Trump Rushes to Rein in RFK Jr. on Vaccines Ahead of Midterms

The White House has taken the reins at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—which has so far included stripping nationwide access to important vaccines—is apparently not winning Americans over. Motivated by midterm anxieties, aides close to Donald Trump have reportedly stepped in to manage the Health Department in an attempt to sway public opinion of the president back into favorable waters, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Republicans in both chambers of Congress are concerned about losing their foothold. The GOP already has a razor-thin majority in the House, but last week, Politico noted that confident moods had turned sour for the caucus’s peers in the Senate, as well.

At issue at the ballot box: the price of food, the price of oil, the price of water, and the price of energy. Yet Republicans have failed to offer a resonant message to keep their party in power. Instead, the president has started an inexplicable war with Iran that has exacerbated the already astronomical cost of living, slashed taxes for the wealthy, and seeded chaos with the “Save America” Act, which even Trump administration officials have admitted will make it harder for married women to vote.

Enter: Kennedy.

Kennedy is running DHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—rather, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked, and his off-the-wall notions about health have thus far proved disastrous for the agency.

During a measles outbreak in Texas last year, Kennedy refused to endorse the tried and true measles vaccine, recommending instead that susceptible residents self-medicate with vitamins. (Since the start of 2026, 30 states have reported at least one confirmed case of measles. In 2025, that number reached 44 states.)

He has transformed DHS, replacing independent medical experts on the Centers for Disease Control’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He also overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, a decision that could potentially affect vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

In the meantime, Kennedy has nabbed headlines for crafting viral moments that include chugging milk while wearing jeans in a pool with Kid Rock, and inventing a new version of the food pyramid that flipped the triangle upside down to feature butter, steak, and cheese in leading roles.

Some people close to Kennedy and the White House told the Journal that the secretary’s popularity within his own agency has hit a record low after multiple setbacks to his MAHA agenda, though that has apparently not affected his standing with Trump.

Americans, meanwhile, have unilaterally lost confidence in the nation’s public health agencies since Kennedy took over at HHS, according to a survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted last month.