RFK Jr. Conveniently Forgets to Tell Key Group About Vaccine Overhaul

The health secretary neglected to inform a critical group of individuals when he decided to overhaul the child vaccination schedule: his own staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Vaccine experts at the agency were “blindsided” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr’.s brisk efforts Monday to radically narrow the parameters for which vaccines the government would recommend for children, current and former CDC staff told The Washington Post.

That revamp included stripping recommendations for immunizations against influenza, rotavirus, hepatitis A, and meningococcal diseases that result in meningitis. Instead, those vaccines will only be recommended to children considered at “high risk” of contracting the illness or if a doctor recommends it.

The decision was not informed by emerging scientific evidence and did not undergo a typical review process, but nonetheless went into effect immediately.

“The abrupt replacement of the immunization schedule by one designed for another context and healthcare system has been done with no scientific justification,” Demetre Daskalakis, a former director of the agency’s center on immunization and respiratory diseases, told the Post.

Private and federal health insurance plans have signalled that they would continue to cover the cost of childhood vaccines through 2026, though several major insurers did not elaborate on how they would manage the Health Department’s shifting guidance in subsequent years.

Prior to Kennedy’s meddling, the schedule included 17 immunizations that were universally recommended for all children. The new schedule shrinks that pool to 11 vaccines.

Top officials within the Department of Health and Human Services released a memo regarding the changes Monday, declaring that the switch-up was in no small part due to public mistrust of vaccines and national public health initiatives in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Kennedy, a virulent vaccine skeptic, told the American public before he was confirmed that he would not let his personal feelings about immunizations shape the nation’s public health policy. In an April interview with CBS News, Kennedy reaffirmed that he was “not going to take people’s vaccines away from them.”

But that’s exactly what he’s done.

Since Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he has replaced independent medical experts on the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and replaced them with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamins. And he founded his new directive for America’s health policy—the “Make America Healthy Again” report—on studies generated by AI that never existed in the real world.

The 71-year-old has a lot to gain from pushing disinformation about the jab: the more doubt and division that Kennedy sows, the more money he’ll make. Ahead of his appointment, Kennedy disclosed that he made roughly $10 million in 2024 from speaking fees and dividends from his vaccine lawsuits. He’s also made cash from merchandising handled by his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, which bungled its response to a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa so badly that it resulted in the deaths of at least 83 people, the majority of which were children under the age of five.

As a reminder: since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

Meanwhile, Kennedy is running DHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—instead, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked.