turning the USA from the leader in science to an ideologically anti-scientific backwater of quackery and pseudoscience," said a prominent infectious diseases doctor.
Aug 06, 2025
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing heavy criticism from medical professionals after he announced on Tuesday that he was ending financial support for research into mRNA vaccines.
In his announcement, Kennedy said that he was canceling $500 million worth of research aimed at using mRNA technology to develop new vaccines. Instead, he said the Department of Health and Human Services would prioritize "the development of safer, broader vaccine strategies, like whole-virus vaccines and novel platforms that don’t collapse when viruses mutate."
mRNA technology is the basis for major vaccines that were developed earlier this decade to protect against Covid-19. A 2022 study referenced on the National Institutes of Health's website estimates that Covid-19 vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths in their first year of availability.
Given the success of these vaccines, many medical experts expressed shock and horror at Kennedy's decision to pull the plug on funding further research.
"I don't think I've seen a more dangerous decision in public health in my 50 years in the business," Mike Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Associated Press in an interview. Osterholm also emphasized that mRNA vaccines allow for rapid production, which he said was a critical factor in combating pandemics.
Neil Stone, an infectious diseases doctor at the University College Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London, argued on X that the mRNA funding decision shows Kennedy is a "dangerous anti-vaccine fanatic" who is jeopardizing America's leading role in providing invaluable medical research.
"RFK Jr. is systematically turning the USA from the leader in science to an ideologically anti-scientific backwater of quackery and pseudoscience," he added. "It will take years to come back from it."
Mike White, an associate professor of genetics at Washington University in St. Louis, said that Kennedy's decision would put the U.S. at a disadvantage in future medical research developments.
"Completely insane decision to walk away from one of the most promising medical technologies, allowing the U.S. to get smoked in this area of biotech by other countries with more foresight," he commented on X.
Alastair McAlpine, a pediatric infectious diseases physician, described Kennedy's actions to shut down mRNA research as "insanity" given that "no other technology promises to provide as much protection against an array of diseases." As a result, he wrote on Bluesky, "never has America been more vulnerable."
Biomedical scientist Lucky Tran, who currently serves as the director of science communication and media relations at Columbia University, took stock of all of Kennedy's actions and concluded that they fit in with a broader anti-vaccine agenda that is not just limited to mRNA vaccines.
"At his confirmation hearing, RFK Jr. claimed he wouldn't take away vaccines," he wrote on Bluesky. "So far he has: Removed Covid vaccine recommendation; fired the CDC's vaccine committee; replaced scientists with antivaxxers; cancelled vaccine hesitancy research; pulled $500 million in mRNA vaccine research."
Jonathan Reiner, a professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, similarly warned that it was unlikely that Kennedy would be satisfied solely with cutting off funding for mRNA vaccines.
"RFK Jr. simply doesn't believe in vaccines and he has the power to take them away from the American public," he wrote. "This is just the beginning."
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Sanders Launches Probe After RFK Jr. Stacked Immunization Panel With 'Vaccine Deniers'
"These individuals have already taken steps to upend decades of scientific research and vaccine policy, threatening the health and safety of all Americans," said a letter signed by Sanders and seven other Democratic senators.
Jul 29, 2025
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday launched an investigation into U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s purge of independent experts from a panel on vaccine recommendations.
Last month, Kennedy announced that he was "retiring" all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, commonly known as ACIP, despite promising during his Senate confirmation hearing to keep the committee intact.
At the time, Sanders (I-Vt.)—chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—warned that "firing independent vaccine experts is a dangerous, unprecedented move that will make it harder for the American people to access vaccines that are safe, effective, and essential to saving lives."
After the firings, Kennedy said, "We're going to bring great people onto the ACIP panel—not anti-vaxxers—bringing people on who are credentialed scientists."
In a letter sent to Kennedy Tuesday, Sanders and seven other Democratic senators said those fears have come to pass. Kennedy, they said, has replaced the panel of experts with "prominent vaccine deniers."
The most prominent of these figures is Dr. Robert Malone, who has described it as "high praise" to be dubbed an "anti-vaxxer."
Malone gained prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic by casting doubt on the illness's severity and baselessly suggesting that the mRNA vaccines used to treat the disease were "causing a form of AIDS."
Earlier this year, Malone also attempted to foment doubt that children had died due to the unprecedented measles outbreak in Texas.
Kennedy also appointed the former leader of his anti-vaccine organization, the Children's Health Defense, Lyn Redwood, a longtime proponent of the false belief that the vaccination for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) causes autism.
Also on the committee is Vicky Pebsworth Debold, founder of the National Vaccine Information Center—one of the longest-running anti-vaccine organizations in America—who has argued that a vaccination caused her child's autism.
ACIP is in charge of examining scientific findings to make recommendations to the public about which vaccines to get and when.
"These individuals," the senators said, "have already taken steps to upend decades of scientific research and vaccine policy, threatening the health and safety of all Americans."
When Kennedy's new handpicked committee met for the first time in late June, the members made substantial changes to vaccine policy and hinted at others coming in the future.
The most significant change they made was the recommendation that Americans receive flu vaccinations free of the preservative thimerosal—which is partially made of mercury and prevents germs and fungi from contaminating batches of vaccines.
Thimerosal, which is a component of many multidose vaccines, has never been found harmful by any scientific study. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provided a document to the committee that included 25 years of studies indicating thimerosal's safety. But that document was removed from the meeting without explanation.
When they questioned ACIP about its removal, the senators say Malone replied that it was "not authorized by the office of the secretary," which the senators concluded meant that Kennedy or one of his staff "had the document taken off CDC’s website."
Instead of credible science, Redwood presented a report likely generated by artificial intelligence, which included many debunked claims about the dangers of thimerosal, and even made reference to a CDC study on the dangers of the preservative that did not exist.
Kennedy's ACIP also determined that it would revise the childhood vaccine schedule that has been in place for decades. That schedule includes vaccines for polio, chickenpox, diphtheria, and tetanus—illnesses that once routinely killed children but have been virtually eradicated by mass immunization.
The recommended vaccine schedule, the senators noted, determines what immunizations are required to be covered by health insurance companies and government programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
"If insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs stop covering vaccines, Americans will be forced to pay out of pocket," the senators said. "The only people who will be able to afford vaccines will be the wealthy."
The senators warned that this, along with Kennedy and his appointees' undermining of vaccine science, would result in "a resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases."
Under Kennedy, the U.S. has already experienced its largest measles outbreak in 33 years, which has resulted in the first deaths from the disease in over a decade, following a downswing in measles vaccination.
Despite this, Kennedy has continued to downplay the disease's severity and the vaccine's well-documented effectiveness, even claiming that it causes "deaths every year."
The senators demanded that Kennedy provide information about why each of the nonpartisan members of ACIP were fired, and what criteria and vetting process was used to pick the anti-vaccine figures who replaced them.
"The harm your actions will cause is significant," the senators told Kennedy. "As your new ACIP makes recommendations based on pseudoscience, fewer and fewer Americans will have access to fewer and fewer vaccines. And as you give a platform to conspiracy theorists, and even promote their theories yourself, Americans will continue to lose confidence in whatever vaccines are still available."
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Nobel Prize for mRNA Researchers Shows Power of Public Funding for Vaccines, Campaigners Say
"Public funding delivers incredible medical advances and that should be a priority for all countries, but pharmaceutical companies cannot be trusted to share technology with the world."
Oct 02, 2023
Scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for research that paved the way for the messenger RNA vaccines against Covid-19—critical work that, as campaigners quickly pointed out, benefited from substantial U.S. government funding.
Dr. Mohga Kamal-Yanni, policy co-lead for the People's Vaccine Alliance, said in a statement that "this award challenges the claim that it was solely big pharmaceutical companies who saved the world from Covid-19."
"Just like the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, Karikó and Weissman's groundbreaking work on mRNA vaccines received a huge amount of public funding," said Kamal-Yanni. "Pharmaceutical companies have refused to share mRNA technologies with developers and researchers in developing countries."
The Nobel Prize committee credited Karikó and Weissman with fundamentally changing "our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system."
"The laureates contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times," the committee said.
As The Washington Post summarized, the pair "discovered how to chemically tweak messenger RNA, turning basic biology into a technology ready to change the world when the pandemic struck. Their discovery is incorporated into the coronavirus vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, which have now been given billions of times."
But the Post and other major outlets covering Karikó and Weissman's Nobel prize-winning contributions did not emphasize—or even mention—that some of the scientists' work was funded by the National Institutes of Health. Karikó and Weissman patented their findings in 2006 and later licensed the patents to Moderna and BioNTech, Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine partner.
According to an analysis by Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Weissman "appears as the principal investigator on a total of 42 projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 1998 and 2020, representing $18,323,060 in costs."
"Karikó was the principal investigator of four projects funded by the NIH between 2007 and 2011, totaling $1,234,462 in costs," KEI observed. "In other words, the United States government funded and has certain rights over at least some of the foundational Karikó and Weissman patents directed to mRNA discoveries."
"As governments discuss how to prepare for the next pandemic, they should learn from the story of mRNA."
Throughout the pandemic and into the present, vaccine makers such as Pfizer and Moderna have opposed global calls to share their vaccine recipes and technology with the world, fiercely clinging to their monopoly control over production and using that control to force governments into one-sided contracts favorable to the pharmaceutical industry—even though their vaccines were developed with massive public support.
A
study published in The BMJ earlier this year estimated that the U.S. government pumped nearly $32 billion into the development, production, and purchase of mRNA coronavirus vaccines.
The Biden administration, meanwhile, has declined to use its ownership of key patents or the leverage provided by public funding to force pharmaceutical companies to do everything they can to ensure the equitable distribution of lifesaving vaccine technology.
Kamal-Yanni of the People's Vaccine Alliance said Monday that "fortunately, Weissman is helping a WHO-backed mRNA program which aims to develop mRNA technology in lower-income countries, even while pharmaceutical companies refuse to share their know-how."
"As governments discuss how to prepare for the next pandemic, they should learn from the story of mRNA," said Kamal-Yanni. "Public funding delivers incredible medical advances and that should be a priority for all countries, but pharmaceutical companies cannot be trusted to share technology with the world."
Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines program at Public Citizen, echoed that message, saying in a statement that "today's Nobel must ring as a call for equity and health justice, and a call to change a massively unjust pharmaceutical industry."
"Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech still largely control the available vaccines and in some countries have significantly increased their price, despite the billions in public funding on which the vaccines rely," said Maybarduk. "By supporting initiatives to share science and technology, and by funding vaccine infrastructure, governments can help blunt the effects of disease, and bring a coda of justice to a terribly unjust time."
This story has been updated to include a statement from Public Citizen.
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